Val d'Oise

Élite Val d'Oise Handball spent last season in the Nationale 1 Fédérale and finished it in second place, enough to send the club up into the Proligue, French handball's second tier, for 2026-2027. The step up follows a Coupe de France Fédérale run that has given the club its identity of late: after losing the 2024 final to US Saintes 40-33, Élite Val d'Oise came back the following year and beat Metz Handball 27-25 to lift the trophy.

The club itself is younger than its players. It was put together in 2017 as an alliance between Saint-Gratien/Sannois Handball, whose roots go back to 1968, and Handball Club Franconville/Le Plessis-Bouchard, founded a year earlier. The merger joined the two senior sides into one; the youth teams stayed under their old club names, which is why the Val-d'Oise department still has a scattering of junior sides carrying names the senior team no longer uses. Matches are shared between Saint-Gratien and Franconville, with the Halle des sports Michel Hidalgo in Saint-Gratien as the main venue, its 700 seats stretched to 1,000 when mobile stands go up.

Saint-Gratien/Sannois had already produced a national team player before the merger: Dika Mem came through the club's youth ranks between 2013 and 2015 before moving on to a career with France. The lineage runs further back to Thierry Perreux, part of the French side that won the world title in 1995 and a Saint-Gratien player through the 1970s.

In the Île-de-France handball calendar, the fixtures against Tremblay-en-France Handball and Massy Essonne Handball carry the weight of local derbies, the kind of games where regional pride counts for as much as the league table.