Dijon

Jackson Richardson spent three seasons on the bench in Dijon, from 2015 to 2018, for a city that had already given French handball Didier Dinart, who played for the men's team between 1993 and 1996. That lineage of men's handball in Dijon goes back to November 1942, when the club began life as Cercle Sportif Laïc Dijonnais and won the French Division 1 title in 1973. The side merged with ASPTT Dijon in 1992, took the name Dijon Bourgogne Handball, and became Dijon Métropole Handball in 2017. It plays now in Proligue, the second tier, having gone up as Division 2 champion in 2023, and shares the Palais des sports Jean-Michel-Geoffroy, a 5,000-seat arena named after one of the club's own former players, with the city's ice hockey team.

The name on the honours board this year, though, belongs to the women. JDA Bourgogne Dijon Handball, a separate club that grew out of the women's section of the old CSL Dijon and was founded in 1996 as Jeanne d'Arc Dijon Handball, won the EHF European League in 2026, beating Thüringer HC 29–25 in the final.