Kiel THW

Nikola Karabatić spent years in Kiel wearing a strip that has stayed black and white since the handball department split off from the old gymnastics club in 1923, itself founded on 4 February 1904 in what was then Hassee-Winterbek.

The rebuild that set the modern club in motion came under Zoran Serdarušić in the mid-1990s, after a 1966 relegation had shown Kiel it could not take its own name for granted. What followed was 2007, when the club won every trophy on offer in the same season, and then 2012, when it went through a full campaign without a single defeat. The EHF Champions League has been won four times, most recently in 2020, and the German championship has been claimed 23 times, a run stretching from 1957 through to 2023.

Against SG Flensburg-Handewitt, sixty kilometres up the coast, the fixture is known simply as the Nordderby, and little else in German handball carries the same weight. Domagoj Duvnjak captained the side through much of its recent silverware, including the 2025 DHB-Pokal, before Kiel began a new chapter this season under Børge Lund. But ask anyone in the arena who the club belongs to, and the answer is still Andreas Wolff, the goalkeeper.