Lokomotiva Zagreb Women

Croatian women's handball has run, for most of the past three decades, through a rivalry between Zagreb and Koprivnica, and Lokomotiva has kept its side of it going into the current campaign, chasing another domestic double against Podravka Vegeta after taking the Croatian First League title in 2022 and again in 2023.

The club came out of Zlatko Schneider's initiative on 1 February 1949; five weeks later it beat Dinamo Zagreb 6:4 in its first fixture. Under Yugoslavia it was the country's strongest side, taking the championship ten times between 1956 and 1991 and the cup eight times, a run that made "Lokosice" the standard against which the rest of Yugoslav handball measured itself.

European finals have been a harder story. Lokomotiva lost the 1975 European Champions Cup final to VfL Gummersbach and the 1980 Cup Winners' Cup final, then lost again in 1996, 1998 and, much later, 2021 — enough near-misses to earn the club a reputation as the competition's perennial runner-up. The exception came in 1991, when Josip Šojat's side beat Bayer Leverkusen to win the IHF Cup, and again in 2017, when Nenad Šoštarić's team beat H65 Höör for the EHF Challenge Cup.

Mara Torti, ranked by the International Handball Federation among the finest players the sport has produced, played her career at the club, and Klaudija Klikovac was named Croatia's best player in 1994. Eight of the current squad's alumnae were in the Croatian national team that took bronze at the 2020 European Championship, a measure of how much of the country's international handball still passes through Dom Sportova, the 3,500-capacity arena Lokomotiva has called home since Yugoslav times.