Nordhorn-Lingen

Two Nordhorn sides, Eintracht and Sparta, pooled their handball sections in the summer of 1981. The merged club took the Nordhorn name outright before the arrangement widened: in September 2008 it became HSG Nordhorn-Lingen, bringing in Lingen as a partner, and since then the team has split its home fixtures between the Euregium in Nordhorn and the EmslandArena in Lingen.

The Tigers earned that nickname from Tiga, a mascot introduced in 2006. Nordhorn finished runners-up in the Bundesliga in 2001-02, then reached the peak of its history in 2007-08, beating FC København in the final to take the EHF Cup. Ola Lindgren coached that side, and the squad he built drew on the kind of Scandinavian handball pedigree — players such as Andreas Larsson and Ljubomir Vranjes passed through the club — that a town the size of Nordhorn does not attract by accident.

Against neighbours TV Emsdetten, the fixture is billed locally as the Derbyklassiker, a rivalry that has outlasted several of the club's ups and downs on the pitch.

Financial trouble has shadowed the sporting side more than once. Promotion to the Bundesliga in 1997 gave way to an administrative relegation in 2009, when the insolvency of the club's marketing arm, HSG Sportmarketing GmbH & Co KG, undid what the team had earned on court. A second promotion followed in 2019, and a second relegation in 2021 — the Tigers have yet to find a way to make top-flight status stick.