Tremblay

Tremblay-en-France sits on the northern edge of the Paris region, in the shadow of Roissy airport, and for half a century handball has been the thing the town does well. The club traces back to 1972, when it started life as Tremblay Athletic Club, and it has spent most of its existence swinging between the top and second tiers of French handball so often that people around the sport just call it a yo-yo club: relegated from the Starligue in 2016 and again in 2021, promoted back up by winning the Proligue in 2005, 2017 and 2024.

The years worth lingering on run from 2005 to 2012, when Tremblay finished third in the Starligue in both 2009 and 2010 and pushed into two finals it did not win — the Coupe de France in 2010 and the EHF Cup Winners' Cup a year later, both lost as runners-up. What the club built in that stretch mattered more than the runs themselves: a pipeline that kept sending players on to Paris Saint-Germain and Barcelona. Dika Mem left for Barcelona after a single senior season in 2015-16. Arnaud Bingo stayed long enough to become the club's own record scorer, with 750 goals, before winning the World Championship in 2011 wearing the France shirt Tremblay had prepared him for.

The team still plays at the Palais des sports de Tremblay-en-France, a hall that holds barely a thousand people, which tells its own story about a club that measures itself by the players it sends elsewhere rather than by what it fills at home. The supporters call themselves Les Tigers, a name that never made it onto the crest but stuck anyway.

What Tremblay wants most is to stay above Massy Essonne and Paris Handball, its Île-de-France neighbours, and matches against either carry the weight of a relegation derby — the kind of game where staying up matters more than anything won that season.