The German handball Bundesliga is considered the best league in the world. But Andreas Wolff is the only DHB star not to pursue his career in Germany. Why?
The fact that Germany still has a chance of reaching the semi-finals of the European Handball Championship is also due to Andreas Wolff. With his fantastic performances, the 32-year-old goalkeeper played a major role in the convincing opening win against Switzerland and the narrow success in the main round thriller against Iceland. Even in the defeat against France and the disappointing draw against Austria, Wolff was the best German on the pitch.
In any case, the DHB selection knows what they have in their keeper. “In terms of condition, he is the best goalkeeper in the tournament,” praised team captain Johannes Golla Wolff after the Iceland victory. After a month-long absence due to a herniated disc last year, it cannot be denied that Wolff is currently, as in previous years, one of the best goalkeepers in the world.
Wolff is the only legionnaire in the DHB squad
But it’s not just his performances that make Wolff stand out among his national team colleagues. His choice of club is also unusual, because Wolff is the only professional in the current European Championship squad who does not earn his money in Germany. He plays for the top Polish club Industria Kielce. Due to the high density of top teams, the German Bundesliga is generally considered the strongest handball league in the world – and would therefore actually be the right place for one of the best goalkeepers in the world.
Nevertheless, Wolff has been playing in Poland since 2019, where, like in the national team, he wears the number 33 shirt. The German national coach was also “to blame” for his move abroad.
Change to Kiel shortly before the breakthrough
Wolff began his career in Germany and had his first Bundesliga experience at TV Großwallstadt in 2009. From there we went to HSG Wetzlar in 2013. There the goalkeeper also caught the eye of a certain Alfred Gíslason, who was still the coach of the German record champions THW Kiel at the time. Before the 2016 European Championships, Gíslason brought the still relatively unknown Wolff to the far north.
“I brought him to Kiel,” recalled Gíslason at a recent press conference during the European Championships. “That was partly the reason why he was included in the national team squad in 2016, because he had just signed with us and my compatriot (then national coach Dagur Sigurdsson, editor’s note) knew that,” Gíslason continued.
Wolff then became a shooting star at the 2016 tournament. Starting the tournament as the third goalkeeper, he rose to become the starting goalkeeper with strong performances. At the latest when he almost single-handedly parried the German team to win the title in the final against Spain, Wolff went from being a little-known keeper to a handball superstar.
Problems in Kiel
Back at THW Kiel, however, this presented him with a challenge. Brought in as a promising player, he had another top international goalkeeper in front of him in the form of the Dane Niklas Landin. The keeper probably didn’t particularly like the division of labor with the Dane. “It was difficult at times,” Gíslason recalled of the situation. “For him more than for me because he was younger and very impulsive,” said the 64-year-old.
Statistically speaking, the two shared the work almost 50/50, explained Gíslason. But Landin didn’t play well when he had to come off the bench, while Wolff always came off the bench very well, “because he was always so angry with me,” Gíslason recalled. That’s why Wolff wasn’t allowed to play most of the games right from the start.
“Suddenly different conditions”
Wolff himself recalled in an NDR documentary about his time in Kiel that he went into the contract signing with the idea of gradually working his way up to becoming a world-class goalkeeper in Kiel. After the European Championships, however, he skipped the step and was suddenly considered a world-class goalkeeper. “You suddenly had different requirements. You then wanted to play, you wanted to collect your playing time at the highest level,” Wolff continued.