RRI Sports Club
End of career for Romanian handball star Cristina Neagu
Florin Orban, 30.04.2025, 13:45
This spring, handball lost the best Romanian player of this millennium, Cristina Neagu, who has retired from competitions.
The final stage of her career saw her fighting for a place in the final tournament of the Champions League alongside her team, CSM Bucharest. However, Romania’s champions stopped in the quarterfinals of the competition, just like in the last four years. Once again, like in 2022 and 2023, the Tigers were stopped on the way to the Final Four by the Danish group Team Esbjerg.
Cristina Neagu, however, remains in history as the best scorer in the Champions League, with a total of 1,232 goals. Apart from her, only the Montenegrin Jovanka Radičević, the Serbian player Andrea Lekić and the Hungarian athlete Anita Görbicz have scored more than 1,000 goals in the main European inter-club competition.
Cristina Neagu was born in Bucharest on August 26, 1988 and made her debut at a local school sports club. As a junior, she was named the best player in the world several times, starting in 2005, when the Romanian team won the silver at the European Junior Championships in Austria. In 2006, she joined the senior handball team Rulmentul Braşov, from where she later transferred to Oltchim Râmnicu Vâlcea. In 2010, with Oltchim, she reached the Champions League final. After the Vâlcea-based team broke up, she moved to the Montenegrin team Buducnost Podgorica, with which in 2015 she won the Champions League. In 2017, she returned to Romania and joined CSM Bucharest.
In 2010, 2015, 2016 and 2018, the International Handball Federation named her the best player in the world, making her the first handball player in history to win this trophy four times. Cristina Neagu’s achievements with the Romanian national team include a bronze medal at the 2010 European Championship in Denmark and Norway, and another bronze at the 2015 World Championships in Denmark. At the European championships in which she took part, she scored 303 goals, holding the record for the nations’ continental competition, according to the European Handball Federation website. (AMP)
