Gidsel's game: "I get new ideas every time I’m in a handball game"

Few handball players in history have earned medals and individual awards at the rate Mathias Gidsel has since bursting onto the scene at the 2021 World Championship. The list of individual accolades earned in that time is mighty — 2023 IHF World Player of the Year, best right back of the season at the EHF Excellence Awards 2023, MVP of the Paris 2024 and Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games as well as the 2023 World Championship, and All-star Team right back at the EHF EURO 2024 and 2022 and the 2021 World Championship. 

With his national team, Denmark, Gidsel is two-time back-to-back world champion, current vice-champion of the EHF EURO, and current Olympic title holder. With his club side, Füchse Berlin, Gidsel raised the EHF European League trophy in 2023 and finished as runner-up in 2024, when the team also secured second place in the Bundesliga and with that a return to the EHF Champions League. 

But what exactly makes Gidsel the player he is? In the first of the series looking at “handball through my eyes,” Gidsel takes us into different elements of the game as he sees them — what he thinks about in a standard attack, what he is working on developing and has developed in the last years, how he bothers his coaches at training, and more. Welcome to Gidsel’s game.

After his early national team successes, Gidsel was hot property on the club market and chose Füchse Berlin for his first move abroad in 2022. There was some talk that Füchse was not a “big enough” club for the right back, but Gidsel knew what he was hungry for.  

“For me, always the biggest goal with the change to Füchse was that I had to have a little bit more responsibility than I maybe would have in some of the other top clubs in the world and, therefore, I had a chance to develop my own game a little bit more — take some more shots, take some more responsibility, learn a little bit more how to be a leader. I think I really developed that,” says Gidsel. 

“I came from a guy who played a lot of one-against-one, to now be a more overall guy. I can shoot a little bit more. Maybe it's still not my biggest strength — that will always be one-against-one — but now I have a little bit more strength from behind and mostly I learnt a lot mentally. I think I've developed a lot of good tools.”

Gidsel outlines how Denmark coach Nikolaj Jacobsen prioritises structure and systems in the game, while there is a little more creative freedom in the playing style at Berlin. But whatever the level of structure in a game plan, teams respond to what is happening on the court and adjustments may be made during matches. 

“For me, it’s always trying to use the first maybe 20 or the first half to figure a little bit out what they have planned to do against us. What are their priorities? Are they holding me in some ways? If they are going high sometimes and so on, trying to code what are they doing, so we can maybe understand a little bit what they have planned for,” says Gidsel. Taking the court now is different for the right back compared to a few years ago — now, any team facing either Berlin or Denmark would prepare specifically for Gidsel.

“I have to understand and quick learn in the games what they have prioritised, so I understand where they are leaving me a little bit the space and where they are, of course, not leaving any space. So, I'm mostly thinking more about the opponents, what their defence are doing against us, because when we know that, then we can find some systems to maybe break up the defence. You can’t get through every time, but you have to figure out where are the opponents living with the shots and where are they not accepting the shots. So that's for me mostly the chess I play when I play handball.” 

Gidsel is known as a standout attacker in the game. He was top scorer of the three most recent major championships: The 2024 Olympics, the EHF EURO 2024 (joint with Portugal’s Martim Costa) and the 2023 World Championship — all without taking a single penalty shot. He also led the overall list of most assists at both the Paris 2024 and Tokyo 2020 Olympics, and ranked fifth at the EHF EURO 2024 and third at the 2023 World Championship for that statistic. 

To beat the opponents so consistently, through his own goals and those he sets up, creativity is vital. Practice is key to be able to deliver creativity in a match situation — mastering a skill or at least working on it outside of a game then opens the door to draw on that skill in the moment, implementing it without thinking too much. That transfers to other areas such as reading the game and creating opportunities.

“Of course, there's a lot of practice and for me handball is a little bit more like a study. When you want to be a doctor, you go 10 years for the medicine studies. If you want to be a handball player, you have to do the same. So, I'm always thinking a lot about why things are happening. I think that’s maybe the most important question,” says Gidsel. 

“When you see me training, it's all about having fun and trying to do all these stupid trick shots my coach thinks are awful to see. But you know when you try that a thousand times in training, one day it just comes out in a game.” 

Perhaps Gidsel’s biggest inspiration when it comes to pushing the limits creatively is what he can do with the ball — both in terms of what he likes to work on and what he enjoys watching.

“I'm very creative. I’m trying to seek new limits all the time and do something with the ball nobody has seen,” says Gidsel. “My big idol when I was young was Luc Abalo. He also could do everything with the ball. That's a little bit what I'm trying to have — the tools, no matter which angle I'm coming in with my shot, to always have a response.” 

He has studied, he has trained, the arsenal of shots is ready and being unleashed. It is game time, into the final minutes, and it is close. What does Gidsel think about in crunch time? 

“For me, it’s always important to remind myself, ‘now you have to do the opposite of what you're always doing,’ because they are standing in the timeout and they have prepared a lot,” says Gidsel, referring to how there is usually a timeout or two called in the last minute of a tight match. In crunch time, when everyone is tired, Gidsel says there may be a tendency for both individuals and teams to revert to habits. 

“I really try to remind myself: Now, you have to go against your habits, because they are standing in the tactic and timeout and expecting habits.”

Gidsel is a big presence in attack and plays a smaller role in defence, but he applies the same way of thinking at his teams’ own end of the court. “Defence has always been a part [of the game] I want to be a bigger part of,” says Gidsel. “I'm a little bit, sometimes, hidden away on the wing, but for me I also see the defence just like the opposite of attack, as the same chess. 

“It's also study. You're trying to use the first 10 minutes to see how are they reacting. Are they looking for the guys they are playing or playing the ball in blind? And so on. Just trying to figure out all those small chances that get created and then you have to really be ready when you have the small chances.”

Learning to deal with pressure was an important part of Gidsel’s national team journey in particular. Now, in 2024, he returns often to the concepts of responsibility and pressure when speaking about the game — two elements he has clearly identified as vital to master. 

And that makes sense: The greats of any team sport are those whose influence goes beyond their own individual sphere, who can be such a strong individual they raise the team to a new level through what they bring to the field of play. Those who can be the one to score just when it seems impossible, showing their team that the limits do not lie where they might have thought and can be stretched. 

“I was quite young when I joined the national team and I’ve played in a lot of finals already now,” says Gidsel. “That pressure and those experiences standing in the finals almost every January, they give you a lot of experience as a handball player, as a person.

“When you can accept that there is a lot of pressure, especially on some of the best players and especially on the Danish national team, then you can also start having fun and start to look around in those arenas you play for when you play in finals — when you are playing in LANXESS arena, you are playing Stockholm in front of 20,000, playing the Olympics in front of 27,000 people — and then you can start enjoying it.

“For me it's all about having fun, and I hope people can see it when I'm on the court — that I'm just a small guy who is having fun. And of course, the pressure, you just need to learn how to handle it. And that is very individual, how you handle it. But for me, it's all about accepting it and also knowing it comes only because you are good at what you're doing.

“One thing is to be a good handball player — that's maybe the easy part. But the hardest part is to be a guy who can handle the pressure, to be a guy who can say, ‘hey, give me the ball’ or to be the guy your teammates always can get energy from. That's a longer learning progress than just what I've been through, but I think that's the thing I can develop most.

“I think that’s an untold but really important thing in the handball world.” 

Every sport combines physical and mental elements in its own way. For Gidsel, it is the complexity of handball that makes it so interesting. 

“A lot of players are popping up which are not so big anymore, are not shooting from 10 metres, but are more wise and clever. For me, I think that's why handball is so amazing, because size doesn't matter. It's always about thinking and being one step ahead. Handball is so complex, so difficult a game, that you can learn something new every week, every day even. I also get some new ideas every time I’m in a handball game — it’s like ‘oh, now you can maybe do like this,’” concludes Gidsel. “It’s the most amazing sport for me.”

September 2024

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