Bob Hanning summed it up before the season: "Everyone wanted him." It was an advantage that the Berlin Foxes had tried to find Mathias Gidsel before the 2021 Olympic Games and got his signature in August of that year.

As an unerring left-hander from the back of the Danish national team, Gidsel stood out at the World Cup in Egypt in early 2021;

at the age of 20 he played next to the world handball player Mikkel Hansen as a matter of course and saw when the defense opened up a crack.

"Boy from Village"

As if through an almost closed door, Gidsel then slips through between two opponents who usually weigh 20 or 30 kilograms more.

Even as a very young player, the slender guy had the courage to make decisions, he brought speed and technique with him to put his plans into action, his youth coach Nicolej Krickau recently revealed to the “Handballwoche”.

Now the "boy from the village", as the humble yet prominent addition calls himself, is enriching the Bundesliga.

Although they must have seen things a little differently in Flensburg on Thursday evening – Gidsel threw eleven goals at 31:31 in the first top game of the young season.

The Berliners are a different team with him.

"He's incredibly clever for his age and makes very few mistakes," says sporting director Stefan Kretzschmar.

Gidsel's transfer is his temporary masterpiece.

Together with managing director Hanning, Kretzschmar is working on a team with golden brilliance - the Berliners want the title and can do it with the purchases of Gidsel, Max Darj and goalkeeper Viktor Kireev.

"I'm fine with my knee"

In courting Gidsel, the foxes' mixture of metropolis, ambition and salary, which is now well known, got caught.

The fact that three other Danish internationals play leading roles alongside him was another argument in favor of GOG Gudme moving to the capital.

Because when someone moves from a town with 8,000 inhabitants (Skjern) to a center with 3.8 million people, a few familiar faces can only be helpful.

With GOG, the team from the island of Funen, Gidsel had become Danish champion in June.

He had already made his comeback in club dress in May after tearing the rear cruciate ligament in his right knee at the European Championships at the end of January.

"Everything is okay with the knee," he says.

More than "okay" was his performance in the last championship games for GOG: It's amazing how often Gidsel was consistently good at the highest level;

even in his four tournaments with the Danes so far, you have waited in vain for his collapse.

All in all, Gidsel seems like little can faze him – although after the hype in early 2021 he sought psychological advice to keep his inner balance.

Gidsel made no secret of this.

The mental support in the Danish public quickly lost the status of a shrill specialty.

"The strongest league in the world"

Gidsel is a guy no one can be angry with, and he can't do anything about attributions that go beyond him as a handball player.

After the announced departures of the Kiel stars Sander Sagosen and Niklas Landin in the direction of Scandinavia, the Bundesliga served some critics as an exhausting obsolete model.

Gidsel is now considered a counterexample.

Even the competition from Kiel and Flensburg, who would have liked the Dane, praised the foxes for the deal and the league's increasing attractiveness as a result.

But Mathias Gidsel doesn't see himself as the driving force of a flagging HBL: "For me, the Bundesliga is the strongest league in the world." life in the certainly not weak Danish league was a bit easier for the 90-kilogram lightweight.