Julian Köster: Why he is so important for the DHB at the Handball World Cup

Julian Köster sits in a storage room at the Barclays Arena in Hamburg. Chairs and tables are piled up here and all sorts of other stuff in cardboard boxes that you can’t think of a better place for. But at least it’s quiet here. Köster has just come out of the hall from a photo shoot. The last pictures were taken before the World Cup, which is just around the corner.

But the Handball World Cup in Denmark seems far away for Köster this morning. In his words he travels back in time, to the summer of 2024, to the Summer Olympics. In Lille, on August 7th, Köster experienced the greatest moment of his career so far.

27,000 spectators in the Stade Pierre-Mauroy, Olympic quarter-final, France against Germany. Six seconds left to play. France leads 29:28 and has possession of the ball. The game seems decided – but then the unbelievable happens. What the newspapers would later call a “game of the century” and “the six-second miracle of Lille”.

The director of this miracle is Julian Köster, 24, from VfL Gummersbach. Köster describes it like this: “We are pressuring the French player with the ball, Dika Mem, with several people. I don’t remember exactly how, but I get hold of the ball, see that Renars (Uscins, editor’s note) is free and pass the ball to him. Renars throws it through the goalkeeper’s legs – equalizer, extra time, game won.”

Köster says this with an incredulous smile. He still can’t really understand what happened in Lille. “It was my intuition, it happened so quickly that I couldn’t make a plan,” he says. “But it worked.”

It is often moments like these that bring a team together, that give them the feeling that they can make the impossible possible.

That’s how it was with the German footballers before the home European Championship. The two wins against France and the Netherlands in March were like a resurrection after the dismal autumn of 2023, when they lost to Turkey and Austria. Above all, the win against France, the 2022 World Cup finalists, gave Julian Nagelsmann’s team a boost. The team played a strong European Championship and only failed in the 119th minute of the quarter-finals against eventual tournament winners Spain.

The German handball players are now hoping for a similar dynamic. As silver medalists from the Summer Games, they are among the favorites for the World Cup, although teams like Denmark and France are more likely.

One of the leaders of the German team will be Köster. National coach Alfred Gislason describes him as a “key player” and will rely on the 2.03 tall Gummersbacher again in the first World Cup game against Poland this Wednesday (ARD, 8:30 p.m.).

Köster also plays a central role because he is more versatile than almost anyone else in the national team. The Bielefeld native can be used both offensively (in the half-left backcourt) and defensively (in the inner block). He particularly excels in defense; Gislason sees him as an “absolute world-class player”.

Köster has had a steep climb. When he joined the national team in 2021, he was still playing in the second division with Gummersbach. Gislason had to face criticism when he nominated Köster for the 2022 European Championships in Hungary and Slovakia. Too young, too inexperienced, they said. But Köster played a strong tournament and was the team’s second best scorer with 19 goals, which finished seventh. After the European Championships, Gislason said with some satisfaction: “Many people said I was crazy, but the critics should have fallen silent by now.”

Today it is impossible to imagine the national team without Köster. Not just because of his sporting qualities. Köster is one of the spokesmen in the team, quiet but firm in his tone. A bright mind who, in addition to his handball career, completed a bachelor’s degree in business administration at the University of Cologne and is now working on a master’s degree through distance learning.

Just sport, just handball, that wouldn’t be enough for Köster, the son of an anesthesiologist and a human resources manager from Brauweiler near Cologne. “I’m very interested in economics,” he says, “and I’d like to delve deeper into it.”

But the next few years belong to sport, that’s what Köster wants. If he continues to stay free of serious injuries, he can play until his mid-thirties. The only question is: where?

Köster has already received inquiries from major clubs in the Bundesliga, but he has rejected them all. He has been loyal to VfL Gummersbach for four years, a big player in European handball in the 1970s, but today only upper middle class.

Don’t want to try out for a top club? “Gummersbach is still the right club for me,” says Köster, “I’m proud of what we’ve built together.”

As intellectually agile as Köster is, he seems to be grounded in his feet. Gummersbach is his club and Cologne his city. Köster travels to Gummersbach every day for training; it takes him 45 minutes by car from Cologne. He takes it all on himself: the commute, the studies, the many games with VfL and the national team – every winter there is either a European Championship or a World Cup.

Köster is capable of suffering, how else could he be a fan of FC Schalke 04. Occasionally he goes to the stadium in Gelsenkirchen. He was last in the arena for the home game against 1. FC Kaiserslautern, the game was lost 3-0.

Schalke has taught him over many years that Köster has to achieve success in sport on his own.