Ana Gros closes in on Club of 1,000

Ana Gros is firmly knocking on the door of the Club of 1,000. Just over 16 years after scoring for the first time in the EHF Champions League Women, the 35-year-old Slovenian right back stands at 993 career goals:

• Brest Bretagne Handball: 315 goals (and counting)
• Metz Handball: 231
• Györi Audi ETO KC: 198
• Krim OTP Group Mercator: 160
• CSKA: 71
• Thüringer HC: 18

Gros will join the elite club of super goal scorers when she nets seven more. That could happen, interestingly, in Brest’s last group phase match on Saturday (21 February) against Krim — the club for which Gros scored her very first EHF Champions League goal back in October 2009.

Gros is set to become only the fifth player to reach the illustrious milestone, joining the excellent company of Cristina Neagu (ROU/1,232 goals), Jovanka Radicevic (MNE/1,181), Andrea Lekic (SRB/1,073), and Anita Görbicz (HUN/1,016).

Those four legends of the game are all retired, and Gros has recently announced that she will end her playing career after the 2025/26 season as well.

Stats about Ana Gros approaching the Club of 1,000:

• Gros scored her first EHF Champions League goal as an 18-year-old prospect on 24 October 2009, netting four times for Krim in an away match at Metz — a club she would join later in her career
• the first time Gros hit double digits in a single match happened on 14 February 2015, when she netted 11 times for Metz in a 31:27 defeat against Györ in Hungary
• Gros has scored 10 or more goals in a single EHF Champions League match on 18 occasions
• her personal best is 14 goals in one match — on 25 October 2020, when Brest won an away game at Odense Håndbold 31:24
• Gros has passed the 100-goal mark for a single season twice, netting 135 times for Brest (and becoming the competition’s top scorer) in 2020/21 and scoring 102 for Györ in 2022/23
• having started the 2025/26 group phase on 967, Gros has added 26 goals so far to raise her career tally to 993 — just seven short of the 1,000-goal milestone
• Gros has scored her 993 goals for six clubs in five countries; more than half of her career tally came at her two clubs in France: 546 goals for Metz and Brest combined

main image © Olivier Stephan