French handball player Nikola Karabatic announced on Friday August 25, 2023 to retire after a final season. The Paris Saint-Germain player has the Paris 2024 Olympics as his last goal.
“This season will be my last and I wanted to write to you”. The Paris Saint-Germain handball player decided to play fair and announce at the start of the season that this year will be his last on the pitch. It was in a letter addressed to supporters and published on the Parisian club’s website that Nikola Karabatic said he wanted to retire.
The quadruple world champion player with the French handball team prefers to plan his exit and not take his fans by surprise. Verbalizing his departure is also a way to better “savor all [his] last moments as a sportsman” he explained to the Parisian, especially as beautiful moments are announced with the Olympic Games of 2024, the last in which Nikola Karabatic will be able to participate. : “The Games help me to get up every day. I don’t project myself into it but, on the other hand, I make it a goal”. Because if he says he is ready to drop off the jersey at the end of the season, the player promises to give himself “200%”, “it will take at least that to thank you” he concludes.
Born of a Croatian father and a Serbian mother in 1984, in Nis (Serbia), Nikola Karabatic arrived in France at the age of 4 with his mother to join his father, a former Yugoslavian handball international. From an early age, he followed in his father’s footsteps and was passionate about handball. Passed by the Montpellier training center, he played his first professional match at the age of 17 in 2001, before quickly becoming essential.
The impressive fullback was called up to the France team at just 18 years old in 2002. The Frenchman won his first Champions League, with Montpellier in 2003, before taking part in his first Games, in 2004 in Athens, where France finished in 5th place. After four seasons with his training club and four league titles, Nikola Karabatic joined the Kiel club in Germany in 2006. Crowned champion four years in a row, he also won his second Champions League in 2007.
Having become one of the executives of the France team, the back led the Blues to the first European title in their history in 2006 then to the first Olympic title, in Beijing in 2008. He also carried the French to victory in 2009 during of the World Cup, very special for him, played in Croatia. Returning to Montpellier in 2010 to be closer to his family and to play with his brother Luka, Nikola Karabatic is at the top of his game, even if he fails to win a third Champions League. At the same time, he chained titles with the Blues, whether European (2010), world (2011) and Olympic (2012).
But on September 30, 2012, Nikola Karabatic, his partner and several players playing or having played the previous season in Montpellier were placed in police custody in the case of the rigged bets. This pushes the French back to leave Montpellier to join Aix, the time of the procedure. He will finally be sentenced to two months in prison suspended and 10,000 euros fine. After this short break from Aix, he decided to leave France and joined FC Barcelona in 2013. He stayed there for two seasons and won a third Champions League in 2015.
In the summer of 2015, he chose to return to France and join his brother Luka at Paris Saint-Germain, who has great ambitions on the European scene. But if he has been crowned champion of France since 2015, PSG fails every year to win the Champions League. In October 2020, he suffered a serious knee injury, the first of his career, at almost 37 years old. But “Kara” returned to the courts in May 2021, enough to be selected for the Tokyo Games, where he hopes to win a fourth Olympic medal with the Blues.
Solid back, Nikola Karabatic displays an imposing stature with his 1m95 for a weight of more than 100 kg. Even at 37, he remains an impressive physical machine, capable of withstanding the frequent impacts suffered by handball players both in attack and in defense. The PSG player was deprived of part of the 2021 season following a rupture of the cruciate ligament of the knee and his physical form remained a question mark as the Olympics approached.
Nikola Karabatic has one of the finest records in French handball. With the French team, he is double Olympic champion (2008 and 2012), quadruple world champion (2009, 2011, 2015 and 2017) and triple European champion (2006, 2010 and 2014). In club, he was crowned champion of France, Germany and Spain 19 times in 20 professional seasons and won the Champions League three times: in 2003 with Montpellier, in 2007 with Kiel and in 2015 with Barcelona. Nikola Karabatic was also named World Handball Player of the Year in 2007, 2014 and 2016 by the IHF.
Star of the discipline at the world level, Nikola Karabatic obviously earns a much better living than most other French handball players. In February 2017, a study by L’Equipe magazine estimated his overall income at 1.1 million euros per year, including his salary and his various partnerships. Which made him the highest paid player in PSG and the highest paid French handball player. For comparison, the average gross monthly salary of a player in the French first division was then 6,868 euros, or around 82,000 euros per year.
Nikola Karabatic comes from a Serbo-Croatian family. Her father Branko is from Croatia while her mother, Radmila, is Serbian. His father, who died of cancer in 2011, was a former professional handball player who came to France to end his career, near Strasbourg.
Nikola Karabatic is currently in a relationship with Géraldine Pillet. The couple had a son, Alek, in 2016 and a daughter, Nora, in 2018. He also has a younger brother, Luka, also a French international handball player and PSG player selected for the Tokyo Olympics.
