Prandi’s game: “It’s frustrating when people reduce me to a shooting beast”

From a very young age, Elohim Prandi has delivered fantastic highlights — whether it was with France, his former club USAM Nîmes or now with Paris Saint-Germain, it is impossible not to have seen his actions on social media. And most of them featured the tattooed left back shooting as fast as possible from a distance, leaving the goalkeeper without reaction. “I don’t deny I am a powerful shooter. But I am so much more than this, and it’s frustrating when people reduce me to just a shooting beast,” says the 27-year-old.

Having two former international handball players as his parents, Prandi had the genes to make it into a great athlete. “My dad was a great shooting player, and even though I am not as large as he was, of course, that helped shape the player that I am now,” Prandi admits, before explaining what he also took from his mother, Mezuela Servier: “My mum was more athletic, she ran a lot and also could jump high. I am pretty sure that my qualities did not come from nowhere.”

But this raw diamond needed to be polished — just because you have physical abilities does not mean that you will turn into a world-class player. “The first thing I actually did on the court was to defend,” he says. “It’s something that I have always loved, the possibility to break an offence just by one action.”

Maybe it’s because he started at such a young age, but Elohim Prandi has always loved defending, especially the mental part that comes with it. “It’s like a fight, one versus one, and very often with the same player you attack against as well. It’s like a game within the game, and just because you won the first five rounds, does not mean you will win the sixth. You have to be on your toes all the time,” he decrypts.

Sometimes, on the court, the French left back gets the feeling that some of his opponents are not too happy about having to go against him. “It’s not fear, no,” he laughs, “but some of them know they are going to have a tough time. They know that if they want to score, it’s not going to be easy and that it’s going to be a huge fight for them.”

But when Elohim Prandi moved to Paris, then coach Raul Gonzalez made him defend on the wing position. “Maybe he thought that I was not good enough, I don’t know. But I am happy I can now prove that I can defend my position.”

One thing that he did not have to prove, though, was his incredible offensive skills. There, again, Raul Gonzalez had a key role in shaping the player Elohim Prandi is now. “I watched a lot of videos to get better at reading the defences, at being consistent throughout the course of the game as well,” he says.

For the past couple of seasons, Elohim Prandi has been through a visible change in the way he plays handball. “I used to be that impact player, kind of the X-factor guy, that would play for 15 minutes, score a couple of goals, deliver a few assists,” he recalls from his time in USAM Nîmes, a club that he played for from 2017 to 2020. 

“Now, I am more of an all-round player. Yes, I can score 10 goals in one game, but in the next one, I could score three and give 10 assists,” he says, before noting that this might not have been possible a couple of years back. “I have learnt to let the game come to me and not to force things. A couple of times in the last season, I just felt like the situations were not there for me to score, so I focused on opening solutions for my teammates.”

While Elohim Prandi is currently the second-best scorer in the Machineseeker EHF Champions League 2025/26 — “something that I am proud of, but this is not an achievement in itself” — he also takes pride in the fact that he is now able to do so many things on the court. “Whatever I do, it will never be enough for some people, but at the end of the day, I feel like I am more adaptable on the court now than I have ever been before. I am more accurate and I read situations better as well,” he explains. “I am not perfect, but I feel like I can easily find the right balance these days.”

What Elohim Prandi also loves to do on the court is to take responsibility. Come crunch time, in the last 10 minutes of a game, if the score is tight, there are slim chances that Elohim Prandi will not take the fate of the game into his hands.

“That is what I love, I don’t shy away. I am not afraid to miss, I am not afraid to take things into my hands,” he warns. When you ask him to date back to the moment when he started to love these situations, he says: “I have always had, but in my former club, the coach would always put me on the court for the money-time, to go and get a penalty and take a desperate shot when the passive play sign was shown. And once you see you can unlock situations, you just start to love it.”

Every player has a different way of unlocking tight situations on the court. Some of them will just unplug their brain and let their instincts speak, while others will focus on what they had worked on before the game.

“I try to go back to the essentials of my game and not overact. You have to keep cool, adapt to what system the defence is playing and try the best solutions,” is Prandi’s way of dealing with the pressure. “You have to be very analytical and keep your eyes and mind open. If the defence is doing this, I should do that and so on… And the more you play in these situations, the better you get at it.”

And in these deciding situations, becoming a more complete player, of course, helps Elohim Prandi a lot. “Taking the shot, creating a space, giving a good pass, everything can be a solution to win a game,” he adds, before concluding: “I still find it appalling that some people will only think of me as a bison who can only throw concrete blocks out of nowhere. But I really think that my physicality is only a part of me and that I have so much more to offer on the court.”

Photos © Lau Nielsen, Jean Marie Hervio, Eliza Sólya