Slovan among top of Europe

Slovakia’s Slovan Bratislava improved from 36th to seventh position with 9,975 fans. Since joining the KHL last year, the club has had all but one game sold out. The club averaged 5,907 fans in the Slovak league last year.



SC Bern set a new club attendance record with an average of 16,330 fans while the Swiss NLA set a new league attendance record with 6,620 spectators per game.

SC Bern tops the European attendance ranking for the 12th consecutive year. The club from the Swiss capital city has been on top since it dethroned Germany’s Kölner Haie in 2002. The top-four is unchanged from 2012. Belarusian KHL team Dynamo Minsk remained in second place with an average of 14,299 fans at Minsk Arena – the newly built facility that will also serve as the venue for the 2014 IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship – ahead of two German teams, Eisbären Berlin (14,034) and Kölner Haie (12,199).

Russia’s most-attended team, SKA St. Petersburg, moved from sixth to fifth place with 11,917 fans per game and also sixth-ranked Adler Mannheim from Germany (10,796) moved up one place.

 The top-10 is completed by Jokerit Helsinki (9,828) – the home team at Hartwall Arena, one of the two venues for the IIHF Ice Hockey World Championships in 2012 and 2013 – the ZSC Lions Zurich (8,745) and Lokomotiv Yaroslavl (8,712).



The top-100 includes teams from 15 different countries: Austria, Belarus, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Great Britain, Germany, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Norway, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland and Ukraine.



The teams with the highest attendance worldwide are currently the Chicago Blackhawks with 21,610 fans followed by the Montreal Canadiens (21,273) and the Detroit Red Wings (20,066).



The Swiss National League A claimed back first place in league attendance in Europe with an average of 6,620 fans. Switzerland has been top twice in the last five years while the Swedish Elitserien led the league attendance in 2009, 2010 and 2012.

The average in Switzerland grew by five per cent to set a new all-time record for league attendance in Europe. Also the German DEL (6,172, +1.9%) and the Russian-based KHL (6,106, +3.7%) had growing numbers and improved by one place while the Swedish Elitserien dropped down from first to fourth place.

The leagues from Switzerland, Germany, Russia and Sweden have the highest attendance figures worldwide only behind the NHL, which averages 17,703 fans, and ahead of the second-most attended North American league, the AHL with 5,626 fans per game.

The ranks from five to twelve in Europe remained the same. The Finnish SM-liiga (5,213) follows in fifth place in a tight race with the Czech Extraliga (5,169). The leagues from Austria (3,547), Slovakia (2,018) and Great Britain (1,977) follow.



The Slovak Extraliga’s average attendance went down by 24.9 per cent due to Slovan Bratislava’s move to the KHL. The league has been dominated on the ice as well as financially by the Bratislava club and its archrival HC Kosice, and losing one of these two teams was a substantial loss for the league.

Of the ten club teams that stayed in the Slovak Extraliga, eight had a lower attendance compared with last year. Kosice’s average went down from 5,678 to 4,029 (-29%). The attendance average of the ten teams that remained in the league decreased by 14.1 per cent.



Attendance figures in European hockey leagues 2012/2013: