Swiss giant SC Bern leads the European attendance study for the 17th consecutive year with an average of 16,371 fans in the regular season.

The club from the Swiss capital has led the European ranking since overtaking Kolner Haie from the German city of Cologne in 2001/2002 despite a marginal drop by 28 spectators this year.

Switzerland also leads the European national leagues in league attendance with an average of 6,833 spectators.

Second comes the KHL that claims second and third spot in the club rankings but
this year with SKA St. Petersburg moving from fifth to second place. Arguably the strongest team in Europe with many Russian home comers from the NHL and the
highest budget, the club averaged 11,847 fans and is followed by another KHL team, Dynamo Minsk from Belarus with 11,738 fans.

The two KHL teams are followed by two German clubs. Eisbaren Berlin stays in fourth place with 11,384 fans while Kolner Haie dropped to fifth with 11,222 spectators in average. Finnish KHL team Jokerit Helsinki and Adler Mannheim from Germany are the other clubs over the 10,000 mark. Frolunda Gothenburg (Sweden), the ZSC Lions Zurich (Switzerland) and Sparta Prague (Czech Republic)
complete the top-10 in Europe.

The top-100 club teams come from 14 different countries across the continent from Great Britain in the west to Kazakhstan in the east. Some of them perform in a second-tier league led by Czech club HC Ceske Budejovice with 5,869 fans.

In the league ranking the Russian-based cross-border league KHL moved to second
place with 6,234 fans. The strategy to decrease the number of the teams paid off. While the current 27 teams had less spectators in average, the league average increased by losing Metallurg Novokuznetsk (relegated) and Medvescak Zagreb (tops the Austrian-based cross-border league EBEL in attendance).

The German DEL had a decrease in attendance of over 3 per cent and dropped to third place with an average of 5,996 fans followed by the Swedish Hockey League
(5,669), the Czech Extraliga (5,455) and the Finnish Liiga (4,254).

With Medvescak Zagreb replacing Olimpija Ljubljana in the EBEL, the Austrian-based league increased its attendance to 3,216 fans and moved to seventh place ahead of the leagues from Great Britain, Slovakia and Norway.

The NHL with 17,414 is by far the most attended league world wide and is followed by Switzerland, Russia and Germany in terms of attendance before the second-most visited league in North America, the AHL with 5,817 fans. The Chicago Blackhawks (21,635) and the Montreal Canadiens (21,299) are the clubs with the highest attendance and the only hockey teams that average more than 20,000 fans in average.

MARTIN MERK

http://www.iihf.com/home-of-hockey/news/attendance-2017-2018/
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