Hockey attendance in EU

[Fred]

Interesting release regarding where the EU game is for attendance

http://www.iihf.com/home-of-hockey/news ... fb6171f7ea

[dhabums]

Is it still 2 loaves of bread and a bag of potatoes for 2 tix in Russia?

[Fred]

Talking about potatoes. We all get so hyped about hockey here and yet when you look at EU it's still small potatoes

[Uncle dans leg]

Or...donate you're empty potatoe sacks to the KHL team of your choice and if they get enough they spring for a defibrillator...

[Per]

Talking about potatoes. We all get so hyped about hockey here and yet when you look at EU it's still small potatoes

Looking at Europe as a whole, hockey is not that big, but in Scandinavia, Russia, former Czechoslovakia, Switzerland and Latvia it is. The number of spectators from the SEL may seem small compared to NHL numbers, but Sweden is a rather sparsely populated country. Our biggest city, Stockholm, is bigger than Vancouver if you just look at the municipality (851,000 inhabitants vs 603,000) but if you include the entire urban area Vancouver has 2.3 million compared to Stockholm's 1.3, ie in reality Vancouver is almost twice as big.

In Sweden hockey is competing with football (ie soccer) for the title of national sport. In general you can say that soccer is bigger in southern Sweden and hockey in the north. Looking at spectator numbers, the average crowd at a game in Allsvenskan, the top league in football, drew a crowd of 7,326 spectators last season and hockey 6,385, but seven of the 16 teams in Allsvenskan averaged less than 6,000 spectators at their home games.

Djurgården*, one of the main sports teams in Stockholm, has both hockey and football on their agenda. Their football team averaged 8,671 spectators and their hockey team 7,723. Yet, if you consider that there are 55 games in the regular hockey season and only 30 in the football one, the total ticket sales would have been bigger for the hockey team.

In Gothenburg, Sweden's second city, the main football team would be IFK Göteborg, who averaged 10,849 spectators at home and the main hockey team would be Västra Frölunda*, averaging 10,482 spectators. Roughly the same.

Gävle, where I live, is the town furthest to the north to have a football team in Allsvenskan, yet four of the twelve teams in the SEL are located north of Gävle. Anyway, at this latitude hockey is already king. Gefle IF, our local football team, drew an average crowd of 4,286 spectators, whereas the local hockey team, Brynäs*, drew 6,265. The city of Gävle has some 71,000 inhabitants, or 95,000 in the municipality.

Further north, Modo* had an average home crowd of 6,119 people attending their games. This in a "city" of 29,000 people, or 55,000 in the municipality of Örnsköldsvik. Proportionally, 6,119 out of 55,000 would translate to a home crowd of 255,000 attending Vancouver's games...

And sure, Sweden fares rather well in football, the world's most popular sport. We've reached the World Cup semi finals four times, which is three more than England, and have earned one silver and two bronzes. This with a population of 9 million. But we do fare even better in hockey. Few people (outside of Sweden) can mention five Swedish football players, but I'm sure anyone interested in hockey can easily mention a dozen or more Swedish hockey players.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that in northern Sweden hockey is the main sport, and the sport most boys strive to excel in. It's just that we're not that many and we live far apart, so the crowds at games can not compare with the NHL, where most teams are stationed in cities that are far bigger than anything you can find in Scandinavia.

- - - - - -

*some current and former players of interest in the teams mentioned above:

Djurgården
former: Mats Sundin, Marcus Krüger, Mariusz Czerkawski, Kent Nilsson, Gabriel Landeskog, Johnny Oduya, Mikael Tellqvist
current: Mattias & Daniel Tjärnqvist, Nils Ekman, Marcus Nilsson, Jimmy Ölvestad, Mika Zibanejad

Frölunda
former: Daniel Alfredsson, Alexander Steen, Kristian Huselius, Henrik Lundqvist
current: Per-Johan Axelsson, Christian Bäckman, Joel Lundqvist, Fredrik Sjöström, Henrik Tömmernes

Brynäs
former: Tomas Sandström, Nicklas Bäckström, Pär Djoos, Jacob Markström, Börje Salming, Mats Näslund, Stefan, Persson, Brian Rafalski¹
current: Andreas Dackell, Johan Holmqvist, Jakob Silfverberg, Calle Järnkrook

Modo
former: Peter Forsberg, Markus Näslund, Thomas Gradin, Henrik & Daniel Sedin, Victor Hedman, Anders Hedberg, Tomas Jonsson, Anders Kallur, Samuel Påhlsson, Andreas Salomonsson
current: Mikael Tellqvist, Niklas Sundström, Freddy Meyer, Rob Schremp
(and GM Markus Näslund, asst GM Peter Forsberg, coach Ulf Samuelsson... )


¹Rafalski was not drafted out of college and instead opted for Europe. He spent one season in Sweden and three in Finland before landing a spot in the NHL

[Per]

OK, to add some perspective on what is fair to expect, I looked up attandance in all indoor sports leagues in Europe (thankyou, wikipedia! )

Here are the top ten:

League - Sport - Country - Average attendance
Liga ACB - basketball - Spain - 7189
Euroleague - basketball - Europe - 6590
Nationalliga A - hockey - Switzerland - 6303
Elitserien (SEL) - hockey - Sweden - 6106
KHL - hockey - Russia (and friends) - 6064
Deutsche Eishockey Liga - hockey - Germany - 5867
Czech Extraliga - hockey - Czech Republic - 4936
SM-liiga - hockey - Finland - 4850
Handball Bundesliga - handball - Germany - 4543
Lega Basket Serie A- basketball - Italy - 3862

So, when you look at it this way, it becomes clear that hockey is the main indoor sport in Europe, except in Spain, and that the European Basketball league actually draws larger crowds than the various national hockey leagues, but not by much.

If you look at outdoor sports, eleven of the twelve top leagues are all soccer. The only exception is the French Top 14 rugby union league that breaks into eighth place with an average attendance of 15,119 spectators, well below the crowd of 19,650 that tends to show up at French Ligue 1 soccer games. The highest attendance of all European sports is German Bundesliga soccer games that have an average attendance of 42,690 spectators, followed by the British Premier league with 35,283, then follow the Spanish and Italian leagues.

Other sports?

The highest placement of any league not concerned with soccer or rugby is the Polish Speedway Ekstraliga in 20th place with an average attendance of 8356. That's right. Polish people like to watch people ride motorcycles around and around on dirt tracks.

The highest place for a cricket league is 28th, that's the English Twenty20Cup with an average attendance of 6896.

The Russian Bandy League is in 38th place with 4135 spectators/game.

No baseball or American Football make this list, but in 65th place we have the Finnish Superpesis league, a league for pesäpallo, which I basically think is a Finnish version of baseball. They don't have "b" in Finnish, so they tend to replace them with "p" in loan words, and they want nouns to end with a vowel.. You do the math. Anyway. An average crowd of 1434 people tends to show up at the Finnish Superpesis games. That's not bad. I seriously doubt you could ever get that many Swedes to attend a baseball game.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_at ... ts_leagues

[Per]

As an interesting aside; the All-Ireland Hurling Championship Final held at Croke Park in Dublin in 2011 drew a crowd of 81,314 spectators, as compared to the 68,658 who showed up for the 2012 Superbowl held at the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.

Of course, neither of those events can touch the 99,537 who showed up at the Melbourne Cricket Ground to watch the 2011 Australian Football League Grand Final.

That hurling figure is awesome though.

I mean, how many Irish people are there?
Something like 6 million, eh?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sp ... ce_figures

[donlever]

I told ya..

Hurling is da bomb!

(head shots perfectly legal for us NA neandrathals)



(little bit o de ol' blood n' gore)

[Per]

I told ya..

Hurling is da bomb!

I knew you'd enjoy that little tidbit of information!

And yeah, an intriguing mix of field hockey and rugby, with the goalie often swinging the stick like a baseball bat.
It's a team sport on acid or something. Very freaky.

Still surprised me that the All-Ireland final draws a bigger crowd than the superbowl.

Then again - considering that most Irish people I've met have been rather small in stature, and the growing problem with obesity in the USA, maybe the crowd isn't bigger...?