ZURICH – One day after the end of the regular season in Europe’s top leagues, the IIHF has announced the annual attendance study. 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.

Scroll down for the chart with the top clubs and leagues.

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.

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.

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).

Swedish Frölunda Gothenburg (from 5th to 11th place) and Germany’s Hamburg Freezers (from 8th to 15th place) had severe drops in spectator numbers, falling out of Europe’s top-10.

Lev Prague is the top new entry in Europe’s top-100 ranking. The newly founded Czech KHL club averaged 7,161 fans to reach 18th place. Incredibly, even though Prague now has three professional clubs competing for fans, Czech Extraliga teams Sparta Prague (25th, from 6,273 to 6,445) and Slavia Prague (66th, from 4,492 to 4,747) both increased their numbers and moved up in the ranking.

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 average attendance in the Swedish top league fell by 10.5 per cent to 5,717 fans per game – the lowest number the league has recorded since 2003. The downfall was mainly caused by the two most popular teams from last year. Frölunda Gothenburg saw a decrease of 18.1 per cent from 10,482 to 8,588 fans while Djurgården Stockholm, the second-most attended Swedish team last year, had to leave the league after being relegated.

But the severe decline cannot only be explained by Djurgården being out of the league. Of the eleven teams that stayed in the league, nine clubs had lower numbers than in 2012. Only the attendance of two teams – the two northern clubs Skellefteå AIK and Luleå HF – went up. Even by taking out Djurgården and the team it was replaced by, Rögle Ängelholm, the average of the other eleven teams dropped by 6.1 per cent.

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.

The study also lists the top second-tier leagues in Europe. The Swedish HockeyAllsvenskan leads the ranking and it improved its average attendance by 28.8 per cent to 3,227 mainly thanks to the presence of Djurgården Stockholm, which still averaged 6,184 fans one level below Elitserien. But the average of the eleven teams that already played in the league last year grew by 10.1 per cent as well.

While the numbers went up in HockeyAllsvenskan, the other main second-tier leagues in Europe from Germany, Switzerland, Russia, Finland and the Czech Republic had decreasing numbers.

Europe’s top-100 attended teams include eight clubs that play in minor leagues including one third-tier team, Löwen Frankfurt from Germany.

In total the average of the top-10 teams in Europe grew by 3.63 per cent, and of the top-100 teams by 1.74 per cent compared to the regular season one year ago.

The Nikko Ice Bucks from Japan were the best-attended team in Asia with an average of 1,396 fans followed by the Oji Eagles Tomakomai (1,251) and Korean team High1 Chuncheon (1,164).

MARTIN MERK

Notes:

• The league attendance figures are calculated based on the average of all club teams in order to eliminate effects of unequal numbers of home games played within several leagues.
• The regular season in North America, Great Britain and in Germany’s 2nd-tier league were not completed as of publication date, 13 March 2013.