The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) has published the annual European attendance ranking with the regular season being concluded in most countries of the continent. For the 18th consecutive year SC Bern leads all European clubs with an average attendance of 16,290 in the regular season.



Scroll down for the club and league rankings.



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 of 91 spectators.



Like last year SC Bern is followed by the best attended Russian team, SKA St. Petersburg, which increased its attendance to 13,016 fans thanks to an outdoor game.



Next comes a trio of German clubs: Eisbaren Berlin (12,026), Kolner Haie (11,573) and Adler Mannheim (11,422) all moved up compared to last year. Frolunda Gothenburg from Sweden, ranked sixth with 10,071, and the ZSC Lions Zurich from Switzerland with 9,693 spectators improved as well while the second and third most visited KHL teams dropped down, Dynamo Minsk from Belarus with 9,495 fans from third to eighth place and Jokerit Helsinki from Finland with 8,768 fans from sixth to tenth place. The top-10 are completed by the most popular Czech club, Sparta Prague, which improved to ninth place with 9,042 spectators.



With Dusseldorfer EG another German team follows in 11th place while famous Russian club CSKA Moscow moved up from 92nd to 12th place with 8,501 fans in its new arena that it shared with Spartak Moscow, which was just one place behind.



The top-100 list below includes clubs from 13 different countries including Austria, Belarus, the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Norway, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden and Switzerland.



The top-100 ranking also includes several clubs competing in second-tier leagues in their countries led by HC Ceske Budejovice from the Czech Republic ranked 44th with 5,736 fans.



The clubs with the currently highest attendances worldwide are again the Chicago Blackhawks (22,951) and the Montreal Canadiens (21,010) of the National Hockey League.



In the Far East countries Chinese KHL team Kunlun Red Star, which plays most of its games in Shanghai, averaged 2,569 fans followed by Qien Tou Jilin (1,400), a Chinese team in the second-tier Russian league VHL, and the Japanese clubs Nikko Ice Bucks (1,344) and Nippon Paper Cranes (1,204) from the Asia League.



Switzerland does not only have the best attended club in Europe but its National League also had the highest average attendance in the regular season, which increased by 1.7 per cent to 6,949 fans with the ZSC Lions Zurich, HC Ambri-Piotta, EHC Biel and HC Lugano having the biggest growth. The increase comes in the season after Switzerland won silver at the 2018 IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship by narrowly missing gold in a shootout against Sweden.



That makes it the best attended league in the world, by the average number, behind the National Hockey League with currently 17,406 fans. Four European leagues have an average attendance that’s behind the NHL but before the American Hockey League, which ranks second in North America with 5,672 fans.



The top-8 attended European leagues remained in the same order. The Russian-dominated Kontinental Hockey League is second in Europe with an average of 6,397 fans (+2.6%). The German DEL (6,215, +3.7%) and the Swedish Hockey League (5,828, +2.8%) also saw their numbers go up. In Germany 10 out of 14 clubs had higher numbers than last year in the season after the German silver fairy tale at the Olympics. In Russia CSKA Moscow was the biggest difference maker with its new arena but also SKA St. Petersburg and Dinamo Riga had a four-digit growth. In Sweden there was a broad number of clubs increasing the average in the country after back-to-back World Championship titles for Sweden.



These leagues are followed in Europe by the Czech Extraliga, Finland’s Liiga, the Austrian-based cross-border league EBEL and the leagues from Great Britain, Norway, France and Slovakia. Ranked 12th, the Danish Metal Ligaen improved its attendance by a whopping 26 per cent in its season after successfully hosting the IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship for the first time. Seven teams in the nine-team league had higher numbers than the season before.