SC Bern : Europe’s Best Ten Years Running, Beat Eight NHL Teams

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For no less than a 10th consecutive season, the well-supported Swiss Nationalliga A outfit SCHLITTSCHUH CLUB BERN led all European professional ice hockey teams at the box office in terms of average attendance per contest. This in a year which saw a record seven teams in five different countries surpass the noteworthy milestone of at least 10,000 spectators on average. The German Bundesliga club Koelner Haie (Cologne Sharks) were the last team other than the 12-times national champion of Switzerland to lead the entire continent at the gate but, indeed, only just beat out SC Bern by a mere 64 spectators to claim the honor at the end of the 2001-02 campaign.

With the National Hockey League regular season having just ended, it is now known that SC Bern also beat eight National Hockey League clubs in average attendance. That figure represents more than 1/4 of all NHL teams for this 2011/12 campaign. Although the average for the Swiss side dropped slightly to 15,779 per game this season, this total was also two and a half times more than the average gate for a Nationalliga A game in Switzerland this term.

SC BERN (Switzerland) ……………………………….. 15,779
DYNAMO MINSK (Belarus) …………………………… 14,193
EISBAEREN BERLIN (Germany) …………………….. 14,073
KOELNER HAIE (Germany) ………………………….. 10,494
VASTRA FROLUNDA GOTEBORG (Sweden) …….. 10,482
SKA ST. PETERSBURG (Russia) …………………… 10,126
ADLER MANNHEIM (Germany) ………………………. 10,018
HAMBURG FREEZERS (Germany) …………………… 9,221
JOKERIT HELSINKI (Finland) ………………………….. 9,173
HC AVANGARD OMSK (Russia) ………………………. 9,143

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The National Hockey League, which was first established in 1917, has always advertised its product as the finest in all the world. Certainly, the multi-million dollar salaries paid to players in the NHL provides signifcant weight to that promotional claim. And yet for this 2011/12 season, the traditionally-popular Swiss club SC BERN, who were officially founded on the first day of 1931, still managed to outdraw the Colorado Avalanche, New Jersey Devils, Winnipeg Jets, Anaheim Ducks, Columbus Blue Jackets, Dallas Stars, New York Islanders and Phoenix Coyotes.