The game looks good: KHL records record attendance of matches

The Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) has recorded record attendance at its championship matches this season. The organization announced this following a meeting of club leaders on December 9. In the regular season, in which almost all participants played about half or more of the games, the average attendance was almost 8 thousand spectators. In addition, KHL President Alexei Morozov said that the issue of returning to the draft league has been put aside for now.

Attendance

A year ago, the league recorded a record average attendance in the first half of the regular season. In December 2024, it was 6886 people. Now the indicator has been improved to 7938 viewers. In the middle of the 18th KHL season, the best result in the history of the league was not prevented even by the fact that St. Petersburg SKA stopped performing at the 23,000-strong SKA Arena, where in previous seasons, even at matches with not the strongest opponents, it was almost always guaranteed to achieve attendance of more than 20 thousand.

Now the army men of the Northern Capital have returned to their old "Ice Palace" with a capacity of 12 thousand people. And the Chinese Shanghai Dragons moved to the SKA Arena, a new club based on another representative of China, Kunlun Red Star, which has been playing in Mytishchi since 2020 due to the pandemic, and not in its native country. The "Dragons" have a good attendance rate for the new model, who has no formal connection with St. Petersburg — about 8 thousand people attend some of the team's matches at the SKA Arena.

But this is clearly not something that SKA could put together. And the attendance record for the league as a whole looks even more significant. In addition, the KHL has improved arena occupancy at its matches. And this can be called the main outcome of the league's development strategy until 2026, adopted in 2023.

—The league's development strategy is being finalized in 2026, and we have already started developing a new one. We have contacted the clubs to share our vision and make suggestions," Alexey Morozov said after the meeting. — Let's look at them — what needs to be done to ensure that the league and clubs develop in sports and commercial terms. Now only half of the regular season has passed, the playoffs are ahead, but we are already breaking records in terms of total and average attendance - on average, about 8 thousand spectators attended each match of the season, which is 80% of the maximum occupancy of the arenas (last season, as of December, the occupancy was 77.3% — Ed.). We are seeing an increase, and we have focused on attracting a young audience — the growth has doubled in two years. There are hundreds of events and projects about hockey that attract young people.

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Contracts

One of the league's problems in recent years has been the increasing number of early contract cancellations between clubs and players, including major agreements. So before this season, the scandal was caused by the story of striker Vladimir Tkachev, perhaps the best KHL player at the moment. The current leader of Metallurg Magnitogorsk in 2024, when he played for Avangard from his native Omsk, received an offer from the club for a large five-year contract, which he signed, becoming the highest-paid hockey player in the KHL.

But six months later, the leadership of Avangard changed. And in the summer of 2025, it terminated the agreement with its pupil due to the fact that he did not fit the playing system of the head coach of the team Guy Boucher. Such fragility of long contracts written on paper has become a scourge for the KHL, especially against the background of how such agreements are mostly respected in the NHL.

In addition, numerous cases raise questions when the club and hockey players agree on a salary reduction under the current contract. Formally, the parties refer to the goodwill of the hockey players, so it is difficult to legally prove that all this is being done to circumvent the salary cap. But such a practice causes a sharp rejection in the hockey community on a conceptual level.

According to Alexey Morozov, a meeting of the KHL Working Group with representatives of the clubs took place at the end of November, 17 issues were jointly considered, 15 of them contractual and two sports. Some of the issues discussed at the meeting of the Working Group required additional collection of club opinions, including the issue of re-signing contracts and their consideration in the salary cap.

—Both cancellations and downgrades of contracts are being sorted out and worked out," said the head of the KHL. "We want to set up the system so that everything works as a single mechanism. There is a vote now, and there are various proposals. For example, if a player had a one-way contract, then you cannot re-sign it to a two-way one. We are waiting for the voting results, we will study them and submit them to the board of directors, so that by the beginning of the new transfer campaign we will already have changes in the regulations.

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Draft

At the last meeting of the heads of KHL clubs, the issue of returning the draft was not discussed, but this topic constantly comes up informally, since it has become one of the main ones in Russian hockey over the past two years. The junior fair was held by the league in 2009-2016. Then it was abandoned. But about a year and a half ago, the idea arose again to consider the possibility of her return, for which a working group was created. So far, it has not come to the consideration of specific draft mechanisms.

— Now this institute has been put aside a little bit, because they realized that the draft after graduation is for the MHL clubs, and it is more interesting for us to make the movement of young players within the KHL, — said Alexey Morozov. — I think the proposal that we have put to the clubs' vote will regulate the movement of young people, especially those players who will not fall under the protective restrictions of their clubs.

The draft process, where clubs secure the rights to the most talented players before the season, has been a fundamental part of business in North American leagues, including the NHL, for several decades. However, in Russia, some hockey managers believe that in our reality it is impossible to completely copy the scheme, since clubs overseas do not own their own schools, which is significantly different from the long-established system in our country. In North America, schools are independent of clubs.

"Returning the draft to the KHL may make sense, but there are many issues that need to be resolved in order to approve this decision," Evgeny Biryukov, athletic director of Magnitogorsk Metallurg, told Izvestia. — First of all, we need to take into account the interests of clubs with a well-established hockey vertical, when there is a main team in the KHL, a farm club in the VHL, a youth team in the MHL and its own school. It turns out that we can spend years investing money in training a hockey player, bringing him to senior age, making his debut in the MHL, VHL, and, possibly, at a young age, in the KHL. But then, at the age of 18, he will enter the draft, another club will choose him, secure his rights, and the interests of the organizations that raised him will be in great doubt. We need to work on this issue very seriously so that this innovation takes into account the interests of all parties.

Also on Tuesday, the KHL determined the final lineup for the upcoming All-Star Game, which will be held in Yekaterinburg in February.