The host nations and cities of many World Championship tournaments are being determined at the IIHF Annual Congress in Stockholm on Friday. The biggest prize was the 2029 World Championship, which has been awarded to Bratislava and Košice, Slovakia. However, Slovakia and its capital city will host an elite-level championship in 2026 as well.
According to the Slovak Ice Hockey Association website, the 2026 IIHF U-18 World Championship will take place in Bratislava and Piešťany. Slovakia had already been named the host nation of the 2026 U-18 Worlds in 2023. Vladimír Dzurilla Arena – where games in Bratislava will be played – and the arena in Piešťany are of similar capacity and a primary venue was not explicitly named.
According to a tweet from Slovak television reporter Patrik Mitas, the tournament will run from April 22 to May 2, 2026 and Slovakia will play in the group based in Piešťany. This would make sense, as Piešťany is the permanent home of the Slovak U-18 national team, which plays in Slovakia's second-tier semi-professional men's league.
If no changes are made then, according to the order of finish of the 2025 U-18 Worlds, the groups will be distributed accordingly:
Piešťany Group: Canada, Slovakia, Finland, Latvia, Norway
Bratislava Group: Sweden, USA, Germany, Czechia, Denmark
Vladimír Dzurilla Arena previously hosted the 2020 IIHF U18 Women’s World Championship. Piešťany, whose arena has had several names over the years for sponsorship reasons, has hosted numerous international hockey events over the years – most notably the 1987 World Junior Championship, which featured a bench-clearing brawl between Canada and the Soviet Union in the last game of the tournament, resulting in the disqualifications of both teams.
Bratislava is the capital city of Slovakia with a population of about 475,000, located in the southwestern corner of the country adjacent to the Austrian and Hungarian borders. Piešťany is a spa town of about 28,000, located approximately 80 km northeast of Bratislava.
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