Will the 2029 IIHF World Championship be co-hosted by Budapest, Hungary and Brno, Czechia? Ideas like this get thrown around all the time, and they rarely come to fruition. But apparently, there have already been some high-level discussions on the possibility that have included Czech Ice Hockey Association president Alois Hadamczik and Hungarian Ice Hockey Federation president Zsuzsana Kolbenheyer.
“It all started with a phone call from the president of the Hungarian Ice Hockey Federation, who wanted to discuss with me the possibility of co-hosting the World Championship in 2029,” Hadamczik told the Kometa Brno website. “My reaction was that it was an excellent idea that could be combined with the new multi-purpose arena in Brno.”
A new 12,714-seat arena is scheduled to open in Brno in 2026, and it’s nearly a given that it will be used to co-host a World Championship at some point soon afterward. Brno is the second-largest city in the Czech Republic with a population of 380,000 but has been passed over in favor of Ostrava the last three times the country has hosted due to its lack of a suitable arena. At this year’s Worlds, however, issues with the aging facility in Ostrava mean that its days of hosting events at that level are probably now finished.
It seemed more likely that Brno would co-host with Prague the next time the Czechs were in line to host, but Budapest is not much farther away (205.7 km vs 326.1 km). Co-hosting with a non-Czech city would also guarantee that Brno would host the Czech team in the group stage and quarterfinals.
“Excellent fans, a new modern arena and the World Championship again in the Czech Republic in the foreseeable future, it’s a perfect combination,” said Hadamczik. “Another advantage is that Hungary does not expect us to co-organize in the future. There is an airport right in Brno, the Vienna airport is also nearby, and what’s more, it’s not far between these cities by car, so everything fits together.”
From Budapest’s perspective, they’d like to host and have a 17,000-seat arena but no suitable secondary venue in the country. Nearby cities such as Vienna, Bratislava and Košice do not offer anything on the level that Brno will soon have.
“We have a beautiful new multi-purpose arena in Budapest,” Kolbenheyer said in a statement for hokej.cz. “However, you need two rinks to host the World Championship, so we are now looking for a potential co-organizer. The Czech Ice Hockey Association and Brno have shown interest in discussing this topic with our party. We are now preparing to meet with the commission in charge of sports in our country to discuss this idea.”
Hungary has never hosted an IIHF World Championship at the elite senior level before, mostly because the team has only occasionally qualified to play in the tournament. They’re becoming more frequent and the Hungarians will play at next year’s Worlds in Sweden and Denmark, but they’ve yet to play in two consecutive years. The IIHF usually awards tournaments several years in advance to host nations they feel relatively confident will qualify on their own merits. Budapest and Ljubljana, Slovenia applied to step in and host the 2023 Worlds after they were pulled from Russia, but it didn’t happen for a variety of reasons and the tournament ended up being co-hosted by Tampere, Finland and Riga, Latvia.
“We are determined to make it happen,” said Kolbenheyer. “We were close to hosting it when the war broke out in Ukraine, but time worked against us then. Hungary is now in the elite group of the World Championship and we would like to raise the level of Hungarian hockey even more. Organizing such an event gives us the opportunity to bring more children and more fans to hockey. It is a dream that we are trying to turn into reality.”
“At this moment, I consider this idea to be very real,” said Hadamczik. “I have already discussed the situation with the executive committee of the Czech Ice Hockey Association, which is also in favor of starting to arrange the organization.”
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