2028 World Cup TV Rights

What do Calgary, Edmonton and Prague have in common? To the average hockey fan, perhaps very little.

But in 2028, the NHL will stage the next iteration of the eight-country ice hockey World Cup in those three cities. It will give the League a globally-dynamic entity wholly owned and operated by the NHL and not the Swiss-based IIHF.

Of note, the last time the NHL held the World Cup was in 2016 in Toronto. Interestingly, Team Canada (captained by Sidney Crosby) won in the final over Team Europe (a team of players from Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Switzerland).

What makes the 2028 announcement most interesting is having a North American sports league announce a major multi-game special event with no matchups scheduled in the U.S. and some of the contests played in Europe. In addition, the games will not automatically be slated for the NHL’s regular domestic broadcast partners (ESPN, TNT Sports and Rogers Communications' Sportsnet) or the League’s European carriers.

Instead, the tournament will be up for grabs, a concept that just might, based on the excitement of the recent Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, deliver frenzied bidding by streaming partners such as Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Hulu or YouTube.

Since the stated expectation (by NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman) was that the League would start a bidding process for the World Cup broadcasting/streaming rights immediately (i.e., in 2026), the existence of the 2028 Cup may serve as bait for the NHL’s upcoming media negotiations.

Why? Because the NHL’s current deal with ESPN and TNT Sports reportedly ends following the completion of the 2027-28 NHL season. That would make bundling the 2028 World Cup plus a multi-year deal for the League’s U.S. rights extremely attractive.

Not lost on many hockey aficionados is the reality that for the fifth straight year, the NHL will play at least four games in Europe during the 2026-27 season. Two games are already set for Finland (Nov. 12 & 14, 2026) between the Carolina Hurricanes and Seattle Kraken at Helsinki’s Veikkaus Arena and two tilts will take place at the PSD Bank Dome in Düsseldorf, Germany (Dec. 18 & 20, 2026) featuring the Ottawa Senators and Chicago Blackhawks.

Norm O’Reilly is the dean of the University of New England’s College of Business and Partner with the T1 Agency. Rick Burton is the David B. Falk Emeritus Professor of Sport Management at Syracuse University and co-host of The NIL Clubhouse on Spotify and Apple. They are co-authors of Business the NHL Way, published by the University of Toronto Press.