I’d be very interested in knowing how these numbers have been attained in each country.
I wouldn’t necessarily be surprised if Finland had more practitioners than Sweden does, for example, but it’s hard to imagine that Finland would have over 10 000 more players registered with “official” teams, or whatever is the way you register players between the countries.
Hockey is, contrary to Sweden and as far as I know, the most popular sport in Finland, and my hunch is also that it’s a more viable leisure sport in more places where people live than in Sweden.
I found other numbers from 2020 stating that Sweden and Finland are more evenly situated at slightly above 70 000 registered players per country, which I think sounds about right. I also read that those 70-something thousand Swedish players are out of a group of barely 200 000 registered players of any sport. That seems like a large figure for hockey players, out of a rather small figure for the registered players in total? One guess would be that a large percentage of those who play hockey register with official teams in Sweden, whereas there’s hundreds of thousands of footballers in unofficial teams and leagues?
Since hockey is less of a pick-up sport than football, perhaps even “beer leagues” may register to receive some kind of support, but I’m not sure what to make of any of this.
What age groups are counted for the countries?
The eye sore of this list has to be the Czech Republic having more players than Russia or the Nordic countries, that just seems like a huge sign of the numbers not being attained in the same way between countries, no?