Even the training matches in August gather more people in the stands than the WC hockey in Edmonton.
Ilves and Tappara opened their season on Friday in Tampere. Mika Kylmäniemi, AOP
At the same time as the Youth World Championships in Edmonton are suffering with really small audience numbers, the practice matches of the SM League that have just started also seem to attract significantly more people to the stands.
Especially in the Tampere Cup match played on Friday night between Ilves and Tappara, there were quite a lot of spectators, even though it was very nice summer weather outside the hall.
The official number of spectators in the first local game of the season was 5,168. Tappara won the match 3–2.
If you don’t see the embed, you can watch it from here.
Already the first match of the day between HPK and JYP was watched by 2,150 spectators in Tampere.
So far, the biggest crowd for a single match at the World Youth Championships has been 3,216 spectators in the match between Canada and Slovakia, which is almost 2,000 less than in the training match between Ilves and Tappara.
This is what the hall looked like in that match. If you don’t see the embed, you can watch it from here.
In most of the matches of the tournament, the number of spectators has remained below one thousand. For example, Finland’s first two matches were watched by 376 and 530 spectators.