The SKA arena is the largest ice rink in the world.
KHL is not played at the SKA arena yet. EPA / AOP
St. Petersburg’s SKA will move to the world’s largest ice rink next season, Forbes.ru news.
The 21,452-seat SKA arena is bigger than the NHL’s biggest hall, the 21,105-seat Bell Center in Montreal.
The arena was built by Roman Rotenberg’s business partner Gennady Timochenko. Rotenberg himself works as SKA’s head coach.
According to Timochenko, the purpose of the project was to get Russia the world’s largest ice rink. He plans to make sure that the arrangement is also preserved.
– We want to have more seats than the Canadians. The project is still in progress, and we will decide on the final capacity at some point. However, if someone suddenly builds a bigger hall, we will enlarge ours even more so that it is bigger than all the others, Timochenko threatened to Sport-Express.
The SKA arena was originally supposed to be completed already in May 2023, but since the Russian national team was excluded from international tournaments, the construction site saw no need to hurry.
The construction costs of the arena have also gotten completely out of control. The original budget of 20 billion rubles has swelled by almost half: to 38.5 billion rubles.
At the moment, the ice rink is kind of in the same situation as the former Hartwall arena. It stands in St. Petersburg as an empty pledge.
Matches could already be played in the hall, and the KHL star match was already organized there. However, there are still “operational challenges” in putting the arena into use, so SKA will probably only move there to play in the spring playoffs or next fall.