Germany and France will co-host 2017 World Championship

It was a lot of work for the federation representatives of Germany and France but in the end their bid to host the 2017 World Championship together convinced the delegates of the 2013 IIHF Annual Congress. In the end the German-French bid received 63 votes by the delegates while the Danes and Latvians who also had a lot of good arguments for their bid received 45 votes.

For Cologne it will be already the third World Championship as hosts after 2001 and 2010 when their partner cities were Hannover and Nürnberg and later Mannheim. For Paris it will be the second top division World Championship after 1951. Both countries are no strangers to top quality international hockey. For Germany it will be already the 8th World Championship and they also were hosts of the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The French will have only their second World Championship but they hosted the 1924 Winter Olympics in Champonix, the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble and the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville.  

Cologne which has a top modern indoor venue called Lanxess Arena with a capacity of 18,500 which makes it one of the biggest venues of such kind in Europe will be the main host. Paris will host one of the two groups in the preliminary round and the respective two quarterfinals which will be played within the groups. The arena in Paris is called Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy and has a current capacity of 13,362 for ice hockey games according to the IIHF but by 2015 the capacity will be extended to 15,000 for ice hockey. Although there is no team in the highest French club competition, Ligue Magnus, in Paris, in recent years the arena in Bercy was host of the national cup competition - Coupe de France - and always sold out.

One of the reasons for the decision in afvour of Cologne ans Paris despite the top organization of tournaments in these cities was that you only need three hours by train or 75 minutes by plane to get from one city to the other while Denmark and Latvia are relatively far away from each other.

The organization teams in Cologne and Paris aim to get a lot more fans into the arenas than it was the case in 2012 and 2013 in Helsinki and Stockholm and want to have moderate ticket prices. Especially in Sweden the spectator numbers had been incredibly low with sometimes not more than 1,000 fans in the arenas during top games.

There were rumours about a possible bid by Latvia (hosts last time in 2006) for the 2018 World Championship while Switzerland (hosts in 2009) and Slovakia (hosts in 2011) showed interest in the 2019 tournament. 

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