From Glendale to Global: How 32 NHL Franchises Conquered the World One Escrow Check at a Time
Icebound Empire: How 32 NHL Teams Quietly Became the World’s Most Expensive Export
By the time the Zamboni’s final lap glistens like a freshly minted credit card, most spectators have already forgotten that the National Hockey League is less a North American pastime than an accidental global franchise. Yes, the rinks are still refrigerated with the same 1950s technology that once cooled Eisenhower’s martinis, yet the NHL’s reach now stretches from Vladivostok boardrooms to Singaporean sports bars that can’t tell a blue line from a mood ring.
Thirty-two clubs—named after everything from 18th-century military defeats to extinct megafauna—are collectively worth US $40 billion, a figure that comfortably exceeds the GDP of every Caribbean nation except the one laundering the TV rights. How did a league that still thinks Celsius is a communist plot become such a stealth superpower? Simple: it sells what every other export lacks—ritualized tribal violence wrapped in a salary cap.
Europeans pretend to scoff at the “narrow” North American game while quietly binge-watching it on illegal streams. The Stockholm stockbroker who once dismissed hockey as “ice-soccer for lumberjacks” now owns a Vegas Golden Knights jersey because diversification means never having to say you’re sorry. Meanwhile, Russian oligarchs treat NHL prospect pools like offshore accounts: draft a teenager at 18, park him in North America until sanctions thaw, then flip him for a London flat.
Asia is the newest mark. Beijing’s state broadcaster still airs Maple Leaf games on tape delay, mainly for the schadenfreude of watching Toronto lose in new time zones. The league’s digital team, apparently mistaking Weibo for a dating app, once greeted Chinese fans with “Good luck getting up at 4 a.m. to watch losers in pajamas.” Somehow, viewership climbed 300%. Nothing sells like self-loathing at scale.
The global cash has produced some marvelously absurd side effects. The Arizona Coyotes—whose arena saga reads like a Beckett play performed by city planners—now draw more fans in Prague preseason games than in Glendale, proving that existential dread travels well. Conversely, Montreal’s Bell Centre has become a pilgrimage site for Parisian hipsters who believe Carey Price’s glove hand explains Quebec separatism better than any referendum.
Labor, too, has gone multinational. Swedes, Finns, and Swiss glide alongside Saskatchewan wheat farmers, all bonded by the same escrow deductions that make Marx look prescient. The league’s latest collective bargaining agreement was translated into seven languages, each version losing a little more hope than the last. When the pandemic paused play, 17 countries closed their borders to NHLers; the only passport welcomed everywhere was the one labeled “elite offensive upside.”
And then there are the geopolitics. Washington Capitals fans now cheer a Moscow-born captain who once posed with a pro-Putin banner; Los Angeles supporters wave Ukrainian flags at the same rink where Slava Voynov once lifted the Stanley Cup. The cognitive dissonance is so pure it could power the league’s carbon-heavy charter flights. Commissioner Gary Bettman, a man who pronounces “international incident” as “untapped revenue stream,” recently floated outdoor games in Riyadh—because nothing says “hockey tradition” like a desert sunset and sportswashing money.
Yet for all the cynicism, the product works. When Finland won Olympic gold in Beijing, half the roster promptly flew back to NHL benches, proving that nationalism is merely a loaner jersey. Kids in Lagos play ball hockey wearing Edmonton Oilers toques despite never having seen ice outside a cocktail. Even the climate crisis cooperates: shorter winters mean backyard rinks melt earlier, so fans migrate indoors to pay arena prices for the nostalgia they can no longer freeze.
So the next time some smug European insists football is the world’s game, remind him that only hockey offers the exquisite spectacle of billionaires, bureaucrats, and bruised gladiators sliding across a shrinking sheet of ice—literally and metaphorically. The NHL may never rival soccer’s reach, but it has perfected something far more lucrative: exporting the illusion that somewhere, the surface is still cold enough to skate on our sins.
