Rinks Per Country

I recently found an IIHF archived article about the number of rinks within each of the countries that take part in the world championship tournaments. So I thought I would have a look and compare the number of facilities the UK has to its world ranking neighbours. Team GB are ranked as the 29th best country in the ice hockey world so I looked at the five teams that sit immediately above us and the five that currently sit below us in the official standings.

According to the IIHF survey the UK has forty four indoor venues all capable of holding hockey games.

Teams above GB:

Croatia - 2 Indoor rinks, 3 Outdoor
China - 18 Indoor rinks, 9 Outdoors
Romania - 4 Indoor rinks, 17 Outdoors
Lithuania - 3 Indoors, 2 Outdoors
Netherlands - 15 Indoors, 0 Outdoors

Teams below GB:

Serbia - 3 Indoor, 1 Outdoors
Bulgaria - 3 Indoors, 0 Outdoors
Korea - 3 Indoors. 13 Outdoors
Australia - 20 Indoors, 0 Outdoors
Israel - 1 Indoors, 0 Outdoors

Some interesting and surprising results there and I think one way of looking at the survey is that GB is very obviously not making full use of the facilities that we have in place. The IIHF say the UK has more rinks than Austria, Ukraine, Norway and Denmark but every one of those teams are well above us in the world rankings. Those teams are completely out of our league but surely a big part of their kids playing development comes from having good, safe training facilities in place for them to learn the game?. The UK has plenty of those!!!. We definitely have more places for players to train than our nearest standings rivals so why do we struggle to beat them?. Obviously their are more reasons as to why Team GB are sitting 29th in the world, probably the biggest reason being poor coaching and the lack of competitive ice time for our guys. The cost of the game, equipment wise also hurts us too and probably puts alot of potential new players off the sport. One thing that is certain though is that we can't blame the lack of ice pads as a reason why we are behind some of the countries that we haven beaten in previous world championships.

Some other info

Canada - 3000 Indoor, 11000 Outdoor
USA - 1800 Indoor, 300 Outdoor
Russia - 142 Indoor, 3 Outdoor
Czech Rep -152 Indoor, 22 Outdoor

The survey itself just over a year old so a few of those numbers might be a little wrong today but not by much (outside of Russia that is). Maybe two or three facilities at most have been added to each of the countries but realistically it wont be must more than that.
Anyway I thought it would be interesting to share the IIHFs findings....