The cities of Edmonton and Calgary, as well as Prague, Czechia will serve as host cities for the 2028 World Cup of Hockey. It will be the first official WCH hosted since 2016, held in Toronto. There were no 2020 or 2024 editions of the once-every-four-years tournament. The former was wiped out due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the latter was effectively replaced with the 4 Nations Face-Off in 2025.
What this means for Edmonton and its profile
The city of Edmonton just continues to own international hockey tournaments in Canada in this decade. That’s not even getting into the three (and counting) Stanley Cup Finals that Rogers Place has hosted in the 2020s. Nor is it getting into the possibility that Edmonton may host an NHL All-Star Game or Entry Draft before the calendar flips to 2030.
In addition to this WCH, Edmonton will also be hosting its third World Junior Hockey Championships of the decade at year’s end, alongside Red Deer. There’s also the Hlinka-Gretzky Cup, bi-annually held in Canada. Edmonton, as of this year, will have hosted that three times in the past eight years. And who knows, maybe something else like the IIHF-run World Hockey Championships, men’s or women’s, comes to town at some point soon.
This is the benefit of having an arena that hasn’t even turned 10 years old yet. Edmonton is now becoming such a major player on the global hockey stage in the time Rogers Place has existed. Evidently, that seems like a status this city will enjoy for many years to come.
The first time in a while Edmonton and Calgary will co-host an event
Edmonton and Calgary have rarely ever collaborated on much in the past. The rivalry between the two cities goes back pretty well to the start of the 1900s. It’s basically been a 125-year-long competition of “who is better.” To be fair, though, much of it in the last decade has had to do with Calgary trying to figure out their own arena situation. In Edmonton, Northlands Coliseum got replaced in 2016. In Calgary, several factors have contributed to a Saddledome replacement not happening until now.
With the new Scotia Place set to take over for the Saddledome next year, it allows the two cities to share tournaments of significance such as the WCH. It’s still weird to see, though. To this observer’s knowledge, the last time Edmonton and Calgary shared something like this was in 2012. That year’s World Juniors was co-hosted by the two cities. However, that also seems to be a thing of the past, if the 2027 edition is any indication.
This also comes with a caveat, in terms of game distribution. Calgary and Prague will host round-robin tournament play, while Edmonton gets the big-ticket Semifinal and Final matches. Even in the World Cup of Hockey, Calgary doesn’t see games past the first or second round.
We could see many Oilers play for their country right in our backyard
Especially with the Olympics this year, several Oilers could be considered “snubs.” Players such as Zach Hyman, Evan Bouchard, Mattias Ekholm and Kasperi Kapanen did not get to play for their national teams. Outside of Connor McDavid, the only Oilers who played in Milano-Cortina were Leon Draisaitl and Josh Samanski. While hockey in Germany is getting stronger by the minute, the list of German NHLers isn’t yet extensive.
This time around, especially if the Oilers continue their run of success, we could see the exact opposite scenario. Imagine a Semifinals of, say, Canada, Finland, Sweden and Germany. You can have as many as eight or nine Oilers suiting up for their respective nations in the city they play NHL hockey in. Now we just need Nathan MacKinnon to feed McDavid for the “golden goal.”
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