Calgary, Edmonton and Prague will be the three host cities when the World Cup of Hockey returns in February 2028, the NHL said Monday.
Scotia Place, which will be the new home of the Calgary Flames in 2027, along with Rogers Place, the home of the Edmonton Oilers, will serve as the North American venues. The O2 Arena in Prague will be the European site.
Calgary and Prague will each host seven games. Six of those contests will be in the round-robin format while the seventh game will be an elimination game. Both semifinal games and the final will be held in Edmonton.
“There is no international competition in sports that matches the passion, skill, and excitement of hockey’s best-on-best coming together to represent their countries — last year’s 4 Nations Face-Off and the recent Winter Olympics were just the latest example,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said in a statement. “We at the National Hockey League and our partners at the National Hockey League Players’ Association can’t wait to bring the World Cup of Hockey to 2028 to three spectacular venues in three cities that shine when staging big events.”
International competitions with NHL players had been part of the landscape throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but that began to change with the NHL no longer sending its players to the Olympics after the 2014 men’s tournament and hosting the last World Cup of Hockey in 2016.
That left the IIHF Men’s World Championships as the lone option for NHL players to compete in an international setting, but that also came with a caveat in that it is usually held during the Stanley Cup Playoffs, which made it difficult for every nation to attract its strongest talent for a true best-on-best tournament.
Knowing that many of the game’s current stars — such as Quinn Hughes, Cale Makar, Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon and Auston Matthews — hadn’t competed at the Olympics eventually led to the NHL and NHLPA working together to make that a reality.
Having NHL players be eligible for the Olympics also led to the creation of the 4 Nations Face-Off, which was played in February 2025 with teams from Canada, Finland, Sweden and the United States.
That’s when the league announced it would be establishing a calendar that allows players to participate in international tournaments every two years with the Olympics and the World Cup of Hockey.
The World Cup of Hockey was created in 1996, replacing the Canada Cup. The first tournament had an eight-team field that was eventually won by the United States. It resumed in 2004 with Canada winning what would be the first of two consecutive World Cups after again winning the 2016 tournament.
