This is not a ranking of who has the best team.
Nor is it about the nicest arena, the biggest budget or the most Swedish championship titles in the history books.
We have travelled around Swedish hockey country for years. Sat in the arenas, walked through the towns, listened to the crowds and considered a question that rarely appears in the standings:
Where would you actually want to play hockey?
We are weighing three factors. Local hockey interest matters most. Then the crowd. And finally, what life around hockey appears to be like for a player.
Entirely scientific? Absolutely not.
More fun than expected goals? Guaranteed.
1. Oskarshamn
Yes, we are biased. It is more or less in the mission statement.
But the local interest is also slightly mad. In Oskarshamn, a great deal revolves around IK. You notice it when things are going well, and even more when they are going badly.
For a young player who wants to focus on hockey, that is a good thing. For a player with a family, it is also a good place to land. Child-friendly, close to everything and no need to spend half your life sitting in traffic.
Are you 24, childless and with a partner who wants big-city life? Then the sales pitch gets weaker.
The municipality has also done its best over the years to preserve Be-Ge as a living museum of Swedish ice-rink architecture.
But a sold-out Be-Ge still ranks highly for us, no matter which Swedish league we compare it with. Even the crowd’s baseline level is good.
Hockey interest: 10/10. Crowd: 9/10. Player life: 8/10.
2. Leksand
There is the hockey team.
And then there is also a municipality around it.
The hockey interest is enormous, and as a player it must be difficult to find an environment where more people understand exactly what you are doing. Hockey people everywhere, history everywhere and a community that genuinely cares.
For a hockey player, it is probably brilliant.
For their partner, the question after a few months may become: *so what do we do now?*
Civilisation is not exactly around the corner.
The crowd can be excellent and the atmosphere intense. At the same time, it is a little repetitive, and the chants will not be winning any Grammys. The supporters are also spread across the country, which shows at some weekday games.
Hockey interest: 10/10. Crowd: 8/10. Player life: 7/10.
3. Modo – Örnsköldsvik
You can hardly complain about the hockey culture.
So many good players have come from the area that there is clearly something in the water. As a player, you enter an environment where the sport is taken seriously and where the knowledge extends far beyond the dressing room.
The downside is that Örnsköldsvik is where Örnsköldsvik is.
Mosquitoes in summer. Darkness in winter. A fairly small town, with an awful lot of Sweden between you and the rest of Sweden.
The crowd is good. Not always magical, but steady and knowledgeable about hockey.
Hockey interest: 9/10. Crowd: 8/10. Player life: 7/10.
4. AIK Solna
Local interest in hockey is virtually non-existent.
Those who do care, however, care for real.
And when the football supporters decide that hockey is fun, the crowd can be fantastic. When they do not, it is more middle-of-the-pack for the league.
Player life saves their position. You can live in Solna or elsewhere in Greater Stockholm and have access to things no other HockeyAllsvenskan town can compete with.
For a younger player, it can be perfect. For an older player with a family, Stockholm is less of an obvious choice unless the salary reflects it.
Hockey interest: 5/10. Crowd: 8/10. Player life: 10/10.
5. Mora
Nybro with a Dala horse.
More or less.
The difference is that Mora has fallen giant Leksand as its neighbour instead of nouveau riche event-town Kalmar.
The hockey interest is genuine and the history is there. The crowd, however, is not always as impressive as that level of hockey interest should allow it to be.
A good goal song makes up for some of it.
For a player, it is very clearly a hockey life. Not much else to distract you.
Hockey interest: 8/10. Crowd: 6/10. Player life: 7/10.
6. Visby/Roma
We will admit straight away that this is the hardest club to assess.
Gotland in summer? Fantastic.
Gotland in January? A bit more like northern Sweden with a sea, though without quite the same darkness and cold.
Hockey interest at this level is still new, so we will have to return in a few years and see whether it became culture or merely an event.
Player life, on the other hand, could be attractive. There are flights to Stockholm, a ferry to Nynäshamn and – most importantly of all – a ferry to the metropolis of Oskarshamn.
For players with Stockholm connections, it may be more appealing than the map initially suggests.
Hockey interest: 6/10. Crowd: 6/10. Player life: 8/10.
7. Södertälje
Not quite Stockholm.
Not quite the rest of the country either.
It is not somewhere many outsiders would spontaneously move to unless Scania or hockey gave them a reason.
The hockey interest is still considerable. The problem is that an impressive amount of the energy seems to be spent being unhappy with their own hockey team.
Maybe that is precisely why SSK never quite manage to put it all together.
The crowd has never stood out much when we have been there, even if its reputation stubbornly insists that it can be very good.
Hockey interest: 8/10. Crowd: 6/10. Player life: 6/10.
8. Vimmerby
A cute little town in the heart of Astrid Lindgren country.
It is not particularly close to anything, which at least makes it easy to focus on hockey.
For a player who needs a big role, ice time and an opportunity to develop, there is a clear case for Vimmerby.
The crowd, however, is strangely quiet. A small arena should be a free amplifier. It ought to be possible to generate considerably more noise here than we have heard.
Hockey interest: 7/10. Crowd: 5/10. Player life: 7/10.
9. Kalmar
An extraordinarily nondescript town from a sporting-culture perspective.
Kalmar feels more like an event town: people turn up for whatever is hot at the moment. That could be hockey, something else or a stop on the way to Öland.
It is therefore still difficult to fully buy into the idea of deep, long-term local hockey interest.
Right now, however, it is probably a fairly good place to be a hockey player. Particularly if you have no great need to be part of a century-old hockey culture and mainly want to play, develop and live comfortably.
There are also some nice houses.
Hockey interest: 5/10. Crowd: 7/10. Player life: 7/10.
10. VIK – Västerås
See Södertälje.
Only worse.
Västerås at least has hockey history and is big enough to offer a normal life outside the rink. That saves its position.
But the feeling around the hockey club falls far short of what a city of its size and history should be able to produce.
Hockey interest: 6/10. Crowd: 5/10. Player life: 7/10.
11. Almtuna – Uppsala
Hockey interest is approximately zero.
Sometimes the away following feels bigger than the home crowd. The fact that Almtuna survive at this level year after year despite the conditions is almost a greater sporting achievement than anything the team does on the ice.
Uppsala, however, is a good city.
Especially if you are a student.
Being close to Stockholm and Gävle also helps. And the small crowd that does actually turn up deserves respect for continuing to fight the good fight.
Hockey interest: 3/10. Crowd: 3/10. Player life: 9/10.
12. Nybro
Actual farmers.
That is said with a certain amount of respect.
Hockey means a great deal there, and the small arena can generate serious pressure when everything clicks.
For a player or their partner, however, Nybro is a tougher sales pitch. You can, of course, settle in favourite neighbour Kalmar and commute, if relations between the two towns allow it.
Hockey interest: 8/10. Crowd: 7/10. Player life: 3/10.
13. Östersund
Grey through and through.
But if you like fishing, mountains, outdoor life and people leaving you alone, we may well have misunderstood everything.
Hockey does not carry enough local weight to compensate for the rest in our highly unscientific model.
Hockey interest: 5/10. Crowd: 4/10. Player life: 5/10.
14. BIK Karlskoga
An excellent place to play hockey if your most important requirement is that absolutely nothing should distract you from hockey.
Karlskoga is not somewhere we long to revisit. BIK are a team we rarely look forward to facing, and the crowd has an impressive ability not to show up.
Sometimes the arena wakes up when a so-called big club comes to visit at the weekend.
At the same time, BIK have a strangely good reputation as a hockey environment, which naturally suggests that the players get something there that we in the stands are missing.
But our ranking is our ranking.
And this is where it ends.
Hockey interest: 6/10. Crowd: 4/10. Player life: 4/10.
The verdict
There are really two kinds of attractive HockeyAllsvenskan towns.
Those where hockey genuinely means something.
And those where life outside hockey is good enough to compensate for the fact that hockey does not.
Oskarshamn and Leksand win on the first count. AIK Solna and Uppsala live off the second.
The real nightmare is ending up somewhere that offers neither.
We will not name names.
Karlskoga already knows.