Hotels for Spengler Cup 2026

Six teams, including invited clubs from across Europe alongside Swiss sides, gather for a midwinter tournament played over consecutive days rather than a single fixture. Crowds pack the open-air rink wrapped in scarves and blankets, with the cold as much a part of the occasion as the hockey itself. Locals treat it as a fixed point of the festive calendar, arriving straight from Boxing Day lunches to fill the terraces. Standing room and the outdoor setting give it a rougher, more communal feel than an indoor arena tie.

The Spengler Cup is the oldest invitational ice hockey tournament in the world, first played in 1923 at the instigation of Dr Carl Spengler, a Davos physician who wanted to use sport to help reunite nations divided by the First World War. Four teams contested that inaugural tournament — Berlin, Vienna, HC Davos and Oxford University, whose side was largely made up of Canadian students — and it was Oxford who won the first Spengler Cup, beating the two German-speaking clubs on home Swiss ice.

The tournament was played outdoors for more than fifty years before moving into the town's indoor rink in 1978, and it has run almost every Christmas since, interrupted only by the Second World War and, more recently, the Covid-19 pandemic. Little else about it has changed: a small Alpine town, a handful of invited clubs, and one of the longest unbroken traditions in club ice hockey anywhere in the world.

Long known as the Vaillant Arena and renamed the zondacrypto Arena in 2024, this compact rink in the Swiss Alpine resort of Davos has been the sole home of the Spengler Cup since the tournament moved indoors in 1978. HC Davos play here year-round, but for six days every Christmas the small town fills with hockey fans from across Europe.

Davos is better known for skiing and the World Economic Forum, with cable cars up to the Parsenn and Jakobshorn slopes nearby. Staying centrally puts the rink, the shops and the mountain lifts within easy reach.