Then why did someone say earlier you don't have an outdoor stadium big enough for a 50K hockey game? Yes I know your population and the Nordic countries. It's really amazing how well Sweden does in international competitions considering how small they are.
I said 70k. I'm not sure we'd be close to able to fill a 50k hockey game. The problem is that hockey is not very popular in the big cities, and in Stockholm the fanbase is divided between 2 teams. If those 2 teams were up against eachother, and the arena was filled with football fans cheering on their hockey sister team, then maybe. The cities where hockey is super popular doesn't have even close to the population to fill a 50k stadium.
I don't follow soccer very closely but I know they have done very well in previous World Cups. I don't know why they didn't qualify this year. Also in both the Olympics and Worlds Sweden has done great in hockey.
We had basically as hard of a qualification for World cup as you can get. First of all, Europe world cup qualification is
significantly harder than anywhere else in the world. First we had Germany in our group (only the group winners gets directly qualified), and Germany has arguably the best national team in the world. Then we drew Portugal as the playoff match, which is notorious for either being really really good, or really really bad. Sadly we got matched against them when they were playing their good football, not like they did in the actual world cup.
Since you are from Sweden here is a question for you. Which is bigger in Sweden, hockey or soccer?
Football is significantly more popular than hockey in Sweden. That's not saying hockey isn't a popular sport, but it's still not a contest as to which one is more popular.
Hockey is number 1 sport in most cities in the northern half of Sweden, but not many people actually live there, it's mostly very small towns/villages. The big cities are mainly dominated by football.
This would be a decent ranking:
1: European football (European leagues, champions league etc) 2: Swedish football league 3: Swedish hockey league 4: Everything else (NHL is not on the radar at all).
There has been some threads about it in the swedish section which you could browse through if interested:
http://hfboards.mandatory.com/showthread.php?t=1610221
http://hfboards.mandatory.com/showthread.php?t=1540425