How much time do you have? Ha!
Well first we have a very different set of owner and you can see the clear gap between the 'top' or 'arena' teams:
Sheffield
Belfast
Nottingham
Cardiff
and then you have the rest who basically scrape by each year, looking for a decent run (like Manchester the other season) to keep the hardcore fan base they rely on happy enough to keep comming. A blog by some lady who runs the website 'cat's whiskers'
Bums on Seats – The 2020 Instalment does a decent job at highlighting the worrying numbers for some teams. Now sure, 1000/2000 fans per game is great, but when we are looking at the costs involved in EIHL hockey it starts getting scary.
How are teams like Manchester, Dundee ect surviving when they have to pay for up to 14 import players, their house, car, expenses and then their actual inflated wages! It must be the finest of fine lines - yet in other compareable countries like France for example the teams seems to be much more stable and the league as a whole is MUCH better organisned.
Which then brings me to the age old debate about development. We all know that the National Ice Hockey League or the previous English Premier League are not true development leagues, they are only in name. Plus the gap between your average guy paying to play for his local NIHL team and the EIHL (imports who have had years of training in the best hockey countries on earth) is far to big and then you end up with your token Local Brit player who has to sit on the bench and waste away at any talent he might have had to begin with. So then you have the actual 'development league' saying "hey! we don't want the EIHL to just take these players we've worked all these years on for free!" and then you get the EIHL saying "development is nothing to do with us, there aren't enough good local players so we need to keep bringing in more and more foreign ones" and the cycle continues.
Personally I don't blame the EIHL for the development hell the UK hockey world is in, they consider themselves an 'entertainment league' and have stated many times so, that's great, but only a handful of teams can actually provide 'entertainment'. Some teams ask for £18 per ticket - that is not cheap when you consider traveling to and from, food, drink, merchandise for what is effectively a very very average level of US Minor league hockey on display!
My opinion is let the 'top/arena' teams do as they want, let them make a 4 team full import 'entertainment' league to keep the fans happy, fill their arenas and 'improve' the product on display and let the others drop their, what I consider the UK hockeys natural level, and go to the NIHL or whatever league is going to fill the gap for the eventual fall out from the EIHL.
My thoughts are my own.