The first vice-president of the Uzbekistan Ice Hockey Federation Bahodir Gafurov in a recent interview admitted the possibility of creating an Asian Hockey League. Clubs from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Japan, Korea, and China can take part in it.

He also mentioned that the idea has been under consideration for the last year and a half, and negotiations are extremely productive. IIHF Vice-President Aivaz Omorkanov is also very active in this direction

Talks about the creation of the Asian Hockey League began back in 2014. The KHL leadership planned to create a tournament with the participation of two Korean, two Japanese, two Chinese and two Russian teams. However, the plans failed to materialize. Over the past years, different teams from the Asian region have played in the second strongest division of the country – the VHL: “Humo” (Uzbekistan), “Saryarka” (Kazakhstan), “Tseng Tou” (China), “Torpedo” (Kazakhstan), “Nomad” (Kazakhstan), “Kunlun Heilongjiang” (China), “ORDZHI” (PRC), “KRS-BSU” (PRC)

At the moment, the Chinese club “Kunlun” and the Kazakh “Barys” are playing in the strongest hockey championship of the Eurasia

To conclude, creation of the Asian Hockey League is an extremely difficult process. The main problem for such competitions is the regular crossing of state borders between countries. Perhaps in the foreseeable future we will see its solution