Ice hockey is considered as a marginal sports, there is around 2 000 000 registered ice hockey players in whole world. If we compare that to football (soccer) witch has over 265 000 000 players. Football has around 132.5 times more registered players than ice hockey. Ice hockey is mainly played in North America and Nordic Europe. Ice hockey is small sports mainly because of the ice, it is weird thing in many places so as skating. Also ice hockey is expensive sports with all equipments and license costs. Of course many other countries do have ice hockey teams and players, but still the game is so small that you basically can’t count them in. Giving honourable mention to Kenyan ice hockey team
Ice hockey has many different leagues in Europe and in North America. Biggest ones are NHL in USA and Canada, and KHL in Russia, China, Finland, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Slovakia and Latvia, but mainly it is Russian league. Then there is high level European leagues like Finnish Liiga, Swedish Hockey League (SHL),