How student hockey became a 70-million-crown business in Prague

What began in 2017 as a bit of student fun on the ice has turned into a sports business with an annual turnover of around 70 million Czech crowns. Tomáš Hlaváč and Vilém Franěk, founders of the University Hockey League (ULLH), have built a project that in eight seasons has become the sixth most attended sports league in the Czech Republic.

The idea dates back to 2014, when Franěk and Hlaváč, both hockey players themselves, noticed that Czech university teams took part in a European student league but lacked any systematic development or connection between clubs. So the student duo decided, quite literally in punk fashion, to launch their own tournament. Franěk, a graduate of the Faculty of Medicine at Charles University, founded the team Akademici Plzeň, while Hlaváč co-founded the CTU Engineers Prague club and the “Battle for Prague” tournament.

The league's first official match — between ZČU Akademici Plzeň and VŠTE Black Dogs Budějovice — took place in September 2019. The competition has grown considerably since then: last season saw 168 matches played, drawing 102,000 spectators, while a record-breaking “Battle for Prague” attracted 9,319 fans.

The eighth season, which kicked off on 21 September, brought another leap forward: the league expanded from 12 to 16 teams in two divisions, moved to the Oneplay Sport channel, and launched its own platform, Unihokej.tv, plus the “Study and Play” project and the UniLife app — the biggest investment in the project's history.

According to Tomáš Hlaváč, the league's executive director and co-founder, the tournament's total budget across all clubs today stands at around 70 million crowns a year. “We put in about five million crowns as the initial investment in the UniLife app — the single largest investment in the league's history,” he says. The clubs themselves are run mostly by students, with young general managers handling budgets worth millions of crowns.

Franěk is not afraid to take risks: “We can easily pay several million for a trip to America that could theoretically end in failure, because we believe it will take us to a new level.” Besides the hockey project, Franěk works in marketing and online projects — his agency Close Friends has been behind the communication campaigns for the shows “Mikyrž” and “Zrádci,” among others.

Hlaváč believes one of the secrets to the league's success is that both founders worked in other fields at the same time. For the past ten years he has held management positions at international IT and engineering companies. “We applied all that know-how to university hockey. Success isn't an accident — it's the result of having a team full of people who learned a great deal outside the hockey world and are now bringing that experience back into the project,” he explains. The turning point came two years ago, when Hlaváč decided to dedicate himself fully to the league as executive director and start building a bigger team.

The road was not an easy one: the first season was cut short by COVID, and the league itself shut down the second season after just two rounds. It wasn't until the 2021/22 season that things came together fully, when teams from Pardubice and Ústí joined and Kaufland became the general partner. Olomouc later dropped out of the tournament, but the Ostrava derby still drew 9,100 spectators. In the 2024/25 season, VŠE, ČZU and UNIted HK joined the league, bringing the number of clubs to twelve, ČSOB became the general partner, and total attendance reached almost 80,000.

From the very beginning, the founders have looked to the American college sports association, the NCAA, as their model. Under the slogan “One Path, Two Goals,” the league aims to combine top-level sport with university study: players must meet academic requirements and retain amateur status.