The 2010 IIHF World Championship was Germany's first major hockey tournament since the format moved to sixteen nations, and the German federation went big. The main venues were Lanxess Arena in Cologne and SAP Arena in Mannheim, the country's two largest indoor rinks. The opener was placed in Gelsenkirchen's Veltins-Arena, a football stadium with a retractable pitch, so they could put more people in seats than any indoor rink could hold. Four nations had bid to host the tournament. After Slovakia and Sweden withdrew to chase later years, Germany beat Belarus 89 votes to 18 at the IIHF congress in Zurich in 2005. Five years later, 548,788 tickets were sold across the tournament, second only to the 2004 championship in the Czech Republic at the time.

The preliminary round produced upsets in every group. Norway beat the Czech Republic in Group C, prompting an angry public statement from Jaromir Jagr about Czech stars who had skipped the tournament; the column it triggered on IIHF.com had to be taken down after IIHF president Rene Fasel intervened. In Group B, Switzerland beat second-seeded Canada for the first time in the history of the world championships. Group D was a chain reaction: Germany beat the United States, Denmark beat Finland, Denmark beat the United States, and the Americans were sent into the relegation round for the first time since 2003. Finland topped the group. By the end of the preliminary stage, almost every favorite had lost at least one game it expected to win.

Germany's quarterfinal against Switzerland in Mannheim on 18 May became the tournament's signature game. The Swiss outshot the Germans 41 to 27, hit the post twice in the scoreless first period, and pressured Dennis Endras in the German net for sixty minutes. The only goal of the game came midway through the second period when Philip Gogulla scored on the power play. Endras, who would be named tournament MVP a few days later, held the one-goal lead through the third. When the buzzer went, Germany was in a world championship semifinal for the first time since 1953. A brawl broke out at the final horn between Swiss defenseman Timo Helbling and German assistant coach Ernst Hofner, both of whom were suspended. The IIHF christened the game The Miracle at Mannheim. Germany then lost a tight semifinal to Russia, 2-1, on a Pavel Datsyuk goal with 1:50 left.

The gold-medal game on 23 May at Lanxess Arena was a rematch of nothing: Russia and the Czech Republic had never met in a world championship final before, although the USSR and Czechoslovakia had been rivals across the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. The match exploded twenty seconds in when Jakub Klepis took a pass from Jaromir Jagr and scored on a Russian defense caught out of position. Russia took over possession for most of the first period; veteran Sergei Fedorov hit a post. In the second, Karel Rachunek fed Tomas Rolinek on a 3-on-2 and the puck went in off Rolinek's skate, ruled good. In the third, Alexei Emelin was tossed for clipping Jagr; Jagr did not return. Datsyuk pulled Russia within a goal with thirty-five seconds left on a 5-on-3. Tomas Vokoun held the line. The final score was 2-1. Czech president Vaclav Klaus and IIHF president Rene Fasel handed out the gold medals.

The 2010 worlds drew a cumulative television audience in over 100 countries and was, at the time, the most-watched IIHF tournament in history. The opening game in Gelsenkirchen still holds the record for the largest indoor ice hockey crowd ever assembled. The host nation finished fourth, its best result since the modern sixteen-nation format, and Dennis Endras became the first German player ever named tournament MVP. Hall of Fame inductions in Cologne added Vladimir Krutov, Arturs Irbe, Dieter Hegen, Rickard Fagerlund and Riikka Nieminen-Valila to the IIHF's permanent record. Wayne Gretzky, Vladislav Tretiak and Erich Kuhnhackl served as ambassadors. The official song, somehow, was Scooter's Stuck on Replay; the mascot, somehow, was Urmel on Ice, a stop-motion puppet from a 1969 German children's series. It was, by every measure that the IIHF cared about, an enormous success.