By the early 2010s, both the Belgian Hockey League and the Dutch Eredivisie were in trouble. Belgian teams had bled across the border into the Dutch competition years earlier, then back, then forward again, and by 2014 the Eredivisie nearly collapsed into a four-team rump after the Dordrecht Lions dropped down a division and Eindhoven Kemphanen threatened to walk. The Geleen Eaters needed to raise roughly sixty thousand euros just to play their season. Eventually Eindhoven relented, five teams took the ice, and the federations of both nations stopped pretending the problem would solve itself. On June 12, 2015, they announced the merger. The BeNe League was born from necessity, not ambition.

The first BeNe League season ran with sixteen clubs split into two divisions of eight, each balanced with five Dutch teams and three Belgian. Twenty-two regular-season games per team, three points for a win, two for an overtime win, one for an overtime loss. The top four from each division advanced to the playoffs. Quarterfinals were two-legged ties; semis and final were best-of-three. The league handed out a single overall trophy, plus separate National Champion honours to whichever Dutch and Belgian sides survived longest in the bracket. It was a competition that knew its place: small, regional, fiercely contested in arenas that rarely held more than a few thousand fans.

Among the founding members were the Heerenveen Flyers, the Frisian town's contribution to a sport that has to compete here with speed skating, sailing, and football for ice time, lake time, and pitch time. Heerenveen sits inside a culture that treats winter sports as something close to religion, and the Thialf arena nearby is a temple to long-track speed skating, but the Flyers are something different: a small ice hockey club in a province better known for the eleven-city skating tour. The team has played through league crises, name changes, and the constant turnover of import players who arrive for a season or two from North America and central Europe and then move on.

On March 13, 2016, GIJS Groningen joined from the second tier and briefly pushed the league to seventeen clubs, but the Dordrecht Lions dropped back down soon after, returning the league to sixteen. The bigger change came in 2023, when two German clubs were admitted. With Germans on the schedule, the BeNe label no longer quite fit, and in 2024 the competition was renamed the Central European Hockey League. Thirteen teams now contest the season: six Dutch, five Belgian, two German. Each plays the others twice over twenty-four regular-season games. The top eight enter playoffs with best-of-three rounds and a best-of-five final. The name is aspirational. The hockey, in the rinks where it is played, is real.