From BookTok spirals to sold-out ice rinks, hockey romance has skated clean out of its niche corner of the internet. But what is it about broody men on ice that has readers absolutely losing their minds?
Six-foot-four, handsome, and captain of the hockey team seems to be a recurring description of many romance novels’ main love interests.
In a lot of them, you will find that they are also rich, perhaps even cocky, if that’s your thing. But the hockey detail seems to be non-negotiable.
Now, I’m not going on about field hockey, which, in the UK, is the sport we’d usually associate with the term. No. I’m talking about Canadians and Russians, skating around the ice with knives for feet and a teeny tiny puck flying across the rink too quickly to even track. This is the world of ice hockey romance.
If you were online at all earlier this year, you have probably heard of the phenomenon Heated Rivalry, an LGBTQ+ romance series adapted from Rachel Reid’s novel titled – you guessed it – Heated Rivalry.
It’s hot, it’s emotional, and (kind of) about hockey. But Heated Rivalry is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the sub-genre. A whole world of broody hockey players finding ‘the one’ exists, and romance readers have been devouring them by the dozen – long before Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander hit our screens a few months ago.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the hockey romance era came to fruition, though the ‘jock’ trope is hardly novel. Sports romances in general have always been around, especially on our screens, but perhaps just overshadowed by vampires and billionaires up until now.
According to a report from Circana BookScan, sports romance is among the fastest-growing romance subjects of 2025, recording triple-digit growth alongside romantasy.
“The athlete is the popular kid,” says Sabrina, owner of romance book shop, Of Books and Love, in Islington. “There’s all these TV shows and movies where the shy girl gets noticed by the guy who shouldn’t notice her,” she adds.
So, it’s unsurprising that this romance model eventually migrated to the page.
But the effect that the Heated Rivalry series had on the internet was unprecedented. 10.6 million viewers in the U.S. alone, with an audience increase of more than 300% by the season finale.
TikToks upon TikToks of fan-crazed analyses dissecting the show scene by scene flooded feeds for weeks. The hashtag alone has over 800,000 videos.
In one viral TikTok, someone even gave their Grandma ‘the gift of Heated Rivalry’ for Christmas, provoking a more than ecstatic reaction, to say the least. Clearly, the hockey romance obsession even transcends age boundaries.
Sabrina felt the wave first-hand. “Definitely, since Heated Rivalry, you can see a bigger interest,” she says. “It’s been like four months now, and they’re still my bestseller. Heated Rivalry and The Long Game” – the second part to Shane and Ilya’s story.
And the numbers back her up: according to Circana BookScan, Heated Rivalry book sales shot up nearly 1,000% in the week of the show’s premiere alone, topping multiple bestseller lists around the world.
But it’s not just sports romance: “It’s queer sports romance,” Sabrina explains. “That’s something people are reading even more.” In fact, January 2026 saw LGBTQ+ romance print sales surge to over 200,000 units.
Many of those customers arrive mid-spiral, fresh from a weekend of bingeing the series. “I have people who come and are like ‘do you have something like Heated Rivalry?’” she says, amused at the chokehold the show has people in. “They’ve watched the show, decided to read the book, and then they want more.”
With Elle Kennedy’s Off Campus – another hockey romance series – headed to Prime Video in May, Sabrina suspects the cycle is about to repeat itself. “You have the fan base of Elle Kennedy. They’ve already read everything. But the TV show has the power to bring new people in.”
But like Heated Rivalry, Off Campus has been around for a while, the first book released back in 2015 – though only appearing on the New York Times bestseller list in 2025.
“It’s funny because obviously romance readers will already know about it. It’s like, hi there, welcome,” says Sabrina. So why is it gaining so much traction now?
“People are looking for these cheesy love stories in a time when the world feels so out of control,” says Sophia, a 29-year-old student who’s been reading hockey romances for the past few years.
It’s a sentiment that reflects a broader cultural shift: according to a 2023 poll by the Publishers Association, a third of people in the UK now turn to books as their primary form of escapism on a bad day – ahead of social media, and second only to television.
“I read like the whole extended Elle Kennedy series in a month,” she says, devouring nine books that are seemingly too good to put down. Clearly, hockey romances are providing a distraction, one that has the added perk of making you giggle and kick your feet like a teenager with a high school crush.
“I feel like here in the UK, it’s also because we don’t really have that [hockey] culture; it makes you travel,” says Sabrina. The escapism, then, for British readers, isn’t just romantic but rather physical. These novels, for the most part, take place in the faraway land that is North America, providing some much-needed distance from the realities of daily life.
Perhaps this is why they seem to be faring better than other sports romances. As UK readers, we’re unlikely to pick up on any sports inaccuracies in the books, like perhaps the fact that the players always seem to have all of their teeth (the one thing about hockey I know to be unlikely).
“It’s not everyday life… it makes you dream a little bit more,” explains Sabrina, making the fact that hockey is the most popular sports romance genre in her shop understandable.
As for Sophia, who grew up in the US, where hockey culture runs deep, the books have a far more personal dimension: “Hockey was really big growing up at my school, in the winter, going to games was one of the main activities we could do,” she said. “These books reminded me of those times.”
But, more than that, hockey as a backdrop is doing specific work that other romance sub-genres simply cannot. On Reddit’s r/RomanceBooks discussion, arguments for why hockey is so popular have been popping up for years.
Some have concluded it is thanks to growing up with The Mighty Ducks, another redditor jokingly pointed out “hockey player butts,” but many reach the same conclusion that the sport’s physicality does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to trope writing.
The fights, body checks, and blood on the ice create a kind of extreme masculinity. These men arrive in the narrative almost as caricatures of toughness, which makes unravelling that testosterone-fuelled persona all the more satisfying to read.
Sophia puts it well: “hockey players have always been portrayed as these traditional tough masculine men, so when you get to see that but also unlock a more vulnerable side of them – maybe something you’ve only dreamed of – it personifies them.”
Sabrina echoes this from behind the till: “Hockey is such an aggressive sport. The girl thinks they’re going to be mean and aggressive, but then they have a soft side they can’t show on the rink.”
The fantasy, then, is less about the sport itself (shocker) and more about what the sport represents – an embodiment of masculinity only a ‘special’ someone gets to chip away.
Is that the dream, then? To peel back the layers of a misunderstood hockey player, with – conveniently – the body of a Greek God and find someone genuinely sweet and emotionally intelligent (with – have I mentioned – the body of a Greek God).
It seems, then, that the bar is low, but not at all surprising. You only have to watch the first ten minutes of Louis Theroux’s Manosphere to know that toxic masculinity is on the rise.
And so, these ‘book boyfriends’ (a TikTok term for the love interests in romance novels) are a sort of antithesis to the kind of men readers may have dealt with both online and in real life.
“They are breaking down the barriers of hypermasculinity,” Sophia puts simply, providing a more fulfilling romantic fantasy, it seems, than the real-life dating pool.
But the genre doesn’t escape without scrutiny. Sophia is candid about its contradictions: “There is definitely a normalisation of some misogyny in these books – the boys as ‘players’ on the ice and in dating, treating women poorly – something I wouldn’t stand for in my own life but for some reason continue reading.”
The same books offering an antidote to hypermasculinity frequently indulge its most familiar tropes – possessiveness dressed up as protectiveness, jealousy reframed as passion, and a recurring cast of female characters who exist largely to soften men who probably need therapy more than a girlfriend.
There is also a distinct lack of diversity that sits uncomfortably against the genre’s supposed progressive pretensions. Ice hockey is commonly known to be one of the whitest professional sports in the world, with 90% of players in the NHL being white, as of 2022. And the novels reflect that without apology.
“Most of these men are depicted as hetero white men who go to elite schools,” says Sophia, the setting providing convenient cover for an absence of POC main characters that many readers have begun to call out.
Which makes one detail about the upcoming Off Campus adaptation quietly significant. Tucker – one of the series’ beloved ensemble and the central love interest of the fourth book, The Goal – has been cast as Jalen Thomas Brooks, a man of colour, departing from the red-headed character readers will know from the page. Whilst only a single casting decision, it may be the exact kind of assist the sub-genre needs for its books to follow suit.
With this upcoming release, it’s safe to say that hockey romance is showing no signs of retreating to the niche corner of the internet it came from.
Sabrina predicts it could be “even bigger than it is right now” – a new wave of readers tumbling down the rabbit hole, emerging blinking on the other side and making a beeline for their nearest romance bookshop.
The impact, though, has already stretched well beyond the bookshelf. SeatGeek reported a 24% spike in NHL tickets sold during the week of Heated Rivalry’s season one finale.
Even in London, fans have managed to track down the few clubs that play, like the Streatham RedHawks, who have noticed a spike in ticket sales since the show, even selling out three weekends in a row.
Sophia draws a comparison to Formula One’s unlikely cultural renaissance after Drive to Survive landed on Netflix – a male-dominated world suddenly flooded with fans who came for the storylines and stayed for the sport.
In fact, according to Nielsen Sports, Drive to Survive generated over 360,000 new F1 fans in the US alone in just one year, with female viewership representing 41% of the sport’s global fanbase, as of 2025, compared to around 20% before 2019. Hockey, it seems, is having its own version of that moment, one paperback at a time.
So, the hockey romance endures. What started as a BookTok phenomenon has become a cultural force powerful enough to sell out bookshops, fill ice rinks, and apparently delight grandmothers on Christmas morning.
At its core, the appeal is disarmingly simple: a six-foot-four man with anger management issues who’s really just saved all his softness for you.
Featured image by Tony Schnagel via Pexels.