If you walked into any bookshop at all in the past year, you might have noticed a rise in a certain genre being displayed. The genre that likes to put cartoon-ish art of the two most generic characters you’ve ever seen on the cover, a background of an ice rink framing them. Hockey romances have swept the market this year, but what exactly is it about them that draws readers in?
Icebreaker
Due to BookTok and Bookstagram (online communities for readers to share their bookish passions) the hockey/figure skating romance IceBreaker blew up in 2023. Hannah Grace’s romcom drew a lot of controversy, critiques about ‘empty characters’ and ‘explicit smut’ both intriguing and repulsing readers. It is in no way the first hockey romance to have been written, but it made waves in a way that others had yet to achieve. Whether you liked the book or not, it paved a way for a specific market that was very quickly filled.
Heated Rivalry
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you have probably heard of Heated Rivalry, a gay romance between two rival hockey stars. First published in 2019 by Rachel Reid, this book blew up as a result of Crave’s on-screen adaption that was released in the UK in January of this year. Paired with the Winter Olympics in February, the whole world was suddenly locked in on ice hockey. It was the perfect timing for the series to blow up, as the entire world had access to watching real hockey for two weeks.
The market expanded. According to Publishers Weekly, 206,000 copies of the Game Changers series, of which Heated Rivalry is from, were sold after the show first premiered in Canada. A second season of the show has been greenlit, and the world went crazy for hockey romances.
Off Campus
Amazon Prime Video released Off Campus in May 2026, a romance between, you guessed it, a college hockey player and a musician who decide to fake-date. The show is based on Elle Kennedy’s book series Off Campus, written between 2015 and 2021. According to Forbes, the show reached 36 million viewers worldwide, one of the biggest original series’ that Amazon has ever produced.
The people love fictional hockey players and the statistics are there to prove it. With each adaptation that is made, the snowball just keeps on growing.
Professional Hockey
The professional hockey leagues would be stupid not to capitalise off of this surge in interest. NHL team the Nashville Predators hosted a Hockey Romance Night in March 2026 which featured authors and game tickets. The event pulled in around 600 attendees.
The surge in hockey romances are lucrative for authors, booksellers, and professional teams, there is no doubt about that. However, the appeal of these books is the fictional men in them. I unfortunately fell for the propaganda and matched with a hockey player on Hinge many months ago. The conversation was drier than the Sahara desert and the fact that he played was the most interesting thing about him. These men are not like these protagonists at all. Save yourself, ladies. Indulge in the hockey romances, they are tailored to your wants, but do not mistake the characters for what a real hockey player is like.
Featured Image Credit: Kerry Lloyd
Braw Magazine co-editor for Stirling University’s Brig and a third year English and Journalism student.
