Love, loyalty, and a little Chicago sports heartbreak: Why we fall for sports romance
Last night was the Chicago Bulls’ first preseason game, and my butt was in my chair, glued to the TV.
Preseason. A game that doesn’t even count toward the regular-season standings, and there I was, happily giving it my evening.
Am I a sports fanatic? Not quite. I’m not going to pretend I can recite every player’s statistics (that’s my husband’s job, lol) or explain every decision a coach makes. But I love me some Chicago sports. The Bulls, the Cubs, the Bears, the Hawks—there’s an attachment there that goes beyond how well they’re playing. Which, depending on the season, is probably fortunate.
I care because they’re my teams. And once you’ve decided something belongs to you in that particular, slightly irrational way, it’s difficult to stop caring.
And as a romance author, I find that very useful.
I’ve been thinking about sports romance a lot lately, partly because I’m currently writing one. Drafted by Accident, my 14th novel, follows Andie Monroe, a woman who knows very little about football but accidentally wins a fantasy league, and Brock Vasher, a notoriously grumpy tight end who would appreciate it if everyone stopped interfering with his carefully controlled life. Naturally, I’ve given him a fake relationship and a woman who asks inconvenient questions.
And before anyone assumes my Chicago loyalty has slipped, I should confess that the fictional football world in this book is loosely based on the Green Bay Packers, and Clay Matthews may have provided a little inspiration.
Shh. It’s the long, sweaty blond hair that got me. But I’m trusting you to keep that information away from the Bears.
This isn’t my first time bringing sports into a love story, though. I wrote I Love You Today centered around the Chicago Cubs, and returning to this space has made me think more deeply about why it feels so natural to me—and why so many readers can’t get enough of it.
Because sports romance is having quite a moment. In its June 2025 market update, Circana reported triple-digit growth for sports romance in U.S. print sales, placing it among the fastest-growing romance subjects. Overall romance print sales were up 24% year to date compared with the same period in 2024. That’s a specific snapshot rather than a full-year figure, but it makes the enthusiasm pretty clear.
The bestselling titles tell a similar story. Hannah Grace’s Icebreaker is a No. 1 New York Times bestseller with more than a million copies sold, according to Simon & Schuster. Elena Armas’s soccer-centered The Long Game is also a New York Times bestseller. And following its television adaptation, Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry reached No. 7 on Circana BookScan’s weekly overall bestseller list for the week ending January 10, 2026.
And those books make me wonder what, exactly, we’re all showing up for.
I have a few theories. And yes, one of them involves the uniforms. But my love for the Bulls, Cubs, Hawks, and Bears makes me think the deeper answer begins with loyalty.
Being a fan means allowing yourself to care about something you cannot control. I can sit in my chair and have strong opinions about what’s happening on my television, but nobody’s calling me for input. I’m invested anyway. I want things to go well. I’m disappointed when they don’t. And when the next season arrives, some hopeful part of me is willing to try again.
Romance asks us to make a similar emotional commitment. We meet two people, become invested in their happiness, and then spend several hundred pages worrying about the choices they’re making.
Sometimes those choices are terrible. Sometimes I’m the one writing them.
But there’s something wonderfully familiar about that experience: seeing the potential, enduring the setbacks, and believing there’s still a way forward. A sports fan and a romance reader both understand how powerful maybe this time can be.
For me, Chicago’s teams bring slightly different feelings to that equation. Watching the Bulls can pull me straight into the moment; last night proved how little encouragement I need. And Josh Giddey certainly doesn’t hurt the viewing experience. The Cubs bring that sense of attachment to a place, which is part of why I wanted them woven into I Love You Today. The Blackhawks bring the speed, intensity, and tension that make it pretty easy to understand why hockey romance has such a devoted following. And loving the Bears requires a willingness to keep hoping, even when hope starts feeling like a questionable personal decision. This year is our year, by the way. Please respect my annual commitment to that statement.
And all of that belongs in a romance novel. So does the strange intimacy of caring about someone whose public life you can see while knowing very little about their private one.
That’s where sports romance gets especially interesting to me as a writer. An athlete might be recognized everywhere, talked about constantly, and judged by people who have never met them. Everyone has an opinion about their performance. Far fewer people know what it costs them to keep performing.
A romance lets us into that private space. We get to see what happens after the game, after the interview, after the athlete has delivered the answer everyone expects. What are they afraid of? Who can they call? What happens when they’re exhausted, hurting, or unsure whether they can do the thing that has shaped their entire identity?
Those are the questions pulling me into Brock’s story in Drafted by Accident. He’s built his life around football, discipline, and control. He understands preparation. He understands effort. He’s much less comfortable with someone noticing that he’s struggling—and caring enough to stay in the conversation when he tries to shut it down.
Andie complicates that beautifully. She has her own financial pressures, ambitions, and reasons to resent an arrangement that turns her life into public entertainment. She’s trying to build a future, and suddenly she’s being asked to help sell a version of someone else’s present. Meanwhile, Brock has become very good at protecting himself from attention, even when that attention comes from a person who might actually understand him.
Writing them means exploring what happens when being seen begins to feel both comforting and terrifying.
And I think many of us recognize that feeling, regardless of whether anyone has ever asked us to catch a football.
There’s also real pleasure in watching a capable person become completely uncertain about love. Someone can perform under extraordinary pressure and still overthink a greeting at the front door. They can understand a complicated playbook and struggle to interpret a thoughtful gesture.
I love writing that gap. It leaves room for humor, tenderness, and the slow realization that knowing how to succeed professionally doesn’t mean you know how to let someone close.
And while the athlete often gets the attention on a sports romance cover, the other person’s life needs to matter just as much. That’s something I care about with Andie. She needs room for her own goals, her own frustrations, and her own growth. I want readers rooting for the future she’s trying to create, too.
The relationship becomes more satisfying when both people have something meaningful at stake—and both have to learn how to support a life that extends beyond their own.
Then there’s the team around them. Teammates, friends, and the people who know when to offer support and when to give someone a hard time create a world readers can settle into. We get attached. We start wondering about the person who keeps making jokes in the background. By the time one couple finds their happy ending, we’re ready to stay for another story.
I understand that impulse. Once I care about a team, leaving is difficult.
And yes, sports romance offers plenty of room for attraction, banter, rivalry, and chemistry. I’m enjoying those parts immensely. But what keeps me coming back to the manuscript is the quieter possibility underneath them: someone can have a terrible game, make a mistake, or lose the thing they thought defined them, and still be deeply loved.
That feels like a story worth telling.
You don’t have to know every rule to want that ending. You only have to understand what it means to work hard, fear failure, and hope someone will stand beside you when things get difficult.
So, I’ll keep cheering for my Chicago favorites. I’ll keep writing Andie and Brock as they discover how inconvenient—and worthwhile—it can be to care about each other.
And I’ll keep my Clay Matthews inspiration between us. Because a Chicago girl is allowed a little creative research, right?
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