The Olympics Opening Ceremony takes place in Paris on Friday, but actually the first bits of action happen today with the start of the football and rugby 7s pool games, so for this Recommendsday I’m reminding you of some of the sports romances that I’ve enjoyed – although full disclaimer, a lot of these sports aren’t in the olympics.
But I’m going to start with one that is – football of the soccer variety and recent BotW pick When Grumpy met Sunshine which has a bad boy of football in a fake relationship with his ghost writer. There’s also Chloe Liese’s Bergman Brothers series, which has a couple of soccer stars among the heroes and heroines – like in If Only You, which has the double whammy of a soccer-playing heroine and an ice hockey player hero.
In fact ice hockey romances seem to have overtaken NFL players as the sport you’re most likely to see in a romance novel, possibly because the word puck rhymes so usefully for a title. Before the ice hockey romance craze, most of the sports romances were about NFL players, like Susan Elizabeth Philips’ Chicago Stars series or Alexa Martin’s Playbook series. And now we’ve got a growing group of baseball romances too, so I can only assume that we’re a year max away from a load of basketball player romances.
I have read more baseball romances than other sports recently – but that’s not saying much because it’s basically just Cat Sebastian’s two historical ones – You Should Be So Lucky and We Could Be So Good. It’s not quite a straight romance-romance, but Linda Holmes’s Evvie Drake Starts Over remains among my favourite novels of recent years.
I often find it quite tricky to recommend some of the more recently published sports romances, because everything is tending very New Adult and that is not my bag at all. I’ve read at least two NFL romances in the last six months where the blurb has seemed like it was right up my street and then in the reading I’ve wanted to throw them across the room* because they’ve annoyed me so much. And no I’m not going to tell you who that is, but I’m sure you can work it out if you look through my Goodreads reviews!
In terms of my own to-read pile, I’ve got Let The Games Begin which is actually set at an Olympics, Match Point which is tennis, Tessa Bailey’s Fan Girl Down which is about golf and Cross the Line which is about Formula One on my to-read pile.
Happy Wednesday everyone
*but I didn’t because they were ebooks and I might have damaged my Kindle if it hit something.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 
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