It is late February, and I am standing inside a dilapidated ice rink in Manchester, about to watch my first ice-hockey game. It's cold at the rink -- so cold I have wrapped a scarf around my face and balanced my glasses on top -- but there is a crackle in the air. The white-hot sizzle of anticipation. "Eye of the Tiger" booms over the speaker system and a stopwatch is projected on to a big screen above the ice, counting the seconds down to zero. I stand directly behind the goal with a gaggle of women, who press their noses up against the battered Plexiglas partition that surrounds the ice and jostle each other slightly. And then it happens. Forty hockey players streak on to the ice, drop down on to their hands and knees and begin to gyrate. They roll around and make strange thrusting motions with their hips.
Technically, the match doesn't start for another 45 minutes. But these "warm-ups" have become a kind of pre-game performance act with a cult following all their own. There is low lighting, and players lie on their backs with their legs in the air. Some of them do the splits. Every 30 seconds or so a player jumps up from the ice and practises shooting a goal, but they seem to be aiming directly at us. Pucks pummel the Plexiglas and the women around me scream.
I was in Manchester to report on the growing popularity of ice hockey in the UK. North American ice-hockey games are watched by TV audiences of millions, but until recently most British teams have been playing to half-empty ice rinks. The Elite Ice Hockey League (EIHL) -- the UK equivalent of the National Hockey League (NHL) -- has no TV broadcasting deal, so audiences have typically been small and local. Most elite clubs share their ice rinks with skating instructors, who run lessons for children on weeknights.
It used to be unusual to discover ice hockey without being initiated by an older fan. You were never going to stumble across a game while channel surfing, or because it was on at the pub. In the past few years, however, ice-hockey matches up and down the UK have begun to sell out, and the new fans filling stadiums are overwhelmingly female. Overall attendance at British hockey games has increased by 75 per cent since 2010, according to the EIHL, and 45 per cent of all attendees in 2025 were women. And while there have always been female ice-hockey fans in the UK, women now buy more match tickets than men in some parts of the UK. The new season started last month, and the trend looks set to continue. Coventry Blaze, one of the elite teams, told me that 60 per cent of new season ticket holders for 2025-26 are women. The new female fans filling ice rinks have been led to the Plexiglas by a siren call.
This is a love story, and like all good love stories it is complicated. The affair between British women and ice hockey all started with a very niche genre of novel, known among readers as the "ice-hockey romance book". Romance is a bestselling book genre in the UK and hockey romance is one of its thriving, surprising subcategories. There are thousands of ice-hockey romances in print, but the most famous novel in the genre is a 2022 book called Icebreaker, which tells the story of the romantic entanglement between a hockey captain and a figure skater. Icebreaker is set in California, but it was written by a Mancunian called Hannah Grace.
Romance readers have been a powerful economic force since the genre first gained mass-market appeal in the 1970s. Romance sales generate billions of dollars for the global publishing industry and the genre made £69mn in the UK in 2024. While fans are typically laughed at for their tastes (Mills & Boon editor Alan Boon said his industry "could take the place of Valium"), there is an increased understanding that these readers help keep publishing afloat, reading many more books per year than the average "literary reader".
A few months after my trip to Manchester, I visited the UK offices of publishers Hachette, an imposing red-brick building by the river in London. I was ushered up to the top-floor café by Lucy Stewart, deputy publishing director at its Hodder & Stoughton division. Mile High, a novel about an air hostess and her hockey-star lover published by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK, has sold 125,000 copies here. Stewart told me that ice-hockey romance represents a rapidly expanding market, partly because of the dramatic possibilities available to an author who has an entire hockey club to play with. A writer can pen a series of novels, concentrating each book on a different player in the team, and there is also plenty of opportunity to explore various romantic tropes. (Whereas most novelists strive to avoid cliché, a quirk of the romance genre is that its authors actively embrace formulaic plot devices.) Popular tropes of ice-hockey romances include "Found Family", where the heroine meets her OTP (one true pairing) but also gains an entire team of new brotherly protectors. There is also the more straightforwardly raunchy "Reverse Harem" ice-hockey novel, in which the heroine has not one boyfriend on the hockey team, but two or three. On BookTok, the wildly influential literary enclave of TikTok, publishers use these tropes to advertise to prospective buyers so that readers can select their next read according to a very specific set of preferences.
Traditionally, many of the most successful romance novels have been historical "bodice rippers", their setting far removed from the lives of their readers. The same is true of the hugely popular romance fantasy "romantasy" genre, in which the everywoman falls in love with an elf, a vampire or a man who is actually a dragon. In A Court of Thorns and Roses, which has sold 13 million copies worldwide, the love interest is a sexy fairy. Hockey-romance books are strikingly ordinary by comparison. While the fictional hockey player might appear, at first glance, to be an untouchable sex god, he is usually revealed to be a kind of dependable boy-next-door character. A "cinnamon roll" in industry parlance, because he is as light and sweet as pastry. "It's a form of idealism that is still in some respects realistic," Stewart explained to me. "We all think that hypothetically we could end up with an ice-hockey player, but you'll never end up with a dragon."
I grew up reading Twilight, and on each film's release day, I would take it in turns with my friends to embrace a life-size cut-out of Edward Cullen in the Odeon foyer. Part of the appeal of the ice-hockey novel is that you have the opportunity to go one step further. You can read about your fictional hockey player and then you can live out a portion of that fantasy by visiting your local ice rink. The relative smallness and shabbiness of the British ice-hockey league means that stars are available to their fans. Hockey players in the North American NHL can make upwards of $10mn a year, but the average British elite player is earning less than £34,000 annually. After the matches, these men aren't whisked away by security guards. Spectators can linger by the locker room doors and meet their heroes. Jo, a 28-year-old communications officer I met online, likes to show her appreciation for the team by hand-crafting intimate gifts. Since discovering hockey in 2024, Jo has made personalised T-shirts for all 14 of the Nottingham Panthers.
One player who has attracted particular attention is an Atlanta-born forward called Mitch Fossier, who plays for the Panthers. Fossier was one of the top scorers in the 2024-25 season, but he also seems to have something of the fictional hockey player's puppy-dog energy. In his time off from hockey, Fossier moonlights as an indie musician and pens folky love songs. He is almost always pictured smiling, and he makes a habit of stopping by the glass during the warm-ups to chat to fans in his Southern drawl. Sophie, a 28-year-old Fossier devotee I spoke to over the phone, told me that she is drawn to Fossier because of his "sweetness". "He just seems like a proper gentleman," she explained to me. "That's what makes him a cinnamon roll."
Over the past few years, as more women have begun to go to ice-hockey matches, there has been a backlash from the established fan base. Newer female fans, in particular, are being accused of watching ice hockey for the wrong reasons. On social media, "hockey-book girl" has become a dreaded insult, and fans who found out about ice hockey through fiction are dismissed as "puck bunnies", whose only ambition is to hop lasciviously between players in the league. I raised this with Paws, the Nottingham Panthers' cartoonish mascot, who is something of an expert in ice-hockey fan culture, given his job is to wander the arena during matches riling up the crowds.
Fossier wore body armour and a helmet and, hockey stick in hand, looked a bit like a medieval knight at a joust
Paws, who asked me to withhold his real name, explained that the tendency among women to ask for signatures and selfies creates the impression that they are less interested in the sport than in forging relationships with the players. But he said he didn't see these women's behaviour as being all that different from the way fans have always engaged with their favourite players. "It's slander, really," Paws said. "I ask the players for signatures after the games. Does that make me a puck bunny?" On X, hostility towards the new fans has become so routine that one "hockey girls" group chat on the platform recently shut down.
Paws does, however, worry that some fans have been attracted by the spectacle of violence, in particular, following the death of Adam Johnson, a 29-year-old Nottingham Panthers player, who suffered a fatal neck injury from a skate collision in 2023. The tragedy of Johnson's death brought the ice-hockey community together, but led to increased media attention and, in Paws' opinion, ghoulish interest from people who didn't understand "the history and ethos of the game".
In March, I travelled to Nottingham to meet Laura, a self-described "hockey addict" who has read 220 romance books so far this year. Laura met me outside the ice rink. She had brought me a Nottingham Panthers jersey and suggested I put it on over my coat. Laura pointed Fossier out to me as he rolled around on the ice during the warm-ups. He wore body armour and a helmet, and with his hockey stick in his hand he looked a bit like a medieval knight at a joust.
During the game -- which was fast-paced and dramatic -- Laura told me that while she started watching hockey because of her passion for romance books, she quickly fell in love with the sport itself. She has watched every Panthers match since, and obsesses over the finer details of penalty infractions and player transfer windows, like any other sports fan. The books aren't the only reason why she would buy a ticket for a game any more, but they are an experience-enhancer. "The hockey book feeds into what you're watching, because you kind of flesh out the players with the personalities of the characters," Laura explained to me. Another fan, 30-year-old Jessy, likened the experience to playing with dolls as a child.
The hockey clubs encourage this kind of imaginative slippage between real and fictional players. US and Canadian teams regularly publish videos of players huddled over copies of Icebreaker in the changing rooms. The NackaRockers, a lower-division team in Sweden, recently posted a video of their star players rating "spicy" scenes in a bestselling romance called Pucking Around. In April, the Sheffield Steelers put up a slow-motion video of their captain, Robert Dowd, taking off his hockey jersey.
Emily Laycock, who works for the Steelers as social media manager, told me that she is careful to avoid over-sexualising the players. "I don't want to portray the guys in that way or objectify them," she explained over the phone -- but she does obliquely reference hockey books in her posts. She'll post about a "bromance" on the team, which is a dog whistle to romance readers that doesn't alienate the established fan base. Laycock, who is in her twenties and a romance reader herself, says that existing fans need to get better at accepting the new generation. "We complain about the lack of money put into the sport but we can't do anything about that if we're not getting more fans in."
On Easter weekend, I travelled back to Nottingham to watch Fossier in the British Elite League Playoffs. The playoffs mark the end of the hockey season, and the women I'd been speaking to had been counting down the days to the match with a mixture of excitement and dread. Every year, the top eight teams battle it out over 48 hours to be crowned British champions. I arrived on Sunday afternoon to watch the grand final and tensions were running high. The Nottingham Panthers were competing to win their first trophy since 2016. The 7,000-capacity arena was completely sold out, and when I arrived, fans were spilling on to the paving stones outside the ice rink. The queue for the ladies' toilets snaked around the building.
When I arrived, fans were spilling out of the ice rink. the queue for the ladies snaked around the building
During the match, which lasted for more than four hours, Fossier triumphed, shooting the winning goal in sudden death overtime. Afterwards, I watched him whizz around the ice doing victory laps at the speed of light. By the time he made it round to our side of the ice rink his helmet was off. He waved to my group and shook his curls. We beat the Plexiglas with our fists and made strange ca-cawing noises to try and attract his attention.
In that moment of victory, it was as if the lines between reality and fiction had collapsed completely -- and Fossier had actually become the 7ft-tall hockey-book boy of his fans' imaginations. But off the ice and away from the crowds Fossier seemed rather different to me. The week before the playoffs, I had been to meet him in person after one of his final practice sessions. All the way on the train to Nottingham I had felt strangely excited. After so many months of reading ice-hockey romance books, watching Panthers games and gazing at a small Mitch Fossier playing card propped up on my desk, I had begun to feel close to him. On the walk to the stadium, I surprised myself by getting into a panic about the kind of impression I might make. I brought a toothbrush and I brushed my teeth behind a bush.
We met in the café attached to the ice rink, and as Fossier walked through the double doors from the arena I was struck by how much smaller he was when not wearing ice skates. His legs looked strangely vulnerable without knee pads. He was charming but there was no warmth between us. He spoke to me as though we had just met -- which was, of course, factually correct. He told me he was pleased to have seen such a growth in UK ice hockey and grateful to have received so much love from the fans, but he had never heard of such a thing as an "ice-hockey romance book". I got out my phone and showed him some of my hockey-boy TikToks. Videos of women attending the games have become hugely popular online, and #hockeyboys has 544.8k hits. In one viral video, a woman films herself clicking a manicured fingernail against the Plexiglas at an ice rink in Guildford, and captions it, "Tapping on the glass at the boy aquarium". As I flicked through a few videos Fossier remained scrupulously polite but his eyes widened. "My algorithm is very different from yours," he said.
Fossier had no knowledge of Icebreaker or Pucking Around, or even Shoot Your Shot -- a debut from an actual NHL wife called Lexi LaFleur, who parlayed her husband's profile into a lucrative publishing deal. We had been living in two different realities. Walking back to the station I felt a prickle of embarrassment.
But perhaps this kind of imaginative world-building is not so different from what every sports fan does to their hero. Over the summer, the dormant season for ice hockey, I found myself browsing fan sites and enjoying the vivid imaginative hinterland earlier generations created around their favourite players. On one archived fan site from 20 years ago, Panthers fans had penned hymns about the team and shared dreams they'd had about specific team members. Facebook pages are full of long screeds about favourite rumours and bits of gossip about the players. Since 2018, British fans have been taking part in an EIHL fantasy video-game league, where you can play online ice hockey using your favourite players as avatars -- you can even craft your own team kits and dress your player up in different outfits
Hockey-book girls are accused of objectifying their favourite stars, but to objectify someone you have to strip them of personhood. Romance readers are engaged in a different project entirely. They are inventing highly detailed personalities for their favourite players. Lucy, a 24-year-old fan I connected with via X, creates enormous Excel spreadsheets in which she lists every single Nottingham Panthers player, then lists who would be "most fun to have a coffee and a natter with" or what she thinks they'd choose as a pet. (Fossier's pet was an adopted hairless cat, because he is "so kind".) The really devoted fans I have spoken to aren't reducing their idols, they are embellishing them -- which is strange and messy but feels more like love than objectification.
Fandom has always been an exercise in fantasy. The average football-obsessive boy playing Fifa in his bedroom fantasises about his team too -- hockey-book girls are just more vocal about the way their fictional worlds overlay reality. You attach special significance to a player, or a match -- otherwise the whole experience would have less meaning. Without your imaginative investment, you'd just be watching a bunch of masked men chase a target through an empty space.