• By Nick Patel
  • 02 Nov, 2026
  • Drama Series

Hockey, Football and F1: Sports Romance Is Scoring on the Vertical 52

By Nirav Patel, Founder, Vertical Charts

Billionaires and werewolves still run the micro-drama world, but there’s a third archetype quietly taking up space on our chart: the athlete. On the Oct 29 Vertical 52, six of the 52 shows are built around a sport, with hockey, football and Formula 1 all represented. Three of them are brand-new entries, and two of the six are male/male romances. That’s a small sample, but it’s enough to see what the apps are betting on as the NFL and NHL seasons hit full swing.

The six sports shows on this week’s chart

Here’s every sports-centered title on the current Vertical 52, with its rank and VertiScore, our 0–100 engagement score (see the methodology for how it’s built):

Together the six average a VertiScore of about 70.2, against roughly 67.3 for the full 52. That’s a modest edge, not a landslide, but it’s real: half of the sports titles sit in the top 17, and the two highest, How to Dump a Hockey Star and Worth the Chase, debuted back to back at #11 and #12. Only The Lost Quarterback Returns is clearly fading, sliding 26 places after a strong run.

The split by sport is also telling. Football leads with three shows (Worth the Chase, Offside Love and The Lost Quarterback Returns), hockey has two (How to Dump a Hockey Star and Revenge Puck), and Formula 1 has one. Notably absent are basketball, soccer and baseball, sports with enormous audiences that apparently haven’t produced a breakout vertical drama yet.

The sport is the setting, not the story

Read the loglines and a pattern jumps out: almost nobody is trying to win a championship. These shows use the sport as a pressure cooker for romance and betrayal.

In How to Dump a Hockey Star, Renee gives up her life as a billionaire heiress to nurse her husband out of a coma and help him chase his NHL dream, only to realize after a miscarriage that he may have chosen someone else. It’s a classic “regret” setup wearing a hockey jersey, and the chart tags it Forbidden Love and Hidden Identity, not anything sports-specific. Revenge Puck goes lighter: dumped by her hockey-star boyfriend, Lucy fake-dates his biggest rival to throw him off his game before the playoffs.

Worth the Chase, ReelShort’s Wattpad adaptation that we covered when it premiered (read our launch analysis), pairs a football prodigy’s NFL tryouts with a secret pregnancy. The Lost Quarterback Returns is the outlier, a switched-at-birth family revenge story in which a star quarterback’s lost son walks into tryouts twelve years later and his own family turns on him.

That’s the formula in one sentence: the athlete gives the male lead fame, a public stage and a ticking clock (the playoffs, the draft, the tryout), and the drama comes from what happens off the ice or field. It also means these shows borrow the chart’s proven tropes rather than replacing them. Every one of the six carries at least one of our standard tags, Revenge, Forbidden Love, Hidden Identity or Billionaire & CEO, which is consistent with what we found in our trope analysis.

The Heated Rivalry effect reaches DramaBox

The most interesting detail on this list is that both of DramaBox’s new sports entries are male/male romances. In Rough Ride with My F1 Rival, rival drivers Kyle and Chase turn their hatred into a secret affair after the debt-ridden Kyle unknowingly signs on as Chase’s live-in training driver. In Offside Love, Ethan walks away from a hidden two-year relationship with a star quarterback and chooses a quiet teammate who has been sketching him for years.

It’s hard not to connect this to Heated Rivalry, the Crave series about two closeted rival hockey players that became last winter’s surprise hit. Warner Bros. Discovery said the show reached an average of 10.6 million U.S. viewers per episode and became the most-watched acquired scripted series in HBO Max history, with its finale drawing several times the premiere’s audience (Deadline).

DramaBox has clearly been mining the same vein all year. Outside our chart, its catalog includes Straight Until Tempted by My Hockey Rival, a 52-episode rivals-to-lovers training-camp story released in July, and Fire on Ice, a 56-episode hockey romance released in August. Two of those rivalry stories now ranking in the top 31 suggests the experiment is working. ReelShort, by contrast, is sticking with straight romance and family drama for its sports titles.

Why sports romance fits the format

From a production standpoint, sports dramas are a smart bet for vertical apps. A locker room, a gym and a few seconds of game footage do a lot of world-building cheaply, and the athletic male lead is already one of the most popular archetypes in romance fiction. The calendar helps too. With football and hockey in season, these titles have a natural hook for social ads and search traffic that a generic CEO romance doesn’t.

The risk is saturation. Hockey in particular is getting crowded: beyond the shows above, there are hockey-themed series on ShortMax, iDrama and ReelRush this year. If every app floods the zone with jersey-wearing leads, the setting stops feeling fresh and the shows will have to win on story alone, the same way billionaire romances do now.

What to watch next

Three things we’ll be tracking on the Vertical 52 over the coming weeks:

  • Staying power. How to Dump a Hockey Star and Worth the Chase debuted high. A drop like The Lost Quarterback Returns’ 26-place slide would tell us sports hits burn fast; holding the top 15 would suggest the opposite.
  • The male/male test. Whether Rough Ride with My F1 Rival and Offside Love climb or fade will be a good read on how big DramaBox’s audience for these stories really is.
  • A new sport. The first basketball or soccer romance to crack our chart would be a sign the trend is widening beyond hockey and football.

If you’re new to the genre, start with How to Dump a Hockey Star for the classic regret-and-revenge payoff, or Revenge Puck if you’d rather have a fake-dating romp. Both are a quick binge, and you can follow every move on the full Vertical 52 chart, updated every Thursday.

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