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9 Best Sports Romance Books That Feel Like Off Campus
- Joao Nsita
- Jul 15
- 19 min read
You binged Off Campus on Prime Video, you devoured all five Elle Kennedy books, and now you are sitting in the middle of a sports-romance-shaped hole in your life wondering what comes next — because hockey was only the beginning.
Here is what you need to know: the Off Campus energy is not exclusive to hockey. The specific combination that makes Elle Kennedy's world so addictive — the sharp banter, the slow burn that earns every moment of its payoff, the athlete hero who is terrifyingly competent on the field and completely undone by the right woman, the college or professional setting that creates natural forced proximity — that combination exists across football, soccer, baseball, and beyond.
This ranking covers the ten best sports romance books that deliver exactly that experience, across multiple sports and multiple settings. Every book here has been selected on the same criteria that make Off Campus so beloved: the quality of the central romance, the trope execution, the banter, the emotional depth, the chemistry between the leads, and the specific addictiveness that makes you cancel plans to finish.
Some of these books are set in college. Some are professional. Some are hockey adjacent. Some are entirely different sports. All of them deliver the thing Off Campus taught you to love: the moment when the deal becomes real.
Whether you are a long-time romance reader looking for your next obsession or someone who came to the genre through the Prime Video show — this list has your next read.
Let's get into it. 👇
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If you love this, check out: 12 Best Hockey Romance Books Like Off Campus
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What Makes Sports Romance Feel Like Off Campus — and Why It Matters for This Ranking
Before getting into the books, it is worth naming exactly what the Off Campus feeling is — because not every sports romance has it, and the distinction matters for a ranking that is specifically trying to identify the books most likely to hit the same notes.
The Off Campus feeling is a specific combination of elements. It begins with a central couple whose dynamic has genuine intellectual and emotional specificity — two people who are not just attracted to each other but who challenge each other in ways that nobody else does. It includes banter that is fast, sharp, and genuinely funny without deflating the emotional stakes. It requires a slow-burn construction that earns its payoff through patience and accumulation rather than manufactured drama and convenient misunderstandings. And it needs an athletic world — a team, a competition, a training environment — that provides both the forced proximity and the specific pressure that makes the romantic development feel natural rather than contrived.
Not every sports romance delivers all of these things. Many deliver heat without emotional depth. Many deliver emotional depth without the specific energy that the Off Campus world generates. The ten books on this list deliver all of it — in order from tenth to first, from very good to genuinely essential.
9. First Down by Grace Reilly (Beyond the Play, #1) — Published 2022
Sport: College football | Tropes: Fake dating, tutor romance, college setting, opposites attract Heat
Level: Medium-high | Goodreads Rating: 3.61
If the specific formula of The Deal — star athlete needs tutoring help, an exchange of favors becomes a fake relationship, the fake relationship becomes real — is what you loved most about Off Campus, First Down is the most direct structural parallel on this list.
James Callahan is a star college quarterback who has transferred to McKee University and needs to pass the writing class he failed at his previous school, or lose any chance at the NFL. Beckett Wood is the fellow senior who agrees to help him pass the class — in exchange for a fake relationship that will convince her cheating ex that she has moved on. The structural DNA of this setup is unmistakable to Off Campus readers, and Grace Reilly executes the classic beats with warmth and genuine charm.
What First Down does well is the specific sweetness of James as a hero. He is not the tortured, emotionally complicated hero of the best Off Campus novels — he is more straightforwardly sincere, a cinnamon-roll quarterback who falls for Beckett more visibly and more quickly than the formula usually allows. For readers who love the idea of the fake-dating setup without wanting the extended emotional gauntlet, this directness is genuinely appealing.
Where First Down sits at tenth on this list is the depth. The characters are warm and likeable without achieving the specific complexity of Kennedy's central couples, and some of the conflict in the later stages strains credibility in ways that pull you briefly out of the romance. But as a direct structural equivalent to The Deal in college football rather than college hockey, it delivers warmth, chemistry, and the specific pleasure of watching a deal become something real.
Who this book is for: Off Campus fans who want the exact fake-dating-tutor formula in a college football setting, readers who want charm and sweetness over complexity, and anyone looking for a quick, enjoyable sports romance that hits familiar notes.
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8. The Cheat Sheet by Sarah Adams — Published 2021
Sport: Professional football (NFL) | Tropes: Friends to lovers, unrequited feelings, professional athlete, sweet romance Heat Level: Low-medium — this is feel-good warmth over spice Goodreads Rating: 3.71
The Cheat Sheet is the sports romance for Off Campus fans who loved the friendship foundation of the best Kennedy couples — the sense that Hannah and Garrett or Dean and Allie genuinely know and understand each other before the romance fully declares itself — and want that particular warmth extended to its maximum.
Bree Camden is a dance studio owner and best friend to NFL star Nathan Donelson. They have been best friends for years. Nathan is completely, obviously, hopelessly in love with her. Bree has been carefully maintaining the boundary between friendship and something more for reasons that become clear as the story develops. Their arrangement — the "cheat sheet" of the title refers to the staged moments of fake closeness they perform for media purposes — is the mechanism through which everything that has been building for years is finally forced into the open.
Sarah Adams writes with a warmth and a gentleness that is quite different from Kennedy's sharper, more combustive energy — this is a cozy, tender friends-to-lovers with genuine sweetness at its center rather than the slow-building tension of Off Campus. Nathan is one of the most purely earnest heroes in contemporary sports romance: a man whose feelings have been entirely visible to everyone except the one person who needs to see them.
For readers who want the emotional reward without the extended slow-burn gauntlet, The Cheat Sheet delivers a warm, funny, and genuinely moving friends-to-lovers that feels like it was made specifically for Off Campus fans who loved Tucker and Sabrina's dynamic in The Goal.
Who this book is for: Readers who want sweet over spicy, fans of friends-to-lovers where the feelings are long-established and patient, and anyone who wants sports romance as comfort reading rather than as an emotional obstacle course.
7. People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry — Published 2021
Sport: Non-sport romance — included for Off Campus fans who love the friends-to-lovers slow burn over all else Tropes: Friends to lovers, best friends, annual trips, second chance, emotional depth Heat Level: Medium |
Goodreads Rating: 3.95
This entry requires a brief explanation of its own placement. People We Meet on Vacation is not a sports romance — Emily Henry writes contemporary romance without the athletic setting. It appears at number eight on this list because the specific Off Campus quality it shares is the most underrated element of Kennedy's series: the deep, accumulated, almost painful awareness between two people who have known each other for years and are trying very hard not to know each other as well as they do.
Poppy and Alex have been best friends for years, taking annual summer trips together, and something changed between them two years ago. Now Poppy is trying to engineer a reunion that might fix whatever broke — while managing her growing certainty that what broke was never the problem, but rather the symptom of something she has been refusing to look at directly.
Emily Henry's writing has the warmth, the specific emotional intelligence, and the patient construction of feeling that Off Campus does at its best. The central couple's banter is exceptional. Their specific chemistry — the shorthand of two people who have known each other so long that they understand each other's blind spots better than their own — is exactly the quality that makes the best Off Campus couples so compelling.
For Off Campus fans who know that what they actually love is not the sport but the specific intimacy of two people who should have been together long before this moment, People We Meet on Vacation is essential.
Who this book is for: Off Campus fans who realise their favourite element of the series is the long-established intimacy between the central couples, readers who want Emily Henry's signature emotional depth, and anyone who wants to cry happy tears on a beach.
6. The Friend Zone by Kristen Callihan — Published 2018
Sport: College and professional football | Tropes: Friends to lovers, fake dating adjacent, sports background, emotional depth Heat Level: High — and emotionally layered in ways the genre rarely manages Goodreads
Rating: 4.03
The Friend Zone is one of the most consistently underrated sports romance novels of its era — the book that readers discover through recommendation rather than through algorithmic push, and then immediately press into the hands of everyone they know.
Gray Grayson is an NFL-bound college player who is carrying significantly more emotional weight than his public confidence suggests. Ivy Mackenzie is sharp, funny, and in possession of a secret that complicates her ability to want things from the future. Their dynamic begins as friends — with the specific quality of a friendship that has always been charged with something neither of them has officially acknowledged — and develops into one of the most emotionally satisfying central romances in sports fiction.
What separates The Friend Zone from most books in its category is the quality of Ivy's characterisation. She is one of the most intelligent, most specifically funny heroines in the genre — the kind of character whose perspective on every situation has a precision and a wit that makes every chapter she narrates a genuine pleasure. Gray's specific vulnerability — the gap between his physical confidence and his emotional uncertainty — echoes the best Off Campus heroes in ways that feel genuinely, deeply familiar.
The book's willingness to engage with the real difficulty of its central complication — the genuine stakes involved in what Ivy is managing — gives it an emotional weight that elevates it above most sports romance. When the central payoff arrives, it is earned in ways that very few books on this list can match.
Who this book is for: Off Campus fans who want deep emotional investment alongside heat and banter, readers who love heroines with genuine intellectual wit, and anyone who appreciated the emotional complexity of The Mistake and wants it in a football setting.
You'll also love: The Shippers by Katherine Center Book Review — The Friends-to-Lovers Romance of the Year
5. Blind Side by Kandi Steiner — Published 2022
Sport: College football | Tropes: Best friend's brother, forbidden romance, college setting, slow burn Heat
Level: High — with emotional depth that amplifies every scene Goodreads Rating: 3.95
Blind Side is the college football romance that Off Campus fans who loved the forbidden dynamic of The Risk most reliably respond to — a story that builds its central tension from a relationship that cannot officially exist, and then spends the entire novel quietly, patiently making the case for why it should.
Kandi Steiner's Off Campus equivalent sets up its central couple with the specific complication of the best friend's brother trope — a relationship where the obstacle is personal, deeply specific, and tied up with loyalties and histories that cannot be dismissed. The hero is a college football star with the kind of confidence that usually reads as arrogance until you understand what it is protecting. The heroine is someone who understands the stakes of wanting this person and chooses to want him anyway.
What Blind Side does particularly well is the quality of its forbidden-feeling tension. Steiner is excellent at scenes where two people are in the same room and everything is technically fine and also nothing is fine at all — the specific charged stillness of two people managing exactly how much they are allowed to feel. That quality is what the best Off Campus novels do so well, and Blind Side replicates it in football with considerable skill.
The book ranks sixth rather than higher because the central conflict occasionally tilts toward external drama rather than internal complexity — the obstacles between the leads multiply in later chapters in ways that slightly dilute the romantic accumulation that the earlier chapters build so beautifully.
Who this book is for: Off Campus fans who love forbidden romance with genuine personal stakes, readers who want college sports romance with the specific tension of relationships that have real consequences, and anyone who loved The Risk's specific charged energy.
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4. Kulti by Mariana Zapata — Published 2015
Sport: Professional women's soccer | Tropes: Coach/player dynamic, grumpy hero, slow burn, professional athletes Heat Level: Low — the passion is entirely in the emotional intensity and the slow burn Goodreads
Rating: 4.23 — Zapata's highest-rated book on Goodreads
Kulti is Mariana Zapata's highest-rated book on Goodreads, and it is one of the great sports romance novels of the decade — a story that proves the slow-burn formula can work at maximum intensity in an entirely different sport from the one that dominates the genre.
Sal Casillas is a professional women's soccer player who has spent her entire life working toward a specific level of excellence. Reiner Kulti is the retired soccer icon she worshipped as a teenager and genuinely imagined marrying — who has arrived as the new coach of her team, quiet and sullen and nothing like the version she constructed in her head across twenty years of admiration.
What makes Kulti exceptional is the specific quality of its central dynamic. Sal is one of the great heroines in sports romance: competitive, hardworking, funny in a deadpan way that sneaks up on you, and absolutely not interested in performing vulnerability for anyone. Her gradual, grudging recognition that Kulti sees her — specifically, accurately, with a care that is expressed entirely through actions rather than declarations — is one of the most satisfying character arcs in the genre.
Kulti himself is a study in the specific appeal of the grumpy hero done properly. He is quiet and difficult and occasionally deeply frustrating. He is also, when it matters, exactly present in the specific way that the person he cares about needs. The scene where he shows up for Sal in a context completely outside his world — quietly, without announcement, simply because she matters — is the kind of moment that makes readers put down the book and stare at the ceiling for a while.
For Off Campus fans who loved the dynamic of the slowly dissolving emotional armour — the way Garrett reveals himself to Hannah across their tutoring sessions, the way Dean's confidence gives way to something real with Allie — Kulti delivers that dynamic in professional soccer with extraordinary precision.
Who this book is for: Off Campus fans who want slow burn done to maximum effect, readers who love female leads with genuine professional ambition, and anyone who wants sports romance that earns every moment of its emotional payoff.
3. The Wall of Winnipeg and Me by Mariana Zapata — Published 2016
Sport: Professional football (NFL) | Tropes: Fake marriage, assistant-to-athlete, grumpy hero, slow burn,
enemies-to-almost-friends-to-lovers Heat Level: Low-medium — the payoff is enormous but patient
Goodreads Rating: 4.16
The Wall of Winnipeg and Me is the novel that introduced many readers to Mariana Zapata's particular brand of slow-burn magic, and it is still the best example of the specific formula that makes her work so uniquely addictive: a central couple who begin at maximum distance, with maximum imbalance of power and attention, and arrive at the payoff by accumulating trust rather than by burning through obstacles.
Vanessa Mazur has spent two years as the personal assistant to Aiden Graves — the "Wall of Winnipeg," the top defensive end in the National Football Organization — and she has had enough. He is ungrateful, uncommunicative, and apparently incapable of acknowledging her existence in any of the basic human ways. She quits. He shows up at her door wanting her back. Not for the job — for a fake marriage that will help him secure his citizenship.
The fake marriage premise gives the novel its structural shape, but what makes it extraordinary is the specific quality of Aiden as a character. He is one of the great grumpy heroes in romance fiction — not cold in the way that becomes romantic shorthand for secretly warm, but genuinely, specifically closed off in ways that have real history behind them. Watching him choose, incrementally, to let Vanessa see something true about him is the romance at its most patient and its most rewarding.
For Off Campus fans, The Wall of Winnipeg most closely echoes the dynamic of The Deal — a transactional arrangement that disguises the real emotional development happening underneath — but extended to 470 pages with the slowest, most methodically constructed burn in the genre. Readers who loved the patient construction of Garrett and Hannah's arrangement, and wanted it to go even slower and even deeper, have found exactly that here.
Who this book is for: Fans of the transactional-arrangement-turned-real trope, readers who want Mariana Zapata's absolute longest slow burn, and Off Campus fans who loved the way The Deal made you feel the accumulation of feeling before either character officially admitted it.
You'll also love: 10 Best Elle Kennedy Books Ranked for Romance Fans
2. From Lukov With Love by Mariana Zapata — Published 2018
Sport: Professional figure skating | Tropes: Enemies to lovers, forced partnership, slow burn, frenemy romance
Heat Level: Low-medium — but the emotional build is among the finest in romance fiction Goodreads
Rating: 4.19
From Lukov With Love is Mariana Zapata's most celebrated novel and the one that BookTok has most consistently championed as the gold standard of enemies-to-lovers slow burn — and it deserves every word of that reputation.
Jasmine Santos is twenty-six and running out of time as a competitive figure skater. Seventeen years of her life have been poured into this sport, and her window to compete is narrowing. Ivan Lukov — the arrogant, brilliant figure skating champion she has spent a decade dreaming about pushing in front of a moving bus — makes her an offer she cannot afford to refuse: a skating partnership that might be her last chance.
Jasmine is one of the great heroines in sports romance fiction. She is tough, competitive, covered in walls she has built for very specific and understandable reasons, and possessed of a voice that is so specific and so alive that readers consistently report missing her after finishing the book. Her trajectory across the novel — from refusing to want anything from Ivan beyond professional competence to allowing herself to see who he actually is, which is someone who has been paying more attention than she realised — is the central slow burn done at its most patient and most emotionally satisfying.
Ivan is the perfect counterpart: a man who shows up for Jasmine in ways she did not ask for and did not expect, consistently and without announcement, until the accumulated weight of it becomes undeniable. Zapata never lets him declare himself with speeches or grand gestures. She lets his actions build a case that Jasmine — and the reader — cannot eventually argue against.
For Off Campus fans who loved The Score's patient dismantling of Dean's defences, From Lukov With Love delivers that arc at its maximum length and its maximum emotional intensity. It is longer and slower than most books on this list. The payoff is correspondingly more extraordinary.
Who this book is for: Off Campus fans who want the enemies-to-lovers slow burn taken to its absolute limit, readers who love heroines with fierce independence and genuine competitive ambition, and anyone prepared to invest five hundred pages for a payoff that justifies every single one of them.
1. The Hating Game by Sally Thorne — Published 2016
Sport: Non-sport romance — included for Off Campus fans who love the specific charged tension of shared space and competitive dynamic Tropes: Office rivals to lovers, enemies to lovers, slow burn, forced proximity
Heat Level: High — with the specific quality of tension that Office enemies-to-lovers does at its best Goodreads
Rating: 3.89
The Hating Game is not a sports romance. It is an office romance about two colleagues who share a job and absolutely despise each other, slowly and against every reasonable intention. It appears at number two on this list because the specific quality of its central tension — two people in unavoidable proximity, competing at everything, unable to stop noticing each other with an attention that they call hatred because they do not yet have the more accurate word — is exactly the quality that the best Off Campus novels generate at their peak.
Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman are co-executives in adjacent offices who have been playing an elaborate, unnamed game of professional rivalry and mutual aggravation since they first met. Their dynamic — the sharp banter, the physical awareness barely contained inside professional decorum, the specific way each of them registers the other's moods before registering anyone else's — is one of the most electrically constructed central couples in contemporary romance.
Sally Thorne writes banter that is so fast and so specifically calibrated to the dynamic between these two people that it reads differently from every other enemies-to-lovers novel on the market. The specific way Lucy and Joshua talk to each other — the way they understand each other's weaknesses and choose, mostly, not to use them, except when they are furious — has the quality of two very intelligent people who have been paying close attention to each other for a very long time without admitting why.
For Off Campus fans, The Hating Game is the closest equivalent in non-sports romance to the specific charged energy of the best Kennedy central couples. The Deal and The Score both rely on central dynamics where two people are performing one thing while feeling another. The Hating Game lives entirely in that space, and it does it brilliantly.
Who this book is for: Off Campus fans who realise the thing they love most is the specific quality of rivals who understand each other too well, readers who want the tension of enemies-to-lovers at maximum intensity, and anyone who wants a romance that earns its heat through accumulated awareness rather than manufactured obstacles.
Conclusion: Your Complete Sports Romance Reading Roadmap
The ten books on this list represent the full range of what sports romance can deliver when it is working at its best — from the sweet and accessible warmth of The Cheat Sheet to the patient, devastating slow burn of Kulti and From Lukov With Love.
Start with whichever entry best matches your current mood. If you want the closest structural equivalent to The Deal, go to First Down. If you want the slow burn taken to its furthest possible point, go to From Lukov With Love or The Wall of Winnipeg. If you want the specific rivals-to-lovers tension at maximum intensity, go to The Hating Game. And if you want the best sports romance novel written in the Off Campus tradition — the one most likely to make you understand exactly why this genre has the stranglehold on your heart that it does — go to Kulti.
Every book on this list will reward your time. Several of them will make you cancel plans. All of them deliver the core promise: two people, a specific sport, and the specific moment when the arrangement stops being an arrangement.
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10 FAQs About Sports Romance Books Like Off Campus
1. What is the best sports romance book to read after Off Campus? Kulti by Mariana Zapata is the most consistently recommended book for Off Campus fans moving into wider sports romance. It has Zapata's highest Goodreads rating, a central dynamic that closely mirrors the best Off Campus couple dynamics, and a heroine with the same competitive professional ambition that defines Kennedy's heroines. From Lukov With Love is the second most recommended for readers who want that same Zapata quality in a figure-skating setting.
2. Are there sports romance books with the same fake-dating trope as The Deal? Yes. First Down by Grace Reilly is the most direct structural parallel — a college fake-dating romance where a star athlete needs academic help in exchange for the fake relationship. The Wall of Winnipeg and Me by Mariana Zapata uses a fake marriage variant with a professional football player. For hockey specifically, consider Consider Me by Becka Mack from the hockey romance list.
3. Which sports romance books are the spiciest on this list? The Friend Zone by Kristen Callihan and Blind Side by Kandi Steiner are the highest-heat entries. The Hating Game by Sally Thorne is high heat in a non-sports setting. Mariana Zapata's books (Kulti, The Wall of Winnipeg, From Lukov With Love) are consistently lower heat — the passion is in emotional intensity rather than explicit content.
4. What is the slowest-burning sports romance on this list? From Lukov With Love by Mariana Zapata is the longest and most patient slow burn — approximately 500 pages of careful, methodical emotional accumulation before the payoff. The Wall of Winnipeg and Me is similarly patient. Both are worth every page for readers who love the slow-burn formula at its most extended.
5. Which sports romance books are available on Kindle Unlimited? Kindle Unlimited availability changes regularly, but several books on this list have been available on KU at various points, including some of the Mariana Zapata back catalogue and newer releases like First Down by Grace Reilly. Check current KU availability directly on Amazon at time of reading.
6. Are there sports romance books with women athletes as the leads? Yes. Kulti by Mariana Zapata follows Sal Casillas, a professional women's soccer player, as one of the few sports romance novels that centres female athletic ambition as the primary driver of the narrative. From Lukov With Love also features Jasmine Santos as a competitive figure skater. Both are excellent.
7. What makes a sports romance feel like Off Campus specifically? The Off Campus feeling requires four elements working together: sharp, specific banter between the leads; a slow-burn construction that earns its payoff through accumulation; a central couple dynamic with genuine specificity (not just generic attraction); and an athletic world that creates natural forced proximity and pressure. Books that deliver all four — Kulti, The Wall of Winnipeg, From Lukov With Love, The Friend Zone — are the ones closest to the Off Campus experience.
8. Which books on this list are part of series? First Down is Book 1 of Grace Reilly's Beyond the Play series. The Cheat Sheet is connected to Sarah Adams's wider contemporary romance work. The Friend Zone is part of Kristen Callihan's Game On series. People We Meet on Vacation and The Hating Game are standalones. Mariana Zapata's books are standalones with no required reading order.
9. Are there sports romance books with LGBTQ+ central couples? For hockey romance specifically, Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid (covered in the hockey romance list) is the definitive LGBTQ+ sports romance — an MM romance between rival NHL stars that is among the finest examples of the genre. For broader sports romance, the genre is expanding rapidly in this direction in 2025-2026.
10. Where can I buy all the books on this list? All ten books are available on Amazon, Waterstones, Barnes & Noble, and as digital editions on Kindle, Kobo, and Google Play. Several are available through Audible in audiobook format. Mariana Zapata's books are self-published and available directly on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions.
External Resources for More Sports Romance Recommendations:
Goodreads — Sports Romance Shelf — Community-curated lists and rankings of the best sports romance novels across all sports.
Smart Bitches, Trashy Books — Sports Romance Reviews — In-depth reviews and community discussion covering the full range of sports romance fiction.
Book Riot — Sports Romance Reading Lists — Features, rankings, and reading guides covering sports romance from football to soccer to hockey and beyond.
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