When it comes to love and football, the stakes are always life or death.
There is a unique kind of magic that exists at the intersection of elite athletics and unconditional love. The beautiful game demands everything: near-religious devotion, grueling physical sacrifice, and a willingness to ride the highest highs and lowest lows in front of millions of screaming fans. It is a world of fierce loyalty, intense pressure, and undeniable passion—making it the ultimate canvas for contemporary romance.
In this exclusive roundtable, five powerhouse voices of the sports romance genre—USA Today bestseller Ava Rani, The Washington Post’s Kallie Emblidge, debut novelist Anna McCallie, global phenomenon and Goodreads Award-winner Elena Armas, and international No.1 bestseller Clare Lydon—come together to talk strategy, high stakes, and happily-ever-afters.
From the inclusive, electrifying atmosphere of women’s sapphic soccer to the grueling training academies of the English Premier League, these authors pull back the curtain on how they balance technical pitch-side accuracy with heart-stopping emotional tension. Grab your favorite stadium snack and dive in as they discuss the inspiration behind their fictional clubs, the vulnerability of writing coming-out stories under the stadium lights, and which of their characters is most likely to get sent off for flirting mid-match.
About Ava Rani
Ava Rani is a USA Today bestselling author writing messy rich people with HEAs.
The daughter of two immigrants, her Indian-American roots peek out in different ways in all her novels. She loves to write diverse stories featuring flawed characters who have real problems, powerful friendships, and chosen families who support each other.
When she’s not writing, she’s probably traveling the world in search of new wines to stock her cellar and delicious food to satiate her latest craving. Stateside, she lives the city-girl life with her husband, adorable son, and loyal labradoodle.
Learn more about Ava from her website and follow her on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
About Kallie Emblidge
Kallie Emblidge is a Creative Strategist at the Washington Post and a former co-chair of the paper’s union. She lives and writes in New York City. Two Left Feet is her debut novel, but she’s been a football (soccer!) fan forever.
Learn more about Kallie from her website and follow her on Instagram, Goodreads, and BlueSky.
About Anna McCallie
Anna McCallie was born in Boston and moved to the small town of Stilwell, Kansas, as a child. She has a B.A. in Arabic from Harvard University and an M.A. in international environmental policy from the Fletcher School, yet has never managed to have a job related to either of those subjects. She lives in London, and when she’s not writing, she can be found solving crossword puzzles, badgering her friends to go to pub quizzes, and watching a tremendous amount of football. Abby Offsides is her first novel.
Learn more about Anna from her website and follow her on Instagram.
About Elena Armas
Elena is a Spanish writer, a self-confessed hopeless romantic, and a proud book hoarder. Now, she’s also the author of a global bestseller and Goodreads Awards Winner, The Spanish Love Deception; instant New York Times bestsellers, The American Roommate Experiment and The Long Game; and USA Today bestseller, The Fiancé Dilemma. Her books have also made it into the Sunday Times, Irish Times, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and Germany’s Spiegel; and are being translated to over 30 languages—which is bananas, if you ask her.
Learn more about Elena on her website and follow her on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter (X).
About Clare Lydon
Clare Lydon writes contemporary sapphic romance with all the feels and always a happy ending. She’s a No.1 best-seller around the globe and has spoken at queer festivals and Prides throughout the UK. When she’s not writing, Clare watches far too many home-improvement shows, drinks nuclear-strength coffee & loves a Cadbury’s Wispa.
Learn more about Clare on her website and follow her on Instagram, Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter (X), and YouTube.
The Questions
Love and soccer both thrive on passion, teamwork, and a little chaos. What made you want to explore romance on and off the pitch?
Ava Rani: I paired a surgeon and a soccer player because, despite the ocean of difference in their careers, there is a common thread at the heart of it, and that is ambition. Surgeons, like athletes, dedicate decades to training before ever “making it,” and even when they have “made it,” their careers are often all-consuming. Exploring that ambition in two love interests drove me to explore a soccer romance.
Kallie Emblidge: I’m an absolute football fanatic (please, ask me about my FC Barcelona thigh tattoo) and I’ve always felt that sports, particularly footy, are the sexiest landscape for pure displays of emotion. As a fan, it’s like, let me channel near-religious devotion into this thing I cannot control. That’s a beautiful display of love and faith! And for athletes, especially in a team sport, the idea of devoting your body and soul to trying to create a legacy alongside your teammates is such a collective, romantic notion. And it’s always begged the question for me, in such a heightened emotional state, how do you separate the game from your heart? Aren’t they inextricably intertwined?
Anna McCallie: The stakes in both are so similar. Watching your team in a good season is like having a crush: you think about them all the time, your emotions are heightened, you overanalyze every little thing they do, you wonder if this is really the one… Watching your team in a bad season is like being in a rocky patch of a relationship: you love them—really, you do!—but certain things are pissing you off at the moment. You’ll get through it—really, you will!—but you reserve the right to be annoyed for a little while. You’re not mad—really, you’re not!—you’re just disappointed.
Love and soccer (football!) can both take you on the most incredible, most infuriating emotional rollercoaster, and so they seemed like a natural pairing for a romance novel. The great Bill Shankly, Liverpool FC’s legendary manager, put it best: “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.” Swap in “love” for “football” and the quote still works.
Elena Armas: Any Spaniard would tell you that there’s something magical about soccer (or well, football), and I don’t disagree. I have so many core memories that are intrinsically connected to the sport, whether that’s watching it on a screen with my dad or attempting (albeit poorly) at playing it myself; so if I was ever going to explore a sports romance as a writer, it was bound to be a soccer one.
Clare Lydon: I’m a huge soccer fan (come on, you Spurs!), and I’m also a romance author. I’d avoided putting the two together because I didn’t want to mess it up. However, after the Lionesses won the Euros in 2022, I knew I had to convey just what that meant to me, and write stories about women winning both on and off the pitch.
I write lesbian and sapphic romance, and women’s soccer is hugely inclusive. Having sapphics scoring and swooning was always going to be a match made in heaven. Once I penned my first—Hotshot—I realised I wanted to write more. So I did, with The Princess Match, and this year, Girlfriend Goals. I’ve also just finished The Forever Match (sequel novella to The Princess Match), which features the royal wedding. It’s out this summer.
Did you have a favorite source of inspiration that helped you capture the soccer world authentically? Be it a documentary, a match, a real-life player/team, or fan culture?
Ava Rani: Having loved the sport my whole life, I was very familiar with how the game is played, but more so how players train to become elite athletes in soccer. For most of the world, football academies exist to train young talent, and understanding that ladder made me want to explore how an athlete could try to replicate that system in a country that doesn’t have the existing infrastructure (the US!) I also toured an MLS facility here in the States and asked tons of questions, which was very helpful.
Kallie Emblidge: As with the aforementioned thigh tattoo… It’s Barça all the way down, for me. I’ve been obsessed with their particular footballing ethos (see: Tiki-Taka and La Masia) and their intense connection to Catalan national identity and culture for a really long time. Being a culer has shaped my life and my weekend schedules since I was a teenager, and I always knew I had to honor that in the novel, both explicitly in the text and implicitly, by modeling Oliver and Leo’s styles of play and Willem’s coaching off aspects of the real club I support. My second novel is set in Barcelona, and I am very excited to write about the city and the (fictionalized) team!
Anna McCallie: I’ve been a fan of Liverpool FC for almost twenty years, and while I’ve always followed their socials, when I was writing Abby Offsides, they became a huge part of my research. I loved seeing the behind-the-scenes footage of them at training and the little moments of banter between teammates—it was fun and easy to imagine what it would be like to be the person capturing that magic and sharing it with the world. The players genuinely seemed like a family, like a bunch of people who worked together but also really liked each other. It helps that the team in the years I was working on the book (2022-2024) was full of big personalities and great comedic pairings: Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold, Andy Robertson and Mo Salah, Andy Robertson and the ladies in the cafeteria… OK, so Andy Robertson may have been a big influence on the culture of Mersey FC!
Elena Armas: Fan culture, mostly. Cameron Caldani is a goalkeeper because I’ve always found their role in a team so absolutely key and their personality traits so pivotal during a high-stakes situation. They work hard at training their mental toughness, resilience, and calm but authoritative demeanor, and I wanted to craft a love interest with those attributes. In the same way, after organically absorbing for so many years the politics of the sport, I wanted to bring into the spotlight the sexism that surrounds the club culture. It’s very rare to see women high up in a club or franchise hierarchy, and taking the chance to explore that road through the character of Adalyn felt like a shot I needed to take.
Clare Lydon: Real-life for the win! I’m a season ticket holder at Tottenham Hotspur Women, and my wife supports our rivals, Arsenal Women. All of which means I go to a huge amount of women’s soccer games live every year, attend fan events, and follow the players on social media.
My book The Princess Match was inspired after I saw the Lionesses—particularly Leah Williamson, the captain—collecting her MBE from Prince William, and I thought: “What if a fictional England captain fell for a Princess who gave her a medal?” Similarly, my latest book, Girlfriend Goals, was inspired by watching all the sapphic managers at Euro 2025 prowling up and down the touchlines in sharp suits.
How did you balance making the story feel authentic for soccer aficionados while keeping it exciting for readers who don’t follow the sport at all?
Ava Rani: Pairing scenes with actual play or “industry jargon” with the romance is pivotal. That can be in a lot of different ways. I used teaching the sport to an unfamiliar (and at times uninterested) FMC to weave in both love of the game and a growing love between protagonists. Additionally, my MMC is a soon-to-be-retiring soccer star (think Roy Kent in Ted Lasso), so he is looking at the soccer world and finding a new place in it, which allowed me to really dig into all the possibilities he’d had.
Kallie Emblidge: I benefited a lot from having an agent and an editor who aren’t Sports People, and they were great at keeping me honest about the balance of football to romance. Ultimately, I think the most important thing was tying the trajectory of the season to Oliver and Leo’s relationship, so the tension on the pitch became a central part of their affection off of it.
Anna McCallie: There’s a scene early on in the book where Abby, a complete soccer novice, is getting a crash course in the sport. In my first draft, this scene was about twice as long—I went into the ins and outs of the different kinds of midfielders, explained the concept of a striker vs. a forward, and on and on. I can be really pedantic when I write: I go down all sorts of rabbit holes, like googling whether there is a flight that leaves exactly at the time I need it to, or what the weather was really like in Liverpool on a particular Tuesday in June 2022. In the case of explaining soccer rules, I wanted to make sure I had covered the bases (to mix sporting metaphors!) enough that keen soccer fans would know I knew my stuff. Then a friend—who herself is a big soccer fan—read the draft and suggested that I was a little too in the weeds for the average reader, and she was totally right. I cut that lengthy explanation of game mechanics and instead focused on the parts that are fun for everyone: the atmosphere in the stadium, the club songs and chants, the banter between teammates, and the thrill of the game. Those are universal experiences, regardless of what sport you’re watching, and they’re also what make Premier League soccer particularly fun.
Elena Armas: Funny that you ask. The premise for The Long Game changed many times with respect to that first kernel that sprouted in my mind, and it was mainly because of that balance that’s so hard to find. Elements like Green Oak, the small-town setting of the novel, or the children’s team Adalyn is sent to manage and Cameron coaches, were introduced. They balanced out the more technical nuances that would have ended up there had the Green Warriors’ team been an MLS one.
Clare Lydon: That’s always tricky, and a balance that’s not always easy to strike. But essentially, sports romance books are workplace romances, so you need to include the workplace. For me, all my books assume a base level of football knowledge. However, so long as the story is written well and the sports scenes are exciting to read, I’ve had a load of readers who are not football fans tell me that they loved them, too. That’s success!
I’ve read hockey romances, and I have no knowledge of hockey, but I still enjoyed them. It’s all about just writing a good book in the first place—so much so that the reader gets swept up, whether they like it or not!
We rarely get a glimpse of soccer players’ lives beyond the field. How did you approach exploring their romantic aspirations amid the pressures of performance and fame?
Ava Rani: This is the crux of Out of Her League! At the end of the day, these athletes have spent their lives singularly focused on one thing, and that leaves lots of juicy internal struggle to contend with. With the MMC in Out of Her League, Austin feels like his life may have passed him by while playing the sport he loved. And while it gave him a life he could have never imagined for himself, he is also cognizant of the sacrifices that were made to attain that life.
Kallie Emblidge: I’m neither famous nor a gay man nor a particularly good footballer myself, but I was drawn to the idea of how engaging in self-compartmentalization out of necessity would eventually draw a veil over your ability to fall in love and how external pressures could come to live inside your own anxieties. Oliver’s situation is pretty unique, but I think those feelings are near-universal.
Anna McCallie: Elite soccer players in the UK can enter professional academies from as young as six or seven years old, and think of nothing else for the next three decades. That kind of intense focus and dedication necessarily colors your life; it makes total sense why so many soccer players are still with their childhood sweethearts. All your mates are fooling around in their teens and twenties, but you’ve been playing at the senior level since you were eighteen—when were you supposed to meet someone from the “real world”? Why wouldn’t you stay with a person who has seen you grow up, seen the pressure that it puts on such a young life? Someone who met you before you were famous, so you can be sure their intentions are good?
At the same time, people are vastly different at eighteen than they are at thirty. Situations change, careers end. I wanted to explore a character where all of these things were true, and they all came to a head: Lachlan had existed in such a narrow slice of the world with such a singular focus for so long, always making decisions because they were the ones he was “supposed” to make on this particular path. What happens when he has a gradual realization that some of those decisions are no longer right for his life? How does he balance all that with a demanding career, an aging body, the public spotlight, and on and on? How would all those factors influence his decision-making, because wouldn’t it be easier to just stay the course? And I loved the idea of him meeting someone who was going through a similar journey, which is the basis of the deep friendship that he forms with Abby.
Elena Armas: My approach wasn’t very different from any of my other books. The world of elite soccer is the one thing that Adalyn and Cameron have in common (besides their rather grumpy tendencies, fine). They experience the same game from opposite sides: Cameron from his spot on the grass and Adalyn from her chair as an exec at the Miami Flames franchise. The sport rules both their lives, and it also gets in the way of them finding true happiness. It’s that life beyond the field is the thing that they struggle with the most. Every job exerts an amount of pressure on an individual, but isn’t it what’s beyond that job that should matter the most?
Clare Lydon: Female soccer players, unlike their male counterparts, often post about their lives on their socials. They’re also fairly unguarded in interviews by comparison, so you can pick up things from what they say.
More than that, though, they’re still simply people at heart. Whether they’re the England captain or manager, or the heir to the British throne, all that my characters truly want is to be seen, to be heard, and to be loved. Those are universal emotions that everyone responds to when they see them in a book.
What scene caught you off guard while writing? Perhaps one that ended up meaning more to you than you expected?
Ava Rani: There are multiple scenes where the female lead (a surgeon) is in the operating room, and what caught me off guard was how similar they are to the scenes of gameplay. It was very interesting to see how similar the two MCs were when it came to their career choices and the root of it, because it came down to ambition for both.
Kallie Emblidge: Late in the editing process, I rewrote and expanded the scene where Oliver and his mother talk about him coming out, and this sort of two-roads-diverged-in-a-yellow-wood moment in his life, and it made me quite emotional. I began to think about it in terms of all the imperfect, sometimes painful, and often cathartic coming-out moments I’ve had in my life and expect to continue having, and it made me think a lot about my grandparents, whom I never spoke frankly with about my own sexuality and who wouldn’t ever get to read Two Left Feet. It was a really worthwhile exercise and in addition to, I think, making the conclusion of the book a lot stronger, made me feel newly connected to Oliver, even after having spent so much time with him.
Anna McCallie: The last scene I added to the book, actually. After my agent signed me, we did a brief round of revisions, and she suggested adding this chapter. I was skeptical, but I wrote it, and then I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been in there the whole time. Without giving too much away, it’s a scene between Abby and Claire, Lachlan’s very estranged wife. It would have been so easy to make Claire the villain of the story, but I find that real life is rarely so clear-cut as to have a good guy vs. a bad guy. We all make a mix of bad and good decisions. We all act selfishly sometimes, even though we try hard not to. This scene is a conversation between two smart, complicated women coming at the same problem from very different angles and with very different expectations, and I was glad to be able to give Claire the opportunity to tell a bit of the story from her side.
Elena Armas: The sprained ankle. In a moment of panic, Adalyn trips and sprains an ankle, triggering Cameron’s protective instincts. That’s the moment where she’s at her lowest, and for the first time, her guard comes crumbling down. In the middle of the night, she groggily sends some very revealing voice notes to Cameron. She never asks him to go get her, but he leaves everything to go to her anyway. That’s when he realizes he wants to be the man she needs. Even when she refuses to accept needing anyone.
Clare Lydon: The ball at the end of The Princess Match. Princess Victoria had always wanted to take a woman on her arm to a royal ball, but she’d always had a male suitor as a cover. She wanted to be out and proud, but she wasn’t sure that would ever be possible. With Ash by her side, plus the support of the wider world and her inner circle, it was.
Most of us don’t have a royal ball to attend, but everyone can think of a situation they always thought would be impossible, but then, suddenly, it happens, and it’s more than you could ever have imagined. All Princess Victoria ever wanted was to be herself. At the end of The Princess Match, she gets her wish and steps out with Ash. I have to admit, I got goosebumps. I got a few more when I eventually wrote the royal wedding in The Forever Match, out this summer. So many readers asked for it, and I loved going back and writing Victoria and Ash one more time.
Bonus Questions
How did you come up with your fictional soccer team’s name, and were there any hilarious contenders that didn’t make the cut?
Ava Rani: For my fictional Premier League teams, I used small UK towns. For my American League, I chose an offshoot of already established team names in different sports. (The New York Lightning Soccer Team was inspired by the basketball team the Oklahoma City Thunder)
Kallie Emblidge: Camden FC doesn’t have the most exciting name, but I did pick the location for two legitimate reasons, and that choice was made very early in the outlining phase: there is a big park right in the neighborhood, which could conceivably hold a football stadium, and they don’t already have a professional club in Camden Town! I do love the Roses’ nickname for a bit of color, which is a subtle reference to the actual rose garden in Regent’s Park and a light nod to the book’s romantic genre.
Anna McCallie: Nearly all of the teams in English soccer are named after cities, towns, places, sometimes with other identifiers (e.g., Chelsea, Manchester City). I knew my fictional team would be based in Liverpool, which already has two real Premier League clubs: Liverpool and Everton. I couldn’t just add “United” or “City” to one of those—I wanted my club to have its own identity. I considered picking a different neighborhood within Liverpool (perhaps Bootle or Crosby), but I don’t know enough about the history of the town and didn’t want to choose something that would make actual Liverpudlians scratch their heads or laugh at me! In the end, I chose Mersey FC as a nod to the great River Mersey, which is a crucial part of Liverpool’s history. Liverpool is also in the county of Merseyside, so I liked the idea that Mersey FC could be supported by a wide range of people in that area. Plus, it’s a cool name. I did have some misgivings because, to my knowledge, no English club is named after a river, and I wanted the name to feel plausible. But if Arsenal can be named after a weapons depot, then I think anything is fair game!
Elena Armas: There was only one other contender to the Green Warriors, and that was the Goat Warriors. If you’ve read The Long Game, you’ll know exactly why.
Clare Lydon: This is a funny question, because I wanted them to be close enough that people could guess, but not precise, because I don’t want readers saying “that would never happen”. Salchester Rovers is the team in Hotshot, and that sounds like a proper northern team to me—a mix of Manchester and Blackburn Rovers, which is about where they’re based.
In The Princess Match, Ash Woods plays for the Royal Ravens. I was going to have her playing for Barsenal, but then decided that was a bit too close for comfort! Plus, Princess Victoria supports the Ravens for obvious reasons. And royal-adjacent teams are more common than I thought: think Crystal Palace, Real Madrid.
Out of all the characters in your book, who is most likely to get a red card for flirting during a game?
Ava Rani: Xander Sutton, but only with his wife.
Kallie Emblidge: 1000000000% Leo and I cannot state this strongly enough. A menace and a lover.
Anna McCallie: This is the easiest question I’ve ever answered: It would be Mersey FC defender Billy Ashburn—aka “Bashie”—100%, no question. It would be a straight red and a three-match ban, and yet I also imagine that the flirtation in question would be extremely successful. He is the most shameless flirt in the book, and also, in my opinion, the character with the biggest heart. I can’t wait for everyone to meet him.
Elena Armas: Matthew Flanagan :)
Clare Lydon: That would have to be the England goalkeeper Cam Holloway, who features in both The Princess Match, The Forever Match, and Girlfriend Goals. She’s a cheeky player, and also a brick wall. She’d flirt with you, then steal the ball from your feet while you weren’t looking. Sloane Patterson from Hotshot would have a good go, too.
Thank you to Ava, Kallie, Anna, Elena, and Clare for a swoonworthy interview! You can pick up any of these amazing novels from the link above or from your favorite local indie bookshop!
Want to hear from more authors? Check out our Author’s Corner for more 5×5 or exclusive 1:1 interviews!
You can find each of these titles on our Sports Romance Bookshop shelf.
