“Heated Rivalry” has caused the National Hockey League ticket sales to increase by 24% according to Seat Geek. (Image Courtesy of IB Times)
Alexia: Hi! I’m Alexia Bailey, a sophomore here at CU Boulder. While I may just be in my second year, I’m here to share everything I’ve picked up so far, which is a surprising amount of information. “What’s Eating at Alexia” is my unofficial and unfiltered guide to some of the things that being a CU Boulder Buff brings. Think of it as your guide to navigating everything that makes CU Boulder, well, CU Boulder. Whether you’re a freshman finding your footing or a senior with “no body, no crime” level grievances about finals week, I’m here to share my takes, tips and honest observations on everything from the sometimes-unpredictable Buff Bus system to navigating campus protests (or dodging them entirely). College is a wild, unforgettable ride, and “What’s eating at Alexia” is here to make sense of some of it, one opinion at a time.
I am going to begin this column by talking about a hockey romance.
Please trust me. We will get to Taylor Swift.
You see, at 1:17 a.m. on a Wednesday, I was watching a romance show about two rival hockey players instead of sleeping. This feels important only because it explains why I started thinking about the NFL. I mean, the love and outcry that has come from HBO’s “Heated Rivalry” is nothing short of a major queer triumph. A show about two men on rival hockey teams who fall into a secret, tumultuous relationship has become social media’s own Romeo and Juliet, a story that, according to Time, playwright William Shakespeare himself would have welcomed, as he is said to be “artistically obsessed with queer desire, imbuing his plays and poems with a homoerotic dynamic that clearly found a gratified audience.” “Heated Rivalry” has had major success online, with the hashtag #heatedrivalry being used in over 370k posts, and their communications team reported that the number of postings has increased by “an average of 48% week over week from premiere to present,” according to Inside Hook in an Instagram post.
However, what I find really interesting about “Heated Rivalry” is its impact on the National Hockey League. After the HBO romance debuted, NHL ticket sales and revenue rose sharply compared to both earlier weeks this season and the same period last year, according to SeatGeek. Average tickets sold per game jumped about 24% and revenue rose over 35% in the weeks following the show’s release, while ticket prices also increased. SeatGeek, while confirming that the changes were in no way just seasonal, also recorded a record share of single-ticket buyers, which hints that the show may be attracting new or casual fans. It’s a kind of spillover effect that happens when attention from pop culture drives behavior in an adjacent industry.
Swifties, we’ve seen this film before. When Taylor Swift popped on 24.3 million screens during the Chiefs-Bears game on Sept. 24, 2023, not only did NFL viewership skyrocket, but the league suddenly found itself in the middle of a pop culture crossover event. Ratings for that game surged, jersey sales spiked, Travis Kelce’s name became a household phrase in corners of the internet that had never once debated a tight end, and the NFL discovered a new demographic: people who had never cared about football, but very much cared about Taylor Swift. It wasn’t just a cute celebrity cameo. It was measurable. According to ESPN, Kelce’s jersey sales jumped nearly 400 percent, Chiefs social media followers ballooned, and games featuring Kansas City consistently drew higher female viewership. The NFL, an institution not exactly known for romantic storylines, suddenly found itself marketed through the lens of love. Which, I’m no romantic, but isn’t that so sweet?
This is the part where my 1:17 a.m. brain made the connection.
Whether it’s a queer hockey romance or the world’s biggest pop star in a luxury suite, the pattern is the same: when pop culture falls in love with sports, the audience follows. We like to pretend fandom is rational, that we watch because of stats, strategy and tradition. We as a society reinforce societal gender norms like the masculinization of sports, especially football and hockey. We are accustomed to the fact that men will watch, and then women will sigh and think about how domestic violence rates can increase up to “10% after a football team experiences an unexpected loss, especially in states where sports betting is legal,” according to the National Organization for Women. This is the version of sports culture we have come to expect. We accept that sports are spaces where aggression is normalized, where women are sidelined as girlfriends, distractions or halftime entertainment; where non-binary people don’t exist and where queerness is something to be tolerated at best and erased at worst.
Which is why the success of “Heated Rivalry” and the Taylor Swift effect before it feels radical. Because these moments are not just about ratings or ticket sales. They are about reframing who sports are for, and the best part? It’s natural. Fans are naturally gravitating to these sports spaces without incentive from the NHL and NFL. So, when a romance show sends new fans to NHL arenas, it suggests that people are not only hungry for competition, but for connection. When a pop star brings millions of new viewers to football, it proves that access to sports is not fixed; it is shaped by culture, storytelling and who feels invited to care.
If fandom can be changed through love stories, through queer representation, through pop culture crossovers, then all of the old assumptions about sports being “for men” start to look less like tradition and more like choice. And for you Negative Nellies, who don’t believe that this change will continue, the AP reported that during the regular 2025 season, the NFL averaged 18.7 million viewers per game, which is the second-highest number since viewing averages were first recorded in 1988. The Chiefs had four of the top five most watched NFL games in the 2025 season, according to Yahoo! Sports, despite the fact that they kept on losing and despite the fact that Taylor going to games had become an everyday occurrence. So, all of this to say, at 1:17 a.m., watching two fictional hockey players fall in love, I accidentally realized something about the NFL, the NHL and every league in between: people do not fall in love with sports because of rulebooks. They fall in love because of stories, and right now, the stories are changing, growing and getting more feminine by the second.
Contact CU Independent Opinion Editor Alexia Bailey at alexia.bailey@colorado.edu
