Hockey Without Ice - When Fictional Sports Steals the Audience's Soul

In a small café in Hanoi's Old Quarter last week, a young woman sat with her mother trying to explain why she had cried for three nights straight over a series about two hockey players. Her mother, who had never watched a single ice match, listened with the expression of someone just invited into a church whose name she had never known. When I asked the young woman why she did not cry over a Vietnam loss in World Cup qualifying, she laughed: "Real football does not let me cry for the main character. Hockey in movies does." That was the moment I realized sport has changed its position in the audience's heart - no longer an event, but a dramatic language, a grammar that can be used to tell any story.

That conversation reminded me of a statement a few months ago from Casey Bloys, HBO's head of content, when he described "Heated Rivalry" - a romance series about two ice hockey rivals - as the "greatest acquisition in the history of television." This is a fictional drama, produced by Canada's Crave and licensed for distribution by HBO. The story tells of Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, two imaginary players who love each other in a context society does not permit. No ice rink exists in real life for their matches. Everything exists only on the film set.

But that is precisely what is worth reflecting on. A fictional series about a sport that most global audiences do not truly understand the rules of is being marketed as a premium cultural product, not through audience figures or ratings, but through emotions measured in tweets and shares. And people nod. People accept the "greatest acquisition ever" as fact simply because it was said by an executive.

I have followed the sports media industry for thirty-five years, and I have never seen a boundary as blurred as the one between real sport and fictional sport. On one side, we have the Premier League with more than 4 billion viewers globally, with contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds for players who have not yet played 50 top-flight matches - exactly how billionaires are betting on the future rather than the present. On the other side, we have series like Heated Rivalry, produced by Crave and licensed by HBO, being marketed as premium cultural products - not through audience figures or ratings, but through emotions measured in tweets and shares.

What stopped me was not that HBO spent money on a romance drama. It was how they chose the sports setting as an emotional lever. Ice hockey - a sport most global audiences do not truly understand the rules of - became the perfect backdrop for a romance between two men because it already had a built-in structure: rivals, confrontation, physical collision, and a tension that cannot be resolved between those collisions. Sport provides a setting for stories that everyday life does not dare write.

I once wrote that "Football is the only place where adults are allowed to cry like children without needing to explain," and I still believe that. But now I must add a line: in the world of sports romance series, audiences are not merely allowed to cry - they are invited to cry, led to that emotion through lighting, music, and screenwriting. A real hit on ice must follow the rules of the game; a scripted hit only needs to follow the rhythm of drama. That is the difference we are slowly forgetting.

Economically, the Crave-produces / HBO-licenses model is a lesson that Vietnam's sports media industry should learn from. Canada creates content, the United States distributes it. That is a value chain any country with production advantages but lacking global distribution channels can apply. Vietnam, with its rising film industry and a young generation of filmmakers who understand both Southeast Asian language and global memory, could create its own "Heated Rivalry" - not by copying, but by finding characteristic sports, characteristic cultural conflicts, to tell its own stories in a language the whole world can understand.

I have witnessed young players in Liverpool reading sports manga during their break time. I have seen Vietnamese fans in Hanoi arguing fiercely about a football anime just as they argue about a Manchester derby. Fictional sport is not the enemy of real sport - it is a supplementary layer, a bridge for those who do not play sports to step into its world.

But there is one thing I must say plainly: fictional sport is teaching the young generation a dangerous language. When every emotion is scripted, when every collision has a screenwriter behind it, when every moment is curated to produce tears - people will forget the feeling of a real shot that misses the net, of a real penalty that goes wide, of a real season that drags on for nine months. I once wrote: "The child wiping her father's face after three missed penalties - I see how football teaches people to live." That is something no screenwriter can stage.

There is a blind spot I must point out: this industry is swallowing the very thing it depends on. When HBO calls a hockey romance drama the "greatest acquisition in the history of television" without providing any audience figures, that is not success. That is hype. And when hype becomes the standard, we will begin measuring sport by emotion rather than by results.

A football player scoring in the 90th minute must touch the net. A fictional player only needs to touch your emotions. I do not hate hype. I have lived by it. But I refuse to accept it as truth. When no figure is published showing how successful Heated Rivalry season 1 truly was, when the so-called "greatest acquisition ever" is merely a sentence spoken by an executive at a press event, then we are standing before a culture that can no longer measure itself.

Perhaps the question is not whether Heated Rivalry will succeed or not. The question is whether we can still remember how to tell the difference between a real hit on ice and a hit staged in a studio. "Each season that passes is a book closing; the careful reader will find themselves within it" - I wrote that for football, but it now applies to fiction as well. Because once that boundary blurs, we will not only lose the difference between sport and entertainment - we will lose the very ability to understand why real sport makes us cry.