Spoiler warning: this review contains spoilers for Football Royalty and Eden Finley’s Fake Boyfriend series.
The Fake Boyfriend series isn’t over.
That was my first thought on opening Football Royalty, the college romance by Australian author Eden Finley that quietly doubles as a next-generation sequel to her best-known series.
My copy came with a message from Finley herself: “Immy, Poor Peyton, His dads are soooo embarrassing.”
She wasn’t wrong – and those dads are the best reason to read this book.
READ MORE: Blindsided: where we first met Talon and Miller
What is Football Royalty?
First published on October 13, 2022, Football Royalty is the eighth and final book in Franklin U, a shared-universe series of standalone college romances written by eight different authors.
Finley closes out a run that also includes a book from her Puckboys co-author Saxon James.
Her instalment follows Peyton Miller, a star college quarterback, and Levi Vanderbilt, the boy he hooked up with once at a high school graduation party.
Both agreed it was a one-time experiment.
Four years later, Levi turns up at Franklin University for grad school, having worked out that the night meant a lot more to him than he let on.
“Did I just move across the country for a straight guy?” he asks in the book’s blurb.
The real story: Talon and Miller are dads
Here’s the part that made me ridiculously happy.
Peyton is the son of Marcus Talon and Shane Miller, the college-best-friends-turned-NFL-teammates we met in Blindsided, the fourth Fake Boyfriend book.
I thought we’d said goodbye to them in Final Play. Instead, Football Royalty lets us check in on their happily ever after and discover they’ve raised two sons.
Yes, you have to suspend belief on the timeline, or simply accept that this story takes place well into the future.
I was more than willing to do that.
One detail I loved: Talon and Miller gave each of their sons one of their surnames, so Peyton Miller’s brother is Brady Talon.
Brady gets his own story in Can’t Say Goodbye, which Finley released on January 25, 2023.
Finley sets the tone before chapter one, with a disclaimer admitting she took creative freedom with some of the finer points of college football.
“Football is, like, really confusing. It hurts my brain,” she writes, joking that Talon would have had a stroke if she’d let Peyton become a hockey player instead.
It’s a wink to anyone who arrived here via Puckboys, and I got a real kick out of it.
The romance didn’t win me over
Now for the honest bit.
I didn’t think much of Peyton and Levi’s romance.
Peyton carries the weight of being football royalty, the prodigy expected to follow two famous fathers into the NFL. Levi is an art student and the heir to a billionaire family.
Finley’s books have almost-exclusively involved wealthy gay men, across both Puckboys and Fake Boyfriend, and it has never bothered me before.
But Levi’s inherited wealth really grated on me, maybe because he is so young.
A big part of his story is about his identity not being tied to his family’s money. I understood that, and I still found him very hard to relate to.
My excitement spiked whenever Talon or Miller walked into a scene, or when other members of the Gay Brigade got a mention.
When the leads’ parents are the highlight of a romance, that tells you something.
What other readers think
I’m not alone, but I’m not the majority either.
Football Royalty holds a 4.11 average on Goodreads from more than 7800 ratings, and a 4.0 average on The StoryGraph across 454 reviews.
Scroll through the reviews on both sites and one theme keeps coming up: Talon and Miller steal the show.
Plenty of readers found Peyton and Levi a sweet, low-angst second-chance couple. Others, like me, felt the spark sat with the family rather than the romance.
Should you read it?
If you loved Blindsided, absolutely. Think of it as a bonus epilogue with a college romance attached.
If you’re coming in cold, the book is written as a standalone, but I suspect its best moments land harder when you already know the dads.
What’s next?
Football Royalty is technically my first trip to Franklin U, and I don’t think I have it in me to review all eight books.
My goal was always to get through the Sadenverse first.
Which means Brady Talon, and Can’t Say Goodbye, is coming up.
READ MORE: Final Play: how the Fake Boyfriend series “concluded” Talon and Miller’s story