The Long Game employs the sports redemption narrative, a popular and lasting storytelling trope. This framework typically centers on a struggling or underestimated team of underdogs who, against all odds, find success through hard work, belief, and the guidance of a reluctant or troubled coach. In the novel, Adalyn is tasked with transforming the Green Warriors, a quirky children’s soccer team that lacks discipline and ambition. Other literary examples of this trope include Travel Team by Mike Lupica, in which a retired profession basketball player starts his own travel team of misfit players when his son is excluded from his school’s team. Hannah Orestein’s Head Over Heels follows a former competitive gymnast who returns to her hometown to coach an ambitious young gymnast with dreams of making the Olympic team. In Liz Tomforde’s sport romance, In Her Own League, Reese Remmington, the first female team owner in Major League Baseball, battles institutionalized sexism and repeated attempts to discredit her authority, joining forces with the team’s head coach to empower the players and help them turn their season around.

The sports redemption trope also forms the backbone of several popular film and TV franchises that celebrate the underdog spirit, including the Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso, which follows an American football coach with no soccer experience who is hired to manage a British Premier League team. Similarly, the 1992 film The Mighty Ducks features a cynical lawyer sentenced to coach a hapless youth hockey team, whom he ultimately leads to a championship. These stories, much like Adalyn’s, emphasize that redemption is found in building unity and communal support as well as winning games. The appeal of this narrative is also rooted in real-life athletic victories, such as the Miracle on Ice, when the U.S. Men’s National Team, made up of American college hockey players, defeated the seemingly invincible Soviet team at the 1980 Winter Olympics.