“At least since the fifth century BC, when Pindar entreated his heart to sing the splendor of the Olympian in his victory odes, poets have found in sport a worthy subject. And soccer—as we know it, a game of relatively recent advent, despite a lineage that can be traced back thousands of years—has inspired many to write in praise of its glory and in lamentation of the heartache it can yield. As ‘the world’s game,’ perhaps no other sport has been written about by amateur and professional poets of so many nations. A commercial for the Museum of Soccer in São Paulo declares that ‘if soccer were a literary genre, it would be poetry,’ and, unsurprisingly, several of Brazil’s greatest poets—including Carlos Drummond de Andrade and João Cabral de Melo Neto—have taken inspiration from futebol.” (Poetry Foundation)