Anthology Shows Soccer—and Sport—as Our Favorite Muse—Book Review

“The beauty of the game, then, remains contested off the pitch, a field of inquiry marked beyond goals and nets, touchlines and corner flags.”

It is not often that a book changes the way one watches sport. Yet Daniel Haxall’s anthology reveals that football’s images—paintings, statues, newspapers and GIFs—expose what societies admire, fear and aspire to become. An art historian, Haxall applies a scholarly lens to the visual culture of soccer, showing readers the perspective of the artist’s psyche—one rarely depicted in discussions of sport. The anthology is organized across six themes, from art history and sociology to media studies. Spanning subjects from modernism to commercialism, the anthology traces football images from Victorian newspaper finals to present-day GIFs of Zlatan Ibrahimović’s goals, relaying that sport absorbs the anxieties and ambitions of modern society. One of the strongest examples appears in discussions of Italian and Russian avant-garde artists who viewed the footballer’s body as the embodiment of the “New Man.” In artist Umberto Boccioni’s painting “Dynamism of a Soccer Player,” the athlete appears to defy gravity, transformed into a futurist superhero merging mechanical, modern and human. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, footballers became the “futurist angels of earth,” reflecting society’s growing fascination with strength, speed and national identity. Haxall’s central argument is clear: How a game is pictured reveals what a society yearns for. With the 2026 World Cup approaching and images multiplying across screens and billboards, the anthology gives readers the vocabulary to read beneath them.