50 Ways to Score a Goal and Other Football Poems

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The poet takes his son to a Liverpool game and thinks back about his own youth, when tea was cheap and supporters didn’t wear jester’s hats. Sarah Wardle is well-known for her football poetry – she was once the poet in residence at Tottenham Hotspur FC in London.

Braw Words is our latest venture, launched in 2021, for our young poets from across the country, aged 5 – 18 years of age. Here are three football-inspired poems, the last by me, and the first by people more famous than me (for me it’s 4th and 20 with a minute on the clock—but hope, and apparently Tom Brady, are eternal!And to my mind the best ever football record, Pam Pam Cameroon by Macka B, includes references to Maradona and Roger Milla and the refrain ‘against the Cameroon England were lucky, lucky! There are no football verses in the Christian Bible, but Paul Cookson’s ‘The Footballer’s Prayer’ feels a bit like a religious reading. Bilston is a magician with words' Guardian 'Someone who knows their way round both a joke and a bittersweet narrative. If you are looking for other football poems, there’s a collection of poems with the same title as this in my anthologies section. Ben Wilkinson digs further: “I can happily report many modern poets have written on the beautiful (and not so beautiful) game.

Eddy from Oxfordshire asks: “Following Diego Costa’s near-heroics against Barcelona on 30 June, has any player actually achieved the magnificent hat-trick of a missed penalty, an own goal and a red card? This collection captures the passion Scots feel about football, covering every aspect of the game, from World Cup heartbreak to one-on-ones with the goalie. Some would better understand the poetry in hiking and hitting, rushing and passing, kicking and scoring. We also recommend The Oxford Book of English Verse – perhaps the best poetry anthology on the market (we offer our pick of the best poetry anthologies here, and list the best books for the poetry student here). Ranging from the 1580 poem The Bewteis of the Fute-ball to poems by many of Scotland's best-known contemporary poets, including Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, Liz Lochhead and Edwin Morgan, the long and fascinating relationship between Scotland and football has never been encapsulated so well, nor has it meant so much.The theme of this chapbook is high school in general, which makes sense when you learn that Al Ortolani taught English for 43 years (eclipsing my record by a whopping 18 years, bless him). It’s a playful, humorous take on the Lord’s Prayer, where ‘Hallowed be thy name’ becomes ‘Hallowed be thy game’ and ‘Amen’ becomes ‘Full time’. Away from these shores, Jordi Gomez points us towards ‘Ode to Plattkó’, in which the famous Spanish poet Rafael Alberti immortalises a Barcelona goalkeeper who played on after being knocked out in the 1928 Cup final, where Alberti was watching on from the terraces. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

In fact, I’ve traveled this gridiron before, sharing three football-themed poems, including one of my own. We're archived by The British Library, so your masterpieces are in the safe hands of a world-class keeper.It’s a footballer’s paradise, he says, where ‘there’s always a top team to play on’ and ‘the matches never end’. There are poems by a range of authors about all kinds of football matches - including meteorite footballs, football on the moon, a witches versus wizards football match, the goalie with expanding hands, and the Stone Age man who invented football. SWNT is the world’s first National Football Team Poetry Society, launched in 2019 and contains over 40 poems. Results elsewhere, however, meant a win was not enough for the Laser Blues (as they were known at the time, to promote their kit deal with Kappa) and they joined the Potters in what was then Division Two.

True, football is a team sport and feeds off the energy and will of the group, but it’s bigger than that. We switch football, or what is known in the United States as ‘soccer’, for American football with this poem, as we cross the Atlantic for this poem by contemporary US poet Louis Jenkins (b.The power of sport in such situations is the ‘mirth’ it provides the speaker: he can keep his mind from gloomier thoughts by joining his fellow man for a football or cricket match. You can read as many as you want, and also submit your own poems to share your writings with all our poets, members, and visitors. Andy Linehan recommends two songs: “The Real Sounds of Africa’s 13-minute track Tornados v Dynamos (3-3) – it details the game in the title and includes commentary on the goals (plus the arrival of the President of Zimbabwe to watch the game). Ways to Score a Goal and Other Football Poems includes witty chants, a haiku or two, and fun shape poems about the beautiful game.