Five times the beautiful game inspired beautiful art

In 2005 17 cameras followed Real Madrid's Zinedine Zidane during a match against Villareal. Turner Prize winner Douglas Gordon, along with French artist Philippe Parreno, took this footage, combined it with a bespoke score by Mogwai, creating a 90-minute film entirely from his perspective.

In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis praised Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait as a "celebration of the body in motion and an acknowledgment of our pleasure in watching bodies in motion".

For The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw it, "becomes a hypnotic experience to which you must simply abandon yourself".

Not that BBC Radio 5 Live's Mark Kermode was able to do this. "It's not a film. It's an art installation... And it's incredibly dull... It belongs in an art gallery, not be in my cinema."

Tracking a revered player in action wasn't a brand-new idea though. German director Hellmuth Costard's 1971 film Football As Never Before was made up of footage from eight cameras trained on George Best for the duration of a match against Coventry City at Old Trafford in 1970.

Archie Gemmill became a World Cup legend when he dribbled through a string of defenders before scoring against the Netherlands in the 1978 World Cup.

In 2001 dancer and choregrapher Andy Howitt paid tribute to this moment with a ballet routine.

"Football is poetry and it is dance," Howitt explained. "The movement he makes is incredible... That’s what I tried to capture, that quite simple beauty of one man understanding that he is about to create something truly amazing.

"Nijinsky, Baryshnikov, Rudolf Nureyev - when they are on stage, they create the same quality that Archie Gemmill did."

"It's very pleasurable that people are still talking about it 23 years on", said Gemmill. "To be doing it by dance is a great compliment to me and my goal."

When Brandi Chastain removed her US team jersey and fell to her knees, she encapsulated what Deadspin called "the biggest moment in the history of American women’s sports, and the single most memorable and reproduced image of the celebration."

Chastain has since reflected on her reaction to scoring the winning penalty in the 1999 Women's World Cup final: "I whipped off that shirt and I kind of whipped it around in the air over my head and dropped to my knees as a 'Yes!' moment that we had done what we set out to do.

"I had no idea that would be my reaction - it was truly genuine and it was insane and it was a relief and it was joy and it was gratitude all wrapped into one," she says.

"There's always going to be someone who says, 'Why did you do that? That's disrespectful,'" said Chastain. Indeed, 192-time capped player welcomed the criticism. "I was grateful for those comments because it gave me a new platform to express myself about what sport has given me.

"There's something primal about sport that doesn't exist anywhere else - when you have a moment like scoring a winning goal in the World Cup championship, you are allowed to release this feeling, this emotion, this response that is not elicited anywhere else."

The Damned United by David Peace was described by Rick Broadbent from The Times as "probably the best novel ever written about sport."

The book speculates on Brian Clough's thoughts during his disastrous 44-day tenure as Leeds United manager, a literary fear hailed by Chris Petit as a "skilful act of ventriloquism, which makes imaginative use of a troubled inner voice".

The Damned United was subsequently adapted into a film in 2009, with Michael Sheen starring as Clough, and became a stage show in 2017.

Despite Peace stating that his novel was "a fiction, based on a fact", Brian Clough's family were unhappy with how he was portrayed.

When his widow Barbara learned in 2007 that the book was in the process of being adapted she said: "I am dreading the film. If it’s close to the character portrayed in the book, then I’m very apprehensive. It’s going to be pretty dire."

LS Lowry's paintings were among the first modern images of working class life to be accepted by the British art establishment.

The Salford-born artist was a football fan and painted a number of images that featured footballers or football fans. While he was a Manchester City supporter, he also went to Bolton Wanderers matches.

The Football Match depicts hundreds of the artist's signature stick figures streaming into Bolton's former ground, Burnden Park.

The painting sold for £5.6m at auction in 2011. (In footballing terms, that's roughly the same as Lazio paid Tottenham Hotspur to secure the services of Paul Gascoigne in 1992.)

Lowry also captured thousands of football supporters steaming into a stadium in Going to the Match, an image Observer art critic Laura Cumming found to be a joyless scene