What do poets have to say about the World Cup?

What do poets have to say about the World Cup? A lot, it turns out. As you'll see from reading Rosie Schaap's survey of, ahem, "Footy Verse".

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. Italian poet Umberto Saba wrote with stinging wisdom about the game during the 1934 World Cup, played in Mussolini’s Italy.