From the Victorian era to today, artists working in different lands and different media have sought to represent the drama, dynamism, emotion, and beauty of football. Finally, there is a wide-reaching and incisive study that does justice to this rich history of creative work. Covering topics from Italian avant-garde painting to GIFs of Zlatan's goals, contemporary Ghanaian art to bronze statues of Brian Clough, this is a fascinating collection that brings visual culture into the growing scholarship on world football and introduces football to art history.

Bruce Berglund, Professor of History, Calvin College, USA

Picturing the Beautiful Game is a true pleasure to read. In this thought-provoking volume of essays, soccer is analyzed and illuminated as much more than simply a global athletic phenomenon that fuels passionate fans. It is an aggregate of complex images that inform our understanding of culture at large. The talented writers represented offer scholars, sports lovers, and students an entry point to consider some of the most pressing issues in the visual arts around the nature of representation, gender, and visuality.

David E. Little, Director and Chief Curator, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, USA, and author of The Sports Show: Athletics as Image and Spectacle (2012)