Art v soccer? No-score draw

It's the time for culture to climb aboard the soccer bandwagon, but, as these spin-offs show, the results might be mixed, writes DECLAN BURKE

Goal! III(2009) Football being a fluid game, it tends to fare worse on celluloid than stop-start sports such as baseball, golf and American football. The lamentable Goal! trilogy begins with its Mexican hero, Santiago Muñez, at Newcastle United, before graduating to Real Madrid for the second instalment. Where else but the World Cup for its final destination? Muñez and English mates Liam and Charlie go to Germany 2006 with immortal glory beckoning. One car crash later and Muñez is out of the World Cup. England – of course – went out in the quarter-finals on penalties. The movie, more own-goal than Goal!, went straight to DVD.

A Night in November(1994) Marie Jones's Stones in His Pocketsis a perennial stage favourite, but A Night in November, a self-satisfied one-man show first produced in 1994, is weighed down by considerably more baggage. Appalled by the bigotry he sees at a Republic of Ireland v Northern Ireland World Cup qualifier in Belfast, our Protestant hero, Kenneth, takes himself off to the 1994 World Cup in the US to support the boys in green as they take on Italy at Giants Stadium. Jason McAteer nutmegged Paolo Maldini, Ireland won 1-0 (Houghton) and the long march to parity of esteem began.

Nike's "the wall" advert(1994) It seems pretty tame stuff by the epic offerings of today, but Nike's "the wall', made to celebrate the 1994 World Cup, was the first football-specific TV ad. Eric Cantona – who else? – kicks it all off by stepping out of a huge wall hanging to hoof a ball all the way across Europe from Paris to Rome, and so begins a global journey that winds up with a neon Nike sign being smashed in New York. Sorry, mister, can we have our ball back? Eight of the tournament-winning Brazilian team were wearing Nike footwear that year. A coincidence? Yes.

Guillermo Conte's Flags (2006) Argentinian artist Guillermo Conte, a habitué of Sotheby's and Christie's, marked the 2006 World Cup in Germany by producing a collection of 32 paintings, each one a version of the competing nations' flags decorated by footballers. His work, according to his biography, "carries an ephemeral essence, a timeless glance marked by strong romanticism". How this translates into stick-figure squiggles on flags is anyone's guess. The Argentinian offering, unsurprisingly, is the most dramatic, although doubling up the rising sun as a football in the Japanese offering was a neat touch. For non-football fans, Conte also paints flowers.

Offside(2006) Iran and Bahrain meet in a World Cup qualifying match, with the stands packed to capacity by men. Outside the stadium, a group of women who dared try to attend are herded into a pen and guarded by soldiers. Cue a rather touching Iranian film with dark undertones of oppression and misogyny, although none of the effusive critics pointed out that, if you start by letting women into football matches, they'll eventually start playing the game, too, and very probably want the right to vote. In all, a subtle and timely warning. Oh, Iran won 1-0.

World Cup theme songsA largely lacklustre bunch, particularly when set against England's Euro '96 pop nugget, Three Lions, the World Cup theme song is generally a triumph of hope over expectation. You don't see Brazil, for example, bothering with yet another samba-inspired ditty every four years. Ireland's best offering, Put 'Em Under Pressure(1990), was inspired for its blend of prosaic ambition and Horslips riff, but the most poignant song was Del Amitri's request of the Scotland squad in 1998. "Just don't come home too soon," quavered Justin Currie, aware that Scotland were due to meet Brazil in their opening game.

Deep Play(2008) A contemporary of Godard, Fassbinder and Herzog, the experimental documentary maker Harun Farocki turned his attention to football in 2008. Deep Play is a 12-channel video installation focusing on the 2006 World Cup final between Italy and France, in which cameras tracked players, faces in the crowd and action around the stadium. One channel, meanwhile, broadcast a video-game version of the final. Every last detail of the game's two-hour running time is covered, although the film is still at a loss to explain why Zinedine Zidane nutted Marco Materazzi.

The Van(1991) No flies on Bimbo and Jimmy Rabbitte snr, who buy a chipper van just in time to cash in on the 1990 World Cup, when Ireland went stark raving loony for soccer, pints and, apparently, fish and chips. The third instalment of Roddy Doyle's Barrytown trilogy continued his groundbreaking exploration of working-class Irish lives, in this case feeding off Italia '90, which dragged Ireland kicking and celebrating out of the doldrums of the 1980s. Bimbo and Jimmy's entrepreneurial success suggests that Thierry Henry might be single-handedly responsible for Ireland's inability to break out of recession this time around.