The monograph is part of a series of works by various authors covering the assimilation of new realities and phenomena for the life of the society of that time by Russian poetry of the 19th–20th centuries — the telegraph, cinema, telephone, radio. It is the first to trace the evolution of the football theme in Russian poetry of the 1910–1950s — all its main stages: how the corresponding motifs first adapted to the unfamiliar environment, almost smuggling their way into poetic texts, how they then won more and more space for themselves on the pages of magazine poetry selections and lyric collections, and, finally, how they gradually acquired a set of stable semantic halos. It was even more important for the authors to show how the new motifs for poetry changed, reflecting the momentary demands of modernity, deforming under their influence, and sometimes desperately resisting them. The book's objective is twofold: on the one hand, to collect and classify as many poetic lines about football as possible, written in the first half of the 20th century; on the other hand, to analyze the logic of the development of the football theme from the point of view of historical poetics.