Ooh, Auden. A favourite of mine. This poem is really good, but for me nothing beats Shield of Achilles.

For those who haven't read it

The Shield of Achilles by W.H. Auden

She looked over his shoulder 
For vines and olive trees,
 Marble well-governed cities
   And ships upon untamed seas,
 But there on the shining metal
   His hands had put instead
 An artificial wilderness
   And a sky like lead.

 A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
 No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down, 
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line, 
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
 In tones as dry and level as the place:
 No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
 Column by column in a cloud of dust
 They marched away enduring a belief
 Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

 She looked over his shoulder
   For ritual pieties,
 White flower-garlanded heifers,
   Libation and sacrifice,
 But there on the shining metal
   Where the altar should have been,
 She saw by his flickering forge-light
   Quite another scene.

 Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
 Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
 And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
 A crowd of ordinary decent folk
 Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
 As three pale figures were led forth and bound
 To three posts driven upright in the ground.

 The mass and majesty of this world, all
 That carries weight and always weighs the same
 Lay in the hands of others; they were small
 And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

 She looked over his shoulder
   For athletes at their games,
 Men and women in a dance
   Moving their sweet limbs
 Quick, quick, to music,
   But there on the shining shield
 His hands had set no dancing-floor
   But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, 
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

  The thin-lipped armorer,
    Hephaestos, hobbled away,
 Thetis of the shining breasts
   Cried out in dismay
 At what the god had wrought
   To please her son, the strong
 Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
   Who would not live long.  

I really like this poem, it has strong imagery, talks about one of my favourite epics, the Trojan war and it also touches on the theme of the spiritual emptiness that arises from oppressive government systems.

Also a great book that I feel would be more topical to r/soccer is Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby. Great book on being an Arsenal fan, it's worth a read if you have time! My favourite quote from it:

To get where he did, Gus Caesar clearly had more talent than nearly everyone of his generation . . . and it still wasn't quite enough. [...] Gus must have known he was good, just as any pop band who has ever played the Marquee know they are destined for Madison Square Garden and an NME front cover, and just as any writer who has sent off a completed manuscript to Faber and Faber knows that he is two years away from the Booker. You trust that feeling with your life, you feel the strength and determination it gives you coursing through your veins like heroin . . . and it doesn't mean anything at all