We witness of how football has transformed from the global number one sport into not just a profitable business (from buying and selling of the players, to gambling and betting) into a mass cultural phenomenon that has affected all generations and various non-sports-related contexts. The aim of this study is: a) to present and analyze the transformation process of football from a global game and sport into the phenomenon of popular culture and mass media; b) to expose and underline the presence of football as a topic in a non-sports context, i.e. in prose texts (in literary text in Croatia and around the world) with praticular emphasis on Nick Hornby's very popular novel Football Fever (1992) as one of the most read novels written on and around football as its topic. The hypothesis is that the presence of football in the non-sports context (for example, within the literary context) contributes, changes and breakes the boundaries of thinking about sport simply as a phenomenon that combines the element of entertainment, profit and easily earned money. In other words, the paper shows in which way, how quickly and by means of which media sports (football) and other social structures, such as literature, can easily be connected. This points to the fact that football has become a valuable subject and topic of many studies throughout different fields of study as well as in various contexts: from prose texts, films and theatre plays to newspaper columns, tv shows and other. Following the aforementioned, the paper concludes that football stands as a valuable topic of numerous social dialogues and as such it should be addressed by other future studies.