I generally don't mind art about football, there's a special place for it. I mean good art, not shitty photographs of kids playing soccer in a dusty town. That makes me warm in the wrong way. I mean like that Douglas Gordon and Phillip Parreno Zidane video piece, that became remarkably apt after the 2006 World Cup. It was a terse portrait of both the man and of soccer itself.

Soccer is a trending topic in art at the moment (no prizes for guessing why). But in two recent works about soccer I have noticed another trend: football becomes a symbol for migrants and integration. As the centrepiece of his recent show, Sidestep, Simon Gush presented In the Company of, a video of two teams of migrants in Belgium playing five a side soccer across railway tracks (also the best piece on that show. Gush is good when he isn't trying to be too clever). And in an as yet unexhibited piece, Shifting The Goal Posts, Dan Halter swaps goalposts between a field in Musina, South Africa and a field in Beitbridge, Zimbabwe. It's a good metaphor, the tension between two halves, common but opposing goals, conflict. There is also a cultural exchange associated with professional soccer, teams are made up of players bought from all over, becoming more capitalist than nationalist. Soccer becomes this transcendent thing, where some louts from England are cheering on a man from Ghana.

The popularity of soccer gives the art that everyman quality, which is good. It also makes good video because people on the outside world readily participate in the fun, and readily understand the metaphor.

But is it too easy?