“Football is a simple game,” the legendary Scottish soccer manager Bill Shankly once said. The sport, he added, is “made complicated by people who should know better.”

He probably had a point: Two teams, two goals and a ball. Around such a simple framework, a multibillion-dollar global industry revolves, with the top players catapulted to fame and riches, and entire countries practically shutting down for the biggest matches.

But 10 years ago, the German musician Carsten-Stephan Graf von Bothmer looked at the game and saw it in a different light: as a silent film in need of a musical score.

“With soccer there are scenes of success, of tension, of great passion; all the emotions that come from watching films also come from watching soccer,” he said in a telephone interview from Berlin recently.