football at the 1972 Summer Olympics

The 1972 Olympic football tournament, held in Munich, Augsburg, Ingolstadt, Nuremberg, Passau, and Regensburg, was played as part of the 1972 Summer Olympics. The tournament features 16 men's national teams from five continental confederations. The 16 teams are drawn into four groups of four and each group plays a round-robin tournament. At the end of the group stage, the top two teams advanced to the second group stage, where the second-placed teams in each group advanced to the bronze medal match while the first-placed teams advanced to the gold medal match held at Olympiastadion on 10 September 1972. The medalists were Poland (gold), Hungary (silver), and shared bronze medalists East Germany and the Soviet Union, the first of three consecutive Olympic football tournaments where all the medalists were communist countries and the first since 1956.

In 2017, the physician of the Soviet team revealed that the bronze medal match between the Soviet Union and East Germany was fixed at the request of Soviet coach Aleksandr Ponomarev.