The beautiful game: revived art prize gives football its creative due once more

Football and the art world have long remained distant but the breadth of entries for this year’s award revivals a healthy revival

It may be the Beautiful Game, but in its early decades football was a rare subject for artists. The Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni whirled an athlete’s body into a vortex of movement in his 1913 painting Dynamism of a Soccer Player. You can see one of the earliest fine art depictions of a match – a smoggy, factory-adjactent scene called Any Wintry Afternoon in England – at the Manchester Art Gallery. If 1930s abstraction is more your thing, you can enjoy decoding the geometric shapes in Kazimir Malevich’s Painterly Realism of a Football Player – Color Masses in the 4th Dimension. I’m guessing the small green pea shape is a ball.

These, in any case, were exceptions. In 1953 the Football Association launched an art prize, backed by the newly formed Arts Council: the winning works included Going To The Match by LS Lowry, with its crowds flocking to Bolton Wanderers’ then home ground, Burnden Park. An exhibition of the submissions, Football and The Fine Arts, toured the country and the FA secretary, Sir Stanley Rous, said he hoped it would finally break the barrier between those two worlds.

Reader, it did not. But it did set a precedent that is being enthusiastically revived. It’s even possible that, after several decades of hurt, the world’s favourite sport may finally be getting its artistic due. There have been three iterations of the Football Art Prize in the past 20 years, and the latest arrives at the National Football Museum this month (from the Sheffield Millennium Gallery) with a breadth of entries that demonstrate how resonant the subject can be.

Meticulous still lives – of battered balls, or boots mid-clean – ache with memory. There’s haunting photo-documentary: Bangladeshi youths playing a pickup game in the middle of a rubbish dump, pitches affected by climate change. “You see the whole gamut of footballing experience on display,” says the museum’s exhibitions director, Pip Diment. Her assumptions – she initially imagined herself hanging portraits of famous moments and iconic players – were overturned. “Pretty much every one of the artists is expressing how football matters to them, but they’re responding and reacting in such different ways.”

There are a few famous faces nevertheless. One artist worked in charcoals to create a hyper-realist bust of N’Golo Kanté. Roy Keane appears twice, once proffering a plate of prawn sandwiches to his viewer, another time in a diptych with Micah Richards. The latter is the work of Conor Rogers, whose satirical series of paintings on abandoned betting slips took second prize. They include a poignant image of Sheffield United’s manager, Chris Wilder, head in hands, next to a repurposed bookmaker’s logo asking: “Lad r u ok?”

Diment says football and art are still perceived as almost entirely separate spheres, so it’s interesting that this year’s winning work – a video by Alina Akbar – explores the connection between “high” and “popular” culture. In Footwork, the multimedia artist segues between keepy-uppy skills and the choreographed movements of Kathak, an Indian classical dance style. The combined rhythms and sounds create a mesmerising meditation on identity, related to the northern South Asian community in which she grew up.

Football, she says, is a post-migration culture whose value is sometimes overlooked by the very people who adopted it. “Whenever I went to my great-grandparents’ house, football was on TV all the time and I’d be on their street, trying out tricks,” says Akbar. “My grandad and his brothers were really excited when I started playing, because they’d gone through the more racist era of the 70s, and they never went to games.”

For all its social themes, Akbar’s work still expresses the balletic movement and poise that Picasso once pursued in the flowing form of his ceramic sculpture Footballeur. It’s interesting how so much of the art in the show reflects football culture rather than the game itself – watching from the sofa, in the pub, on the touchline of a recreational game. Perhaps it’s hard for artists to compete with the volume of visual content that the games already provide. And we have moved a long way from a classically inspired fascination with athletes’ physiques (for comparison, check out the leaping goalkeeper in Cecil Beaton’s mid-20th-century painting Footballers, with his unashamedly pert buttocks).

Tim Marlow, the director of the Design Museum and chair of the judging panel, points out that “artists today have unashamedly adopted the position of the spectator or the fan” and that it’s rare to find works that try to get inside the experience of the footballer themselves. One of his favourite exceptions is the 2006 film, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, which he calls “a great piece of conceptual art”. “It’s a really intimate study of the game, which in the current era, when you’ve got referees with head cams, might feel old hat, but nothing like it had been done before.”

And then there’s Tottenham’s stadium gallery, OOF, where exhibitions of football-related work have ranged from Roger Mayne’s 1950s street photography to AC Larsen’s polemic on the FA’s trans ban. This month brought the opening of Trackie McLeod’s celebration of Wag culture. Historic football art, meanwhile, is rocketing in value. Four years ago Lowry’s Going To The Match went for £7.8m at auction, a record price for the Salford artist’s work, and in 2022 one of Nicholas de Staël’s Parc des Princes 1952 abstract series – based on a friendly he watched between France and Sweden – became the most expensive football artwork when it sold for £16.7m.

Money has always been a key element in the art world, and there are notable collectors within the footballing world today, from billionaire club owners to cultured former players. Fabio Capello has a well documented passion for Kandinsky; David Beckham’s collection is said to include Andy Warhol, Banksy and Yayoi Kusama; Michael Ballack is spotted at major art fairs around the world. The whimsically named J St John, who organised Football and Fine Arts, told the Liverpool Daily Post 70 years ago that art needed a new form of patronage, to help people appreciate the painted canvas in the same they understood the artistry of Joe Mercer, Ferenc Puskas and Stanley Matthews. Could his dream finally be coming to pass?