Football Art Prize Reopens a 70-Year-Old Question at the National Football Museum

A video blending keepy-uppy with Kathak dance has won this year's Football Art Prize, now showing at the National Football Museum after its run at Sheffield's Millennium Gallery. Alina Akbar's Footwork segues between football skills and the choreography of an Indian classical dance style, building what the exhibition's organisers call a meditation on identity and post-migration culture. It beat a field that includes a hyper-realist charcoal bust of N'Golo Kanté and two appearances by Roy Keane. Football, it seems, has finally learned to sit for its portrait.

Why did it take 70 years?

Football was a rare subject for artists through the game's early decades. Umberto Boccioni's 1913 Dynamism of a Soccer Player offered one Futurist exception; Manchester Art Gallery holds Any Wintry Afternoon in England, one of the earliest fine art depictions of a match. Kazimir Malevich contributed Painterly Realism of a Football Player – Color Masses in the 4th Dimension in the 1930s.

In 1953 the Football Association launched an art prize backed by the newly formed Arts Council. LS Lowry won with Going To The Match, showing crowds heading to Bolton Wanderers' Burnden Park. The FA secretary, Sir Stanley Rous, said he hoped the touring exhibition, Football and The Fine Arts, would break the barrier between the two worlds. It didn't. But it set a precedent, revived enthusiastically in three iterations of the Football Art Prize over the past 20 years.

What's on the walls this time?

Pip Diment, the museum's exhibitions director, expected portraits of iconic players. Reality corrected her. "You see the whole gamut of footballing experience on display," she said. "Pretty much every one of the artists is expressing how football matters to them, but they're responding and reacting in such different ways."

The shortlist includes:

• Meticulous still lives of battered balls and boots mid-clean
• Photo-documentary of Bangladeshi youths playing on a rubbish dump, and pitches affected by climate change
• Conor Rogers's satirical second-prize paintings on abandoned betting slips, including Chris Wilder, head in hands, beside the repurposed logo "Lad r u ok?"
• Keane proffering prawn sandwiches, and in a diptych with Micah Richards

Who won, and why it matters

Diment notes football and art are still seen as separate spheres, which makes Akbar's exploration of "high" and "popular" culture a fitting winner. "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," Akbar said. "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."

Tim Marlow, Design Museum director and chair of the judging panel, observes that "artists today have unashamedly adopted the position of the spectator or the fan". His favourite exception is the 2006 film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, which he calls "a great piece of conceptual art" and "a really intimate study of the game".

Is the market listening?

Money suggests it is. Lowry's Going To The Match sold for £7.8m four years ago, a record for the Salford painter. In 2022 a work from Nicholas de Staël's 1952 Parc des Princes series, based on a France-Sweden friendly, fetched £16.7m — the most expensive football artwork. Collectors inside the game include Fabio Capello, devoted to Kandinsky; David Beckham, said to own Warhol, Banksy and Kusama; and Michael Ballack, spotted at major fairs. Tottenham's stadium gallery, OOF, runs football exhibitions from Roger Mayne's 1950s street photography to AC Larsen's polemic on the FA's trans ban, with Trackie McLeod's celebration of Wag culture opening this month.

Whether the 1953 dream of shared patronage has arrived remains arguable. But at £16.7m a canvas, the barrier looks considerably thinner.