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

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…