Footballers' union buys Lowry painting for less than the cost of a promising wing-back

THE FOOTBALL world was celebrating its latest million-pound transfer last night, confident its latest acquisition would at least behave itself.

The Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) spent pounds 1,926,500 on a Lowry painting depicting crowds on their way to a football match. The price was the highest paid for a Lowry or any modern British painting at auction, according to Sotheby's in London.

The PFA's chief executive Gordon Taylor, who bid by telephone, said of the painting, Going to the Match: "We wanted to buy it for football. We consider this one of the finest football paintings and it represents the heart and soul of the game - the anticipation of the crowds going to the match."

The work was painted in 1953. Sotheby's alerted David Beckham of Manchester United to the sale of the painting, which is set at Bolton Wanderers' old ground, Burnden Park. Beckham's wife, Victoria - Posh Spice - is understood to have dissuaded him from bidding because she did not like it.

The work, which features Lowry's distinctive, tiny matchstick people and evokes the pre-war games at Burnden Park, which were attended by huge numbers of people, was sold by a private collector. It has not been seen publicly since it was last exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1976.

The PFA intends to lend the painting to the Salford Art Gallery and Museum before moving it to the new Lowry Centre in Manchester in April. Andrew Kalman, director of the Crane Kalman Gallery, in Knightsbridge, London, which has sold hundreds of Lowrys, welcomed the PFA's pledge to keep this one in the North-west, where Lowry came from, on public display.

"Had it been bought by some secretive bidder, this wonderful and joyous painting celebrating football and people's love of football would have been lost to a public audience for a generation or more.".

Laurence Stephen Lowry RA was himself a football fan. The painting is based loosely on his memories of the ground and is a collage of impressions. Susannah Pollen, head of Sotheby's Modern British and Irish art department, said: "This is one of the great images of this century's greatest game and one of the most remarkable Lowrys we have ever handled."

The previous record for the sale of a British painting this century was The Crucifixion by Sir Stanley Spencer, which went for pounds 1.2m at Sotheby's in 1990.

Mr Taylor said of the price of Going to the Match: "I would have liked it for a lot less than that, but it is the football picture. It captures all the atmosphere of the game. It is always said that there is not enough literature and art surrounding the world's greatest game, so we are trying to build up a collection of memorabilia, caps, medals, jerseys - and good football pictures."