Professional Footballers' Association charity to sell Lowry worth £8m

Going to the Match by LS Lowry has been given a top estimate of £8m by auction house Christie's

An LS Lowry painting, which has been valued at £8m, is to be sold by the Professional Footballers' Association charity to support its future work.

The Players Foundation (PF) said the financial crisis meant it had to sell Going To The Match at auction "in the interests of our beneficiaries".

A representative said the charity "no longer has any income guaranteed, so we have had to completely reposition".

Auction house Christie's said the 1953 work was an "iconic masterpiece".

Going To The Match was one of a number of works the artist painted on the theme of sports and has been on public display at The Lowry, the Salford arts centre which bears the painter's name and holds many of his works.

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The work won Lowry first prize in a 1953 exhibition, which was sponsored by The Football Association, and was last auctioned in 1999, when it was acquired by the charity for about £2m.

The foundation said it was "very proud that we have been able to make sure the British public have had the opportunity to enjoy such a wonderful piece of footballing memorabilia and art", but its trustees "recognise the current financial crisis means we need all the income we can obtain, and all our assets have to function for us to ensure our ongoing work".

"We want to continue to assist people with dementia and provide benevolent grants to those in real financial need, amongst other things," it said.

"This has led us to the inevitable decision that the Lowry has to be sold in the interests of our beneficiaries."

'No greater example'

The work will be sold at Christie's in London on 19 October, which said the painting was an "iconic masterpiece".

Nick Orchard, the auction house's head of modern British Irish art, said Lowry "mastered a distance in his art that offered him the opportunity to present his viewers with an entire scene unfolding before them".

"He used this displacement to great effect, often allowing people within the crowd to articulate the event itself," he added.

"There is no greater example of this than Going to the Match."

Lowry, who died in 1976, won first prize at an exhibition for Going To The Match

The Charity Commission recently officially warned the foundation about "mismanagement" between 2013 and 2019.

The regulator has been investigating the organisation, which supports past and present players, for several years and has informed the charity it will be taking the action because of "various failings".

The foundation, which was formerly known as the Professional Footballers' Association Charity but was now "legally separate" from the union, told the BBC that the commission had acknowledged "we have corrected everything we needed to from 2019".

"The charity has not lost a penny here and no beneficiary has lost out in any way, shape or form," it added.