A football team sponsored by art at the centre of Waterford preparations for FAI Cup final

We wade this week into another important debate. Can football be an art form?If you spend your Friday nights on League of Ireland terraces, with nothing to warm your ruddy cheeks and knuckles but the heat of flares and communal frustration, then we acknowledge that you might not be advocating hanging anything in front of you in the Louvre.Spending time in Waterford this week in advance of Sunday’s FAI Cup final, however, allowed us to come across proof that football can indeed be the stuff of high art.The city’s Garter Lane Arts Centre is currently hosting an exhibition titled Trust Artists Unconditionally, which looks back on the centre’s unique set of commissions between 1995 and 1999. Artist Garrett Phelan and the then Garter Lane director Annette Clancy wanted to take art beyond the four walls of the gallery, and so they got a £10,000 grant from the Arts Council which they distributed to a select number of artists with very few strings attached.READ MOREThey were given the money and told to come up with an original idea for public art that would get people talking. The only rules were that they couldn’t break the law and the cash had to be accounted for.Artist Tom Molloy bought hundreds of scratch cards and hid them in books across Waterford city’s public library, with a view to drawing attention to the connection education, knowledge and opportunity have with luck and opportunity. The phenomenon made national headlines when one reader won £100 on a scratch card discovered in a book and then discovered his wife had found one too, with coverage speculating about the identity of the mystery benefactor.Maurice O’Connell designed “Marathon Man”, which involved getting a train from Dublin to Waterford and running an identical loop around the city centre and its outskirts every day for a month, stopping for water in the same shop each time. His purpose was to become an anonymous figure ensconced in and drawing attention to the rhythms of everyday life in Waterford.St Joseph's AFC's Art-sponsored kit for the 1998 season. Photograph: Davi Matheson/DGM English artist Theo Sims decided he would also use sport for his art piece, and spent some time in Waterford pubs to meet local people and scope out the right team. He alighted on a local soccer club, St Joseph’s AFC, which has been active since 1923 but had just come off a season in which they lost every game they played. Sims hung around Waterford, speaking with players and others involved at the club to better understand its history and the local area. He also went to watch them play and was struck by their ragtag appearance, where it seemed the kit approach was a case of “any hue of blue will do”.He spent time with players and others involved at the club decided to sharpen their appearance. He redesigned the club crest – incorporating a replica of the football that appears on the Barcelona badge – and presented them with a brand new set of blue-and-white jerseys. The sponsor on the front of the jersey read “Art”. It was a neat inversion of the norm for the artist to act as patron, though we have been unable to confirm whether St Joseph’s became the first soccer club in Ireland to be sponsored by an abstract noun. It had a tangible effect.[ ‘It’s horrible football to play against’: Conan Noonan on Waterford’s remarkable turnaroundOpens in new window ]Having lost every game they played the season before, and opened the 1998 season with a defeat, the first game in which St Joseph’s wore their new jerseys resulted in an 8-0 hammering of Stradbally.Given Sims didn’t use his grant money to flood the St Joseph’s team with ringers, I asked Annette Clancy, then the director of Garter Lane, how the sponsorship could have led to an uptick in performance and results. She said it was a psychological thing, that the team’s confidence was reinstated by the fact Sims had spent time with them, “discussing their history, talking with them about the good old days of the team, and who they were”.In this respect, art was a form of football because this captures a wider truth about sport.All competition, be it a county championship or a parkrun (or in St Joseph’s case the TSB Cup in Waterford’s junior soccer ranks), offers a sense of validation; of knowing that you are worthy of the attention of recording your name beside a scoreline. Sport provides the mirror from which you have the perspective to take pride in yourself and where you come from.This power is greatly multiplied on showpiece Irish sporting occasions like Sunday’s FAI Cup final. Waterford and Derry are this year’s beneficiaries. The grandiosity of the stadium, the size of the crowd, the TV cameras and the media coverage: it is extremely gratifying to stand at the centre of all of this and feel that the whole country is paying attention to you.Sport affords all involved the basic dignity of feeling important, all the more so on cup final days.