The owner of Aston Villa Football Club has given £5 million to the National Portrait Gallery, the institution’s largest-ever single donation.

The ground-floor galleries are being renamed the Lerner Galleries in recognition of billionaire Randy Lerner’s donation. 

Ohio-born Mr Lerner, 45, became the second US owner of a Premier League club in 2006 when Villa’s board accepted a £62.6 million takeover of the club. 

US sports team owner Malcolm Glazer had purchased a majority share of Manchester United in 2005. 

Mr Lerner has supported the National Portrait Gallery since 2002, when Sandy Nairne became its director. 

The Lerner Foundation was set up by the family of Alfred Lerner, the Villa owner’s father, who died in 2002. The gift will be made over three years and help to build up the gallery’s Portrait Fund, for the acquisition of portraits for the collection. 

It will also be used to enrich Gallery research, displays, digitisation of the collection, educational initiatives, and outreach in schools, colleges and hospitals. 

Mr Lerner said: “On behalf of my mother and my sister it is an enormous privilege to express our support for the National Portrait Gallery financially. 

“We are enthusiastic supporters of the Gallery’s director and the board for their inspired and creative management of the Gallery’s collection and acquisition programme.” 

Mr Nairne said: “I am delighted that the Lerner family is expressing such confidence in the future of the National Portrait Gallery. This builds on the tradition of key support in recent years of a number of major benefactors.”  

Lerner didn’t grow up in an arty household in Cleveland, Ohio.

Both his parents were from New York. His father, ex-military, made it big in banking, setting up the MBNA credit-card empire, and bought an American football team, the Cleveland Browns, whose ownership now rests with Lerner. 

He is not the first arts supporter to come from football. Fabio Capello, the new England boss, was recently unmasked as a collector, owning works by, among others, De Chirico, Chagall and Cy Twombly. John Madejski, OBE, chairman of Reading, who has many treasures, including a Degas bronze and who mounted a Ferrari Testarossa as a work of art in his home, gave £3 million to the Royal Academy in 2004.