Born in 1942 into a large Sardinian family where football was nearly as important as food, Aldo Inganni grew up in the mountain town of Orgosolo with a football at his feet and, more often than not, a pencil or piece of charcoal in his pocket. His father played for a local side, as did several of his brothers, cousins and uncles, and football dominated family life.

 

Sunday meals could become arguments about players, tactics and referees before the first course had been cleared from the table. Aldo played as well and was apparently quite good, but the family eventually realized that his unusual gift was not what he could create with the ball. It was what he could create after the match was over. As a boy, Aldo drew constantly. He sketched players from memory, filled notebooks with imaginary stadiums and drew scenes from neighborhood matches in which the streets and buildings of Sardinia became part of the game. As he grew older, those drawings became paintings and eventually the paintings became murals. It was a natural progression in Orgosolo, a town that would become internationally known for the extraordinary murals covering the walls of its homes, shops and public buildings.

 

The village itself became an open-air gallery, and while many of its best-known murals reflected politics, history, social struggles and Sardinian life, Aldo increasingly found his subject in the world he knew best: football. Inganni’s football paintings were rarely conventional portraits. He wanted movement, emotion and a little bit of chaos. He painted packed stadiums disappearing into Sardinian mountains, goalkeepers suspended impossibly in the air, children playing between old stone buildings and footballers emerging from explosions of color.

 

His work gradually blended traditional mural painting with graffiti, abstract shapes, splashes, drips and the rough visual language of the street. Sometimes the player was immediately recognizable. Other times the footballer was almost secondary to the movement surrounding him, as though the wall itself had captured a few seconds of a match and refused to let them disappear.That style reflected the way Aldo thought about football. He believed some of the game’s most important lessons were learned far away from organized training, on streets, in courtyards, between buildings and anywhere children could create a game. The uneven surface mattered. The wall that suddenly became another defender mattered. Playing against an older brother mattered. Having too many players and too little space mattered. Even arguments over the rules mattered. Those environments forced players to solve problems for themselves, and Aldo believed that was where imagination came from.

 

He was especially fascinated by deception. He would watch the position of a player’s shoulders, the movement of the eyes, the first step in one direction followed by an explosion in another and the tiny disguises great players used to manipulate defenders. To Aldo, a feint was almost identical to what an artist did with perspective: convince the eye that it understands what it is seeing and then reveal something completely different.

 

Perhaps appropriately, his own surname, Inganni, is the Italian word for deceptions or tricks. Over the decades, football changed enormously, but Aldo never stopped painting it. The subjects changed as generations of players came and went, stadiums became larger and the visual language surrounding football became increasingly modern, but he continued to sketch, paint and experiment.

 

Even today, at 84 years old, he remains fascinated by contemporary football and particularly by the young players who still possess the unpredictability and freedom he associates with the street game. He no longer spends endless days high on scaffolding covering enormous exterior walls as he once did, but he continues to paint, draw and develop new football compositions in his studio, assisted when necessary by younger members of his family.

 

For much of his life, Aldo also carried around another ambition that never quite happened. He wanted to paint in America. He had seen photographs and books showing the enormous murals covering buildings in American cities and became fascinated with the idea of bringing his particular version of European football culture across the Atlantic. Philadelphia especially captured his imagination because of its extraordinary mural tradition, while the painted walls of New York and, later, Miami showed him an entirely different American approach to street art.

 

Over the years he filled sketchbooks with ideas for murals he might someday paint there: an enormous footballer breaking through the brickwork of an American building, children playing beneath European stadium lights and imaginary scenes in which the streets of Sardinia somehow merged with the streets of an American city. Life, however, has a habit of leaving certain plans unfinished. Aldo raised a family, continued painting and remained deeply connected to Sardinia, and the American trip was continually postponed. By the time the opportunity became realistic, age had made the physical demands of traveling internationally, climbing scaffolding and spending weeks painting the side of a building increasingly impractical.

 

Aldo had more or less accepted that his American murals would remain drawings in his studio.Then he learned about European Street Soccer in the United States at WABA. What caught his attention was not simply the name. It was the idea behind it. Here was a program thousands of miles from Sardinia deliberately trying to preserve many of the qualities Aldo believed modern football was slowly organizing out of young players: creativity, improvisation, deception, individuality, adaptability and the ability to solve problems in the middle of chaos. European Street Soccer’s rapidly changing small-sided games, unusual numerical situations and emphasis on allowing players to discover solutions rather than constantly being given them reminded Aldo of the football he had spent a lifetime playing and painting. There was something wonderfully circular about it.

 

As a young artist, Aldo had painted children learning football in the streets because he believed those environments produced a particular kind of player. More than half a century later, an organization in America was intentionally recreating many of those same developmental conditions. The streets had crossed the Atlantic even if Aldo had not. The connection eventually led to an idea that gave his old American dream an entirely different ending. If Aldo could no longer realistically travel across the United States painting walls himself, perhaps his artwork could make the journey without him. He agreed to license a collection of his football artwork to European Street Soccer and WABA, allowing his paintings, illustrations and distinctive street-art imagery to become part of the visual world surrounding the program.

 

Murals, facility artwork, apparel, graphics and other projects could carry pieces of the artistic language he had developed over a lifetime in Sardinia.For Aldo, the appeal was never simply seeing his pictures reproduced in another country. What mattered was where they would live. His footballers would be surrounded by young players actually experimenting with the same ideas the paintings represented: trying something unexpected, disguising an intention, escaping pressure, improvising a solution, failing, adapting and trying again. Artwork that had begun with children playing football in the streets of an Italian village would now hang around children discovering their own version of street football in America.

 

At 84, Aldo Inganni still works from Sardinia. His studio is said to be crowded with old football photographs, unfinished canvases, paint-covered notebooks, stadium sketches and ideas accumulated over more than six decades. Some are carefully finished compositions and others are little more than frantic lines capturing a movement he noticed during a match the night before. Members of his family still bring him photographs and clips from matches, and contemporary players continue to find their way onto his drawing table. Football keeps changing, which means Aldo has never really run out of things to paint.

 

There are also stories, inevitably, about Inganni murals scattered around Sardinia that nobody has ever properly catalogued: a goalkeeper hidden behind an old workshop, a footballer painted on a farm building and an imaginary stadium somewhere overlooking the Mediterranean. Aldo has never shown much interest in confirming which stories are true. He seems to enjoy the uncertainty. Perhaps that is appropriate for an artist named Inganni. After all, Aldo has spent his life fascinated by that beautiful instant when a footballer makes everyone believe he is going one way and suddenly goes another. His paintings attempt to do much the same thing. They combine reality and imagination, football and art, order and chaos until it becomes difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins.And after spending a lifetime dreaming about painting football on the walls of America, Aldo Inganni finally found another way to get there.

 

He sent the art instead.