Nike Mad 90 Pack: Where Art Meets Football with Mattia Guarnera
The Nike Mad 90 Pack is about taking football memory and giving it a new surface. Four boot eras, four different energies, rebuilt through the Air Max 90. For Total 90, that memory has always felt especially visual: opti-yellow, black graphics, target details, strike zones and a kind of early-2000s football attitude that was hard to miss.
For the global launch of the pack, Nike looked to the cities and communities carrying those references forward now. For T90, that city was London, and the artist was Mattia Guarnera.
A painter from South East London, Mattia’s work sits naturally in the space between legacy and rework. He is not trying to copy the past. He is more interested in building on top of it, pulling familiar cultural codes into a new setting and letting them hit differently. That made him the right creative to take on the Laser era: a period of Nike Football built on power, accuracy and a rawness that still feels tied to cages, concrete, YouTube clips and the Wayne Rooney Street Striker years.
We linked up with Mattia in his bespoke London creative studio to talk T90 stencils, football’s visual language and what happens when art and the game meet properly.
Mattia grew up around football in the way a lot of London kids do. He played casually, had the dream of becoming a footballer at one point, but the game itself was never the whole centre of his life. What pulled him in was the spectacle around it: the culture, the clothes, the atmosphere, the visuals.
“Creatively I was always more drawn to the spectacle around football. The culture, the visuals, the fashion, the atmosphere.”
That distinction matters. Mattia is not approaching the Nike Mad 90 Pack like a boot reviewer or a collector lining up old release dates. He is looking at it as a painter, someone tuned into shape, reference and feeling. Even his early football memories lean that way. Not tactics boards or technical drills, but fail compilations, YouTube videos and the strange visual world football built around itself in the early internet years.
Still, the boots were there. His first pair were Nike Total 90s in black and red. After that came pink Mercurials. Years later, working with Nike on a project built around one of those same eras, the circle is hard to ignore.
“It’s funny because now it feels like things have come full circle.”
That full-circle feeling runs through the project. Nike approached Mattia after looking for a way to bring his practice into the football space, and the Mad 90 Pack gave that conversation a clear reason to exist. The brief was rooted in homage, but not nostalgia for its own sake. Total 90 already had a visual identity strong enough to stand on its own. The work was about taking that identity and making it feel active again.
“The ethos of it, paying homage to football culture and legacy, aligned naturally with my work. That’s really what my practice is about: building on top of existing cultural legacy and reworking it in a new way.”
For T90, the source material is rich. This was football before everything felt fully polished. A rougher, louder, more direct era. The boot looked like it was built for contact. Target graphics, heavy contrast, bright yellow, visible strike language. It belonged to a time when power had its own look, when the shot itself felt like the whole point.
Mattia’s stencil work taps into that. It takes the graphic confidence of the Total 90 Laser and pushes it through his own hand. The result is not just a poster for a shoe. It feels closer to a piece of football visual culture: part tribute, part remix, part London translation.
The process with Nike was collaborative rather than closed. There were rough outlines, but space to move. Mattia describes it as a back and forth, with compromises on both sides until the work landed somewhere that felt right. That balance feels important for a project like this. Too faithful and it becomes archive decoration. Too loose and the reference disappears. The best version sits in the middle, where the old code is still readable, but the new work has its own pulse.
That is also where football culture feels most alive right now. People are not just looking backwards. They are pulling from the past and styling it into the present. Old shirts with new fits. Archive boots through lifestyle shoes. Familiar graphics turning up in art, fashion and design. The reference matters, but only if it can move.
“I think people love references now. They love mixing old and new together. That’s what excites me most about football culture, taking the legacy of the past and building something new from it without losing what made it special in the first place.”
That line could sit underneath the whole Nike Mad 90 Pack. Hypervenom, Mercurial, Total 90 and Tiempo all come from specific moments in the game. The Air Max 90 gives them another context. Mattia’s work does the same for T90, taking a boot era remembered for power and accuracy and turning it into something graphic, physical and current.
Asked to sum the project up in one sentence, he keeps it simple:
“Building on football’s past while creating something that feels completely new.”
That is the point. The old boot did its work. The new version has somewhere else to go.
