The Roberto Baggio Conundrum: A Requiem for the Death of a Man’s Youth

In the summer of 1994, Roberto Baggio, the special son of Italy and beloved son of many millions of football fans across the world died a very strange and painful existential death.

In the stuff of Greek tragedy, Baggio had bravely stepped up and taken responsibility for the hopes of his nation in the biggest moment of his lifetime.

It might be a “guy” thing but I do not know any man who wanted him to fail in that moment.

You see, for men of a certain age, Roberto Baggio is a true hero.

Off the football field, he was completely atypical and completely alien – but there was a magnetism about the man. Darkly enigmatic, effortlessly cool, but in his own strange way honourable and humble, Baggio somehow eluded the stereotypical Italian machismo for fully realised individuality.

In a deeply conservative and Catholic society, he was a Buddhist and sporting (and remarkably) pulling off a ponytail that few men would even dream of wearing, he was one of the most recognisable and iconic football players in the history of the sport.

Before that fateful penalty kick he was also the best. A sublimely silkily skilled footballer, with his mesmerising balance, composure and balletic close control, he could easily have been a professional ballet dancer.

Such was the flair and creativity he was capable of at his absolute peak (he was World Player of the Year in 1993), that he single handedly converted many young males across the world to the hitherto unpopular Italian cause.

In 1994 I was just 11. But I began to watch the Italy team, and like many others, was drawn to Baggio – to such an extent in fact, that much to the disgust of my brother, I actually supported Italy in that 1994 final.

When my brother did ask me for an explanation, I said that whereas the Brazil players were simply excellent footballers, Baggio was an artist.

It took moral courage to play the game the way he did. Real courage and real passion.

In fact whilst at Juventus, Gianni Agnelli referred to Baggio as an artist, comparing his elegance to the painter Raffaello.

And then – in one decisive miss in one decisive minute of his life in the 1994 World Cup Final Penalty Shootout, everything changed.

Baggio was never quite the same player again.

It is the sort of existential question that is almost the subject of a play: Why did the man lose his mojo? Why did the artist lose his ability to paint in the same way?

In one painful but perceptive piece of live football commentary which I still remember at least 20 years afterwards, a commentator stated that in the latter half of his career, Baggio really had become “a shadow of himself”.

Although by any reasonable account, Baggio would have his moments after that decisive penalty miss, score many more goals and have an excellent remainder of a career, something almost imperceptible (perhaps at a spiritual level) had changed deep within him. He had lost that lightness of touch and finesse. He had become haunted and serious.

From that moment onwards, Baggio always carried grief.

Although still physically and technically able, at a very fundamental level, that youthful idealism had simply vanished.

Deep down he knew that whatever he achieved after that penalty miss, his chance to take the world’s biggest sporting trophy back home to his nation had gone and would never return.

In truth it was the death of a dream and a type of spiritual death from which he would never truly recover.

I was gutted for him.

But even today for me, and many men like myself, Baggio will always remain a hero – a symbol of the creative possibility of youth and of the catastrophe in our lives which brings about its end.

That playful drop of the shoulder - that swivel and turn. The idea that you can always find a way by trying something different – something crazy even – that passion was something that Baggio embodied more than any other player before that penalty kick and was missing in his game more than any other player immediately afterwards.

For the football fan of my generation, Baggio is a symbol of lost youth and that one moment in your life which deep down (even whilst it happens) you know you will never fully recover from. That moment at which everything changed so that the world you enter afterwards is a different one to the one you left before it happened.

The moment at which your world becomes a darker and more hopeless place. The moment when your youth died a terrible and painful death.

The moment that you are never truly and completely out of.

In September 1994, Italian daily La Repubblica wrote: “Around Roberto Baggio there is the tinkle of crystal shattering. Inside Roberto Baggio, there is still something cracking – it could be the dream of winning a cup, or the tired shiver of a missed penalty. Perhaps even a muscle. And so old and new weaknesses return – the physical and psychological limits of a young man used as a totem and a talisman, of a champion of whom too much has to be asked, and if it’s not all, it’s nothing. Every cure, now, seems like a palliative, an aspirin given to a dying man.”

On 2 December 2019, I had my Roberto Baggio moment.