THE PRESSURE OF being the main man for a top footballing country is often underestimated, and a feeling few people can ever fully understand or relate to.
In some ways, it is hard to compare Roberto Baggio to anyone in football currently.
He was a maverick, a small, skilful striker who could beat players for fun and was capable of conjuring magic out of nothing.
In modern football, at the elite level, those types of luxury players are a rarity.
Yet there are plenty of instances at this World Cup of superstars with the weight of a nation on their shoulders.
It is true to an extent of Erling Haaland, Lionel Messi, Harry Kane and Kylian Mbappé.
Yet perhaps the closest equivalent to Baggio now is Spain’s Lamine Yamal.
At his best, Yamal is arguably the most talented player in the world – as was true of Baggio in his pomp, winning the 1993 Ballon D’Or.
Like Yamal, Baggio was part of a talented team. Four of Italy’s starting XI for the World Cup final had been part of a Milan side that defeated Barcelona 4-0 in the Champions League’s climax two months previously. In total, seven Milan players made the squad for the tournament.
And similarly to Yamal, Baggio went into the tournament carrying an injury.
That issue likely contributed to his slow start at the ’94 World Cup, failing to find the net against a Paul McGrath-inspired Ireland before being substituted just 22 minutes into the 1-0 win over Mexico after goalkeeper Gianluca Pagliuca’s early sending off forced coach Arrigo Sacchi to take drastic action.
As the attacker walked off the pitch, Baggio could be seen saying, “This guy is crazy,” a public criticism Sacchi chose to forgive as his star player started every subsequent fixture at the tournament.
Unlike Yamal, Baggio didn’t score at all in the group stages – Italy just about got over the line, as a 1-1 draw with Mexico meant all four teams finished on four points, and they pipped Norway to third place thanks to their superior goals-scored record.
By this stage, Baggio was under serious pressure to deliver. In 1990, he became the world’s most expensive footballer when Juventus bought him for £8 million from Fiorentina. However, at that summer’s World Cup, he was still a young player and not an automatic starter, with the likes of Gianluca Vialli and Andrea Carnevale initially preferred in attack.
Baggio was an unused sub for Italy’s first two matches, and also began on the bench for their semi-final with Argentina, which they lost on penalties despite the prodigious talent converting one of their spot kicks. He finished the tournament with two goals (including the stunning individual effort above against Czechoslovakia), four fewer than his strike partner and the tournament’s official best player, Salvatore Schillaci.
1994 was different. Baggio’s talent had fully blossomed, and he was unquestionably a key figure for the Azzurri.
After being fortunate to escape the group stages following a series of unconvincing displays, Baggio and Italy were on the brink of another disaster in the round of 16 against Nigeria.
It was a comparable scenario to the 2026 clash between Argentina and Egypt, as one of the tournament favourites looked set for a shock loss against an unfancied African team.
But like Messi the other night, Baggio came good when it mattered most. The 27-year-old coolly slotted home an equaliser in the 89th minute before converting a penalty in extra time to send Italy through.
Baggio was the Azzurri’s hero again in the quarters, as he settled a tight encounter with Spain with a composed late finish – this time in the 88th minute – to ensure a 2-1 victory.
The semi-final against Bulgaria, meanwhile, was both Baggio and the team’s best performance of the tournament. Within 25 minutes, he had a superb brace that seemed to confirm his status as the world’s best footballer (though Romário ultimately pipped him to the Player of the Tournament award).
Hristo Stoichkov’s penalty just before half-time set up a nervy second half, but the Italians saw out a deserved win.
The occasion was marred, however, by Baggio picking up a hamstring strain that forced him off in the second half.
He had already been dealing with niggling injuries throughout the tournament and this latest setback complicated matters.
The striker was doubtful for the World Cup final against Brazil, but played with the aid of a painkiller injection.
Baggio, though, was a diminished force and struggled to influence a cagey match that finished 0-0 after 120 minutes.
Cruelly, the Caldogno native then attracted headlines for the wrong reasons when he blazed over the final penalty in the shootout to confirm Brazil’s triumph.
In an instant, the story of Baggio’s ’94 World Cup had changed irrevocably.
The player was visibly distraught, but it was only later that the extent to which that moment haunted him became clear.
“He’s been quite reclusive in his retirement until recently,” Mark Gordon, author of Roberto Baggio: The World Cup Years, tells The 42. “He doesn’t give many interviews. But he did speak about the psychological impact. He said he felt like dying when he missed the penalty, and there were so many elements of it that he found difficult to understand.
“He was so good at penalties and scored so many penalties; he almost couldn’t understand himself that he had missed, and why he had missed, and couldn’t get his head around that. So [it had] a big psychological impact on him that he carried through the rest of his career.”
Baggio himself put it starkly. “If I had a gun, I would have shot myself,” he told The Athletic in 2025. “At that moment, I wanted to die. That’s how it was.”
Baggio reacts to his miss in the 1994 World Cup final against Brazil. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Baggio’s legacy is complicated. The 1994 World Cup remains his apex, mainly for the brilliance he showed in those three knockout matches, even though the unfortunate ending tarnished the experience.
His club legacy feels equally exceptional and anti-climactic. He never finished a season as the league’s top scorer, but with 205 goals, only six players have a superior record in the history of Serie A.
He played with three of Italy’s biggest clubs – Juventus, Milan and Inter – but of that trio, only Juve really worked out, scoring 78 goals in 141 appearances.
Post-1994 World Cup, his career continued to be dogged by injuries, which partially explains his underwhelming stints at Milan (12 goals in 51 appearances) and Inter (nine goals in 41 appearances).
It was with the smaller Italian clubs where he truly thrived. As a youngster, two standout seasons with Fiorentina had earned him the big-money move to Juve, and in the latter half of his career, he excelled at both Bologna (22 goals in 30 appearances) and Brescia (45 goals in 95 appearances).
It was at a time when Serie A was considered both the best and most defensive league in the world, so a striker simply reaching double figures over the course of a season was no mean feat.
Due to injuries and age, Baggio had to adapt his game as his career progressed, still capable of great moments while lacking his trademark burst of pace. It perhaps explains why he had many of his best moments at smaller clubs like Bologna and Brescia, who were willing to base the team around him, akin to Messi and Argentina in 2026.
Another fascinating quirk with Baggio is that despite featuring in three World Cups, he never played at the Euros. Italy did not qualify in 1992, while he was left out of the squads for 1996 and 2000, owing to concerns related to fitness and form.
His outstanding sole season at Bologna was enough to get him on the plane for the 1998 World Cup. Regardless, the 31-year-old was not at the same level as four years previously and was perceived as a backup to the younger and similarly talented Alessandro Del Piero.
But injuries to others meant Baggio played a bigger part than expected, starting two out of three group games and finishing the tournament with two goals.
Just as he did in 1990, Baggio came off the bench to score in a shootout in which Italy were knocked out – this time in the quarters by eventual World Cup winners France. Still, he had shown admirable character to step up and exorcise the ghosts of ’94.
Baggio had also scored a penalty in the group stages to rescue a late 2-2 draw in their opener with Chile, continuing a largely excellent record from the spot over the course of his career.
Four years later, there was another clamour to have Baggio included in Italy’s squad for the 2002 World Cup.
The veteran began the season with Brescia like a man determined to make the panel, scoring eight goals in his first nine appearances.
But an ACL tear suffered in September appeared to dash his hopes of reaching a fourth successive World Cup.
Against the odds though, he made it back by the end of the campaign, adding three more goals in three Serie A appearances and conceivably coming good just in time for the tournament.
Unlike Sacchi though, Giovanni Trapattoni was unwilling to gamble on Baggio’s fitness and left him out of the squad to the dismay of many fans and pundits.
“Trapattoni promised him that he would keep him in mind if he could manage to get back; he put himself through hell to get back fit,” Gordon recalls. “But then Trapattoni decides not to pick him for the tournament, which was a huge blow to Baggio, certainly from interviews he’s given since. I think he took it personally, in a way, that Trapattoni didn’t take him to that tournament.”
Fittingly for a player with a reputation as a maverick, Baggio has largely remained a fringe figure in Italian football since retiring.
Despite doing his coaching badges and holding a Uefa Pro Licence, he has never managed a team.
After the Azzurri’s humiliating group-stage exit from the 2010 World Cup as they finished bottom of their group behind Paraguay, Slovakia and New Zealand, Baggio was appointed president of the technical sector of the Italian Football Federation.
Just over a year later, the Italy legend, with the help of roughly 50 collaborators, presented a 900-page document titled ‘Renewing the future’. According to reports, it proposed an overhaul of the federation’s talent development paths, including a standardisation of coaching methods, a more structured scouting network and a shared digital database for measuring players’ progress.
Yet in January 2013, Baggio resigned from his role, complaining that the project was “literally dead” and that his recommendations had been ignored.
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Perhaps not coincidentally, since then, Italy have failed to qualify for three successive World Cups.
Another aspect of Baggio that separates him from most footballers is his atypical faith.
Despite being born in a predominantly Catholic country, he is a devoted Buddhist.
The conversion occurred after he had suffered a career-threatening knee injury as a young player on the verge of joining Fiorentina from Serie C1 side Vicenza, and was struggling to deal with the emotional toll of this setback.
A chance encounter with a practitioner at a record shop, during which they began discussing religion, paved the way for this bold decision.
Baggio credits Buddhism for his inner strength, extraordinary willpower and recurring ability to play through the pain barrier during his turbulent career.
It also ostensibly influenced the player’s on-field behaviour and demeanour, his characteristic ice-cold finishes in the most pressurised of circumstances.
“There are certain times you do see him getting emotional. It’s not as if he’s an unemotional player,” adds Gordon. “But there is a sense of calmness in those goal celebrations.”
Roberto Baggio speaks in June 2026 during a press conference as part of the Italian Fifa Legends Tour in Toronto. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
In June 2024, Baggio suffered minor injuries after being robbed at gunpoint in his villa near Vicenza, while watching Italy’s European Championship clash with Spain.
“His family were held, they were tied up, and he was assaulted, and it was a really traumatic experience,” Gordon explains. “There was an interview with his daughter, who explained that he decided that he should be getting out in the world more than he has been, and it’s almost given him a different perspective on the world, a different lease of life.
“So that was a bit of a turning point for him, and his daughter became his agent, and he’s been a lot more visible, doing interviews and making public appearances, which is good to see, because there are so many people who still want to see him, still want to hear from him.”
Nonetheless, Baggio has retained that maverick spirit, and there remains a degree of ambivalence when it comes to self-promotion and fame.
“He’s been quoted a few times as saying that he doesn’t like to be a pundit, doesn’t like to speak about other players; he said he doesn’t like when he sees pundits on the TV that weren’t very good players speaking about players who are,” adds Gordon.
“I think he is quite shy; even looking back on old interviews on YouTube, he does come across that way, and maybe something else that affected him around ’94 after missing the penalty was just how famous he’d become, and how difficult he must have found that if he was quite a shy person.”
Roberto Baggio: The World Cup Years by Mark Gordon is published by Pitch Publishing. More info here.
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'He said he felt like dying when he missed the penalty'
THE PRESSURE OF being the main man for a top footballing country is often underestimated, and a feeling few people can ever fully understand or relate to.
In some ways, it is hard to compare Roberto Baggio to anyone in football currently.
He was a maverick, a small, skilful striker who could beat players for fun and was capable of conjuring magic out of nothing.
In modern football, at the elite level, those types of luxury players are a rarity.
Yet there are plenty of instances at this World Cup of superstars with the weight of a nation on their shoulders.
It is true to an extent of Erling Haaland, Lionel Messi, Harry Kane and Kylian Mbappé.
Yet perhaps the closest equivalent to Baggio now is Spain’s Lamine Yamal.
At his best, Yamal is arguably the most talented player in the world – as was true of Baggio in his pomp, winning the 1993 Ballon D’Or.
Like Yamal, Baggio was part of a talented team. Four of Italy’s starting XI for the World Cup final had been part of a Milan side that defeated Barcelona 4-0 in the Champions League’s climax two months previously. In total, seven Milan players made the squad for the tournament.
And similarly to Yamal, Baggio went into the tournament carrying an injury.
That issue likely contributed to his slow start at the ’94 World Cup, failing to find the net against a Paul McGrath-inspired Ireland before being substituted just 22 minutes into the 1-0 win over Mexico after goalkeeper Gianluca Pagliuca’s early sending off forced coach Arrigo Sacchi to take drastic action.
As the attacker walked off the pitch, Baggio could be seen saying, “This guy is crazy,” a public criticism Sacchi chose to forgive as his star player started every subsequent fixture at the tournament.
Unlike Yamal, Baggio didn’t score at all in the group stages – Italy just about got over the line, as a 1-1 draw with Mexico meant all four teams finished on four points, and they pipped Norway to third place thanks to their superior goals-scored record.
By this stage, Baggio was under serious pressure to deliver. In 1990, he became the world’s most expensive footballer when Juventus bought him for £8 million from Fiorentina. However, at that summer’s World Cup, he was still a young player and not an automatic starter, with the likes of Gianluca Vialli and Andrea Carnevale initially preferred in attack.
Baggio was an unused sub for Italy’s first two matches, and also began on the bench for their semi-final with Argentina, which they lost on penalties despite the prodigious talent converting one of their spot kicks. He finished the tournament with two goals (including the stunning individual effort above against Czechoslovakia), four fewer than his strike partner and the tournament’s official best player, Salvatore Schillaci.
1994 was different. Baggio’s talent had fully blossomed, and he was unquestionably a key figure for the Azzurri.
After being fortunate to escape the group stages following a series of unconvincing displays, Baggio and Italy were on the brink of another disaster in the round of 16 against Nigeria.
It was a comparable scenario to the 2026 clash between Argentina and Egypt, as one of the tournament favourites looked set for a shock loss against an unfancied African team.
But like Messi the other night, Baggio came good when it mattered most. The 27-year-old coolly slotted home an equaliser in the 89th minute before converting a penalty in extra time to send Italy through.
Baggio was the Azzurri’s hero again in the quarters, as he settled a tight encounter with Spain with a composed late finish – this time in the 88th minute – to ensure a 2-1 victory.
The semi-final against Bulgaria, meanwhile, was both Baggio and the team’s best performance of the tournament. Within 25 minutes, he had a superb brace that seemed to confirm his status as the world’s best footballer (though Romário ultimately pipped him to the Player of the Tournament award).
Hristo Stoichkov’s penalty just before half-time set up a nervy second half, but the Italians saw out a deserved win.
The occasion was marred, however, by Baggio picking up a hamstring strain that forced him off in the second half.
He had already been dealing with niggling injuries throughout the tournament and this latest setback complicated matters.
The striker was doubtful for the World Cup final against Brazil, but played with the aid of a painkiller injection.
Baggio, though, was a diminished force and struggled to influence a cagey match that finished 0-0 after 120 minutes.
Cruelly, the Caldogno native then attracted headlines for the wrong reasons when he blazed over the final penalty in the shootout to confirm Brazil’s triumph.
In an instant, the story of Baggio’s ’94 World Cup had changed irrevocably.
The player was visibly distraught, but it was only later that the extent to which that moment haunted him became clear.
“He’s been quite reclusive in his retirement until recently,” Mark Gordon, author of Roberto Baggio: The World Cup Years, tells The 42. “He doesn’t give many interviews. But he did speak about the psychological impact. He said he felt like dying when he missed the penalty, and there were so many elements of it that he found difficult to understand.
“He was so good at penalties and scored so many penalties; he almost couldn’t understand himself that he had missed, and why he had missed, and couldn’t get his head around that. So [it had] a big psychological impact on him that he carried through the rest of his career.”
Baggio himself put it starkly. “If I had a gun, I would have shot myself,” he told The Athletic in 2025. “At that moment, I wanted to die. That’s how it was.”
Baggio’s legacy is complicated. The 1994 World Cup remains his apex, mainly for the brilliance he showed in those three knockout matches, even though the unfortunate ending tarnished the experience.
His club legacy feels equally exceptional and anti-climactic. He never finished a season as the league’s top scorer, but with 205 goals, only six players have a superior record in the history of Serie A.
He played with three of Italy’s biggest clubs – Juventus, Milan and Inter – but of that trio, only Juve really worked out, scoring 78 goals in 141 appearances.
Post-1994 World Cup, his career continued to be dogged by injuries, which partially explains his underwhelming stints at Milan (12 goals in 51 appearances) and Inter (nine goals in 41 appearances).
It was with the smaller Italian clubs where he truly thrived. As a youngster, two standout seasons with Fiorentina had earned him the big-money move to Juve, and in the latter half of his career, he excelled at both Bologna (22 goals in 30 appearances) and Brescia (45 goals in 95 appearances).
It was at a time when Serie A was considered both the best and most defensive league in the world, so a striker simply reaching double figures over the course of a season was no mean feat.
Due to injuries and age, Baggio had to adapt his game as his career progressed, still capable of great moments while lacking his trademark burst of pace. It perhaps explains why he had many of his best moments at smaller clubs like Bologna and Brescia, who were willing to base the team around him, akin to Messi and Argentina in 2026.
Another fascinating quirk with Baggio is that despite featuring in three World Cups, he never played at the Euros. Italy did not qualify in 1992, while he was left out of the squads for 1996 and 2000, owing to concerns related to fitness and form.
His outstanding sole season at Bologna was enough to get him on the plane for the 1998 World Cup. Regardless, the 31-year-old was not at the same level as four years previously and was perceived as a backup to the younger and similarly talented Alessandro Del Piero.
But injuries to others meant Baggio played a bigger part than expected, starting two out of three group games and finishing the tournament with two goals.
Just as he did in 1990, Baggio came off the bench to score in a shootout in which Italy were knocked out – this time in the quarters by eventual World Cup winners France. Still, he had shown admirable character to step up and exorcise the ghosts of ’94.
Baggio had also scored a penalty in the group stages to rescue a late 2-2 draw in their opener with Chile, continuing a largely excellent record from the spot over the course of his career.
Four years later, there was another clamour to have Baggio included in Italy’s squad for the 2002 World Cup.
The veteran began the season with Brescia like a man determined to make the panel, scoring eight goals in his first nine appearances.
But an ACL tear suffered in September appeared to dash his hopes of reaching a fourth successive World Cup.
Against the odds though, he made it back by the end of the campaign, adding three more goals in three Serie A appearances and conceivably coming good just in time for the tournament.
Unlike Sacchi though, Giovanni Trapattoni was unwilling to gamble on Baggio’s fitness and left him out of the squad to the dismay of many fans and pundits.
“Trapattoni promised him that he would keep him in mind if he could manage to get back; he put himself through hell to get back fit,” Gordon recalls. “But then Trapattoni decides not to pick him for the tournament, which was a huge blow to Baggio, certainly from interviews he’s given since. I think he took it personally, in a way, that Trapattoni didn’t take him to that tournament.”
Fittingly for a player with a reputation as a maverick, Baggio has largely remained a fringe figure in Italian football since retiring.
Despite doing his coaching badges and holding a Uefa Pro Licence, he has never managed a team.
After the Azzurri’s humiliating group-stage exit from the 2010 World Cup as they finished bottom of their group behind Paraguay, Slovakia and New Zealand, Baggio was appointed president of the technical sector of the Italian Football Federation.
Just over a year later, the Italy legend, with the help of roughly 50 collaborators, presented a 900-page document titled ‘Renewing the future’. According to reports, it proposed an overhaul of the federation’s talent development paths, including a standardisation of coaching methods, a more structured scouting network and a shared digital database for measuring players’ progress.
Yet in January 2013, Baggio resigned from his role, complaining that the project was “literally dead” and that his recommendations had been ignored.
Perhaps not coincidentally, since then, Italy have failed to qualify for three successive World Cups.
Another aspect of Baggio that separates him from most footballers is his atypical faith.
Despite being born in a predominantly Catholic country, he is a devoted Buddhist.
The conversion occurred after he had suffered a career-threatening knee injury as a young player on the verge of joining Fiorentina from Serie C1 side Vicenza, and was struggling to deal with the emotional toll of this setback.
A chance encounter with a practitioner at a record shop, during which they began discussing religion, paved the way for this bold decision.
Baggio credits Buddhism for his inner strength, extraordinary willpower and recurring ability to play through the pain barrier during his turbulent career.
It also ostensibly influenced the player’s on-field behaviour and demeanour, his characteristic ice-cold finishes in the most pressurised of circumstances.
“There are certain times you do see him getting emotional. It’s not as if he’s an unemotional player,” adds Gordon. “But there is a sense of calmness in those goal celebrations.”
In June 2024, Baggio suffered minor injuries after being robbed at gunpoint in his villa near Vicenza, while watching Italy’s European Championship clash with Spain.
“His family were held, they were tied up, and he was assaulted, and it was a really traumatic experience,” Gordon explains. “There was an interview with his daughter, who explained that he decided that he should be getting out in the world more than he has been, and it’s almost given him a different perspective on the world, a different lease of life.
“So that was a bit of a turning point for him, and his daughter became his agent, and he’s been a lot more visible, doing interviews and making public appearances, which is good to see, because there are so many people who still want to see him, still want to hear from him.”
Nonetheless, Baggio has retained that maverick spirit, and there remains a degree of ambivalence when it comes to self-promotion and fame.
“He’s been quoted a few times as saying that he doesn’t like to be a pundit, doesn’t like to speak about other players; he said he doesn’t like when he sees pundits on the TV that weren’t very good players speaking about players who are,” adds Gordon.
“I think he is quite shy; even looking back on old interviews on YouTube, he does come across that way, and maybe something else that affected him around ’94 after missing the penalty was just how famous he’d become, and how difficult he must have found that if he was quite a shy person.”
Roberto Baggio: The World Cup Years by Mark Gordon is published by Pitch Publishing. More info here.
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