Naples, 1989: Roberto Baggio comes of age
“I’m not Maradona — he’s something else entirely.” Roberto Baggio may have been wise to distance himself from the best player in the world, but there was a time when comparisons with Napoli’s captain were inevitable, especially if you wore the number ten shirt. For three seasons Baggio had ostensibly fulfilled that role for Fiorentina following the retirement of club captain Giancarlo Antognoni. But they were frustrating years conditioned by painful recovery from the career-threatening damage to his right knee suffered while playing for Vicenza in May 1985 and again for his new club in September 1986. I’ll spare you a gory retelling of the hundreds of stitches, and dramatic weight loss, and the tears that he would never play again.
By 1988 Baggio had regained fitness and had begun to leave an impression on a league already packed with attacking talent. He scored 15 goals during the 1988-89 campaign and two more by week four of the 1989-90 season. Next up was a visit to Naples. Napoli remained unbeaten in Serie A under new mister Albertino Bigon, yet Maradona had so far yet to kick a ball. He’d fallen out with club president Corrado Ferlaino, and in protest had granted himself an extended vacation after that summer’s Copa América. Wearing a heavy beard and the number 16 shirt, Maradona made his belated return to the side as a substitute in a goalless UEFA Cup tie at Sporting, just three days before the Fiorentina match. The following Sunday he again started from the bench, alongside a young Gianfranco Zola. Fiorentina’s coach, Sven-Göran Eriksson, had also gone to Lisbon, Benfica specifically. His replacement, Bruno Giorgi, was the same man that had launched Baggio’s career at Vicenza and taken the club from Serie C1 to Italy’s top flight.
Such mini subplots may have sold some newspapers in the days leading up to the match, but this was 1989: “social media” meant chatting at the bar over a macchiato and the morning papers, while Serie A had yet to reorganise its weekend schedule to favour the casual armchair spectator. Referees still dressed in black, and all matches kicked off simultaneously on a Sunday afternoon. On 17th September 1989, as Napoli and Fiorentina took the field at the Stadio San Paolo, Inter and Juventus were lining up to face each other some 400 miles away at San Siro. Not all eyes were on Naples, and any hype generated before kick-off was tempered by the collective understanding that regardless of the sacred rituals and frenzied passions that calcio no doubt cultivates, sometimes a football match is just a football match.
And what a match it was. Perhaps still groggy from their trip to Portugal, Napoli started poorly and by half-time were two-nil down. Maradona came on for Massimo Mauro after the interval, and within ninety seconds of the restart had already missed a penalty. Stefano Pioli deflected the ball into his own net, then Careca equalised. Three minutes remained when a Maradona cross was met by Giancarlo Corradini’s head: 3-2. The result put Napoli on top of the Serie A table, which is where they finished the season in April. Though the unlikely comeback launched Napoli’s march towards a second scudetto, the game is still recalled for one reason only: Roberto Baggio, who scored both of Fiorentina’s goals. The second was a routine penalty, but the first saw the young forward travel three-quarters of the length of the pitch with the ball (in Italy they call this kind of run a “coast-to-coast”). It was the sort of individual effort with which Baggio would become forever associated, and to which magazine articles are devoted some thirty-five years later. Only one other active player in Serie A could have scored such a goal, but on this occasion he could only watch in admiration from the Napoli bench.
The move began in the twenty-second minute inside Fiorentina’s own penalty area, where a swift exchange between Napoli’s twin attacking threats, Careca and Carnevale, was anticipated by the balding Battistini who, in the libero tradition, wore his shirt untucked. He immediately played the ball out to the pragmatic Dunga, a player whose very existence defied every Brazilian footballer stereotype. The stocky mediano turned and found Baggio, still deep in his own half. Eleven seconds later Fiorentina were in front. What happened in between Baggio receiving the ball and depositing it in the back of the Napoli net is hard to describe, and even harder to explain. Over 50,000 people witnessed the goal with their own eyes, but such accounts can be unreliable; for this kind of forensic study one must turn to the video evidence. The television images are equally hazy and deeply saturated, but their vibrant colours and elongating shadows instantly convey a warm afternoon in September. As Baggio starts to move up field, his socks already shoved down towards his ankles, not even the halfway line — let alone the opposition’s goal — has yet come into view. Surely even he must have been only vaguely aware of his destination, which at that point was represented by a distant rectangle in his peripheral vision. No player in that position thinks, I’m going to score. Or maybe they do. Baggio once described a similar goal against Milan as “the kind I used to score in the hallway at home, only this time the hallway was San Siro.”
Baggio trots unencumbered into Napoli’s half and then quickly outpaces Alemão, who soon gives up the chase. The camera switches to a tighter angle as defenders arrive to halt Baggio’s one-man attack, appearing one by one like hapless bad guys in a kung-fu movie. First up is Alessandro Renica, whose challenge Baggio evades easily, cutting inside and hopping over a trailing left leg with the apparent nonchalance of a Kenyan steeplechaser. Next, Corradini comes hurtling into view with a desperate, sliding lunge, but both Baggio and the ball are already long gone. Recognising that something special is developing, the television director cuts back to a wider shot as Baggio enters the box. Only Napoli’s goalkeeper, the improbably named Giuliano Giuliani, stands in his way. If Baggio had been any other player, he might have laid the ball square to present unmarked Argentine forward Oscar Dertycia with a simple tap-in. But he wasn’t, and so he doesn’t. Instead he feints to shoot with his right foot before rolling the ball past Giuliani with the sole of his same boot. Facing an open goal, a left-foot finish looks like the natural option, but Baggio pulls off a final twist, shifting his weight to slot home with his right. By the time Napoli’s Luca Fusi follows the ball over the line, the goalscorer is already jogging towards the corner flag to celebrate.
Two-and-a-half years earlier Baggio had scored his very first Serie A for la viola goal at the other end of the same stadium. That goal — the type of free-kick that would also become a trademark — earned Fiorentina a point and ensured the club’s survival on the penultimate day of the 1986-87 season. For Baggio, it also represented a release, and a belated rite of passage. He’d missed the entirety of the 1985-86 season and the bulk of 1986-87 following two surgeries in as many years to restore the wreckage of his ligaments and cartilage. Yet few home fans will likely have remembered Baggio’s first goal, as it coincided with the occasion of Napoli’s historic first scudetto. In 1989 the reaction was very different. This time the San Paolo crowd rose as one to applaud not just Baggio’s skill, vision and impudence, but also his perseverance — attributes to which the partenopei had grown accustomed thanks to their own number ten, for whom the stadium would one day be named.
The next evening Baggio and Carnevale appeared together in matching Azzurri training wear from Italy’s Coverciano training headquarters on Il Processo del lunedì, Rai Tre’s long-running Monday night football show. Hosted by Aldo Biscardi, a journalist with a background in law, the weekly live transmission helped popularise the slow-motion machine known as moviola, an innovation that could extend heated debates concerning dubious offside decisions into the early hours. For this episode, given his exploits the previous afternoon, Baggio himself was asked to comment on the footage while his “gol da leggenda” was played back at a reduced speed.
“We’ve enlarged the pictures as much as possible so we can also see Baggio’s facial expressions,” begins Paolo Valenti by way of an introduction, aiming a telescopic pointer at a giant screen like a university lecturer. “This is Renica,” he notes, as though identifying a continent for the benefit of a class of struggling geography students. “I’d like kids who want to play football to see this,” he continues, describing the goal in didactic terms more suited to a masterful set-piece of cinema before breaking down the action into a checklist of pure technical accomplishments. “Ball control, change of direction, acceleration, deceleration, an obstacle jump and then the finishing touch,” Valenti concludes. “It’s a textbook of style.”
Valenti never disclosed his footballing allegiance, but after his unexpected death in 1990 it was revealed that he was a Fiorentina supporter. Baggio’s own live commentary is predictably mundane by comparison: he sounds more like a man offering directions to the nearest farmacia. There are long pauses as he waits for the moviola to catch up — the playback speed has been slowed down to the extent that it takes a full seventy seconds for the goal to be replayed. When the ball finally nestles in the corner of Napoli’s goalmouth Valenti cries, “Olé!” The audience breaks into a spontaneous applause. No other words are necessary.
Two nights later Azeglio Vicini’s Italy played a friendly with Bulgaria in Cesena, where Baggio (wearing the number seven shirt) scored another doppietta. One goal was another coolly dispatched penalty. The other — a typically pacy run around the keeper and a cool finish into an unguarded net — proved that his performance at Napoli the previous weekend wasn’t a one-off. In less than a week, Baggio had confirmed the interest of Juventus and consecrated his status as the host nation’s most exciting young talent ahead of Italia ’90. The 1989-90 season is generally considered Baggio’s best in a Fiorentina shirt. There was much more to come in his career, but by the end of the decade Baggio was no longer compared to Maradona or anyone else. From that point forward other players would be compared to him, though few ever really could.
This article was originally published in issue 31 of Mundial magazine.