When Roberto Baggio stepped up to take his penalty in the shootout that would decide the 1994 World Cup final, the English commentator Brian Moore gave him a title that suggested the outcome was predetermined: “Roberto Baggio, the savior of Italy…” It was a fitting description for a man already nicknamed The Divine Ponytail and who entered the tournament as the reigning European and FIFA World footballer of the year. When he stepped up to take that fateful penalty, he had already proved his credentials on football’s biggest stage by being arguably the most spectacular player of the tournament.
Baggio had already come to Italy’s rescue many times throughout the tournament. Although he didn’t score in the group stages, when Italy went down a man and a goal against Nigeria in the round of 16, Baggio netted the equalizer in the 88th minute and then the winner from a perfectly executed penalty in extra time that kissed off the post and settled in the bottom left corner. Against Spain, he converted in the 88th minute again, this time to win the match by rounding the goalkeeper and scoring from such a tight angle and with such force that the recovering defender had no time to scramble the ball away. In the semifinal against Bulgaria—led by Hristo Stoichkov, one of his rivals for the tournament’s best player and forward—Baggio scored two early goals to put the game away. He was the reason why Italy made it to the final. He didn’t just enjoy the pressure of big moments; he came alive in them.
It was a surprise that Italy and Brazil went to penalties in that final. Anyone who had watched the tournament would have expected Baggio to have scored in the dying minutes to win the game, maybe even in the 88th again. But perhaps the moment wasn’t yet big enough for him. Maybe he needed more pressure.
Baggio scoring wouldn’t have won Italy the match. Franco Baresi and Daniele Massaro had missed their penalties before him. Italy had gone first, so Baggio’s penalty would have only equalized the score and saved Italy momentarily. Italy’s fate would still have been decided by the next Brazilian penalty taker, and if he missed, Baggio’s teammates would still have had to step up to win the tournament.
Maybe it was the perversion of his usual role that messed everything up. He was the fifth penalty taker, implying there was an understanding between manager and team that Baggio should be the one to decide the match. But when the moment came to him, he wasn’t there to single-handedly secure victory, as he had again and again in 1994; he was there to buy time. He was asked not to fulfill his heroic duty, but to merely delay his team’s fate. Maybe the sun was in his eyes, or perhaps the stars were misaligned. Maybe his ponytail wasn’t as curly and bouncy as it usually was, but when Baggio stepped up to take his penalty, something was off. What was expected to happen didn’t.
A second after announcing Baggio as the savior of his nation, Moore screamed: Baggio had missed. His shot had gone high and wide, into the crowd. Moore screamed, not like someone who was witnessing an incredible sporting moment, but instead with shock and disappointment, like a true believer finding out that his messiah was not only an ordinary human being but a failure. We had followed the savior to the mountaintop and there was no promised land. He was a pretender.
It’s a great irony and a devastating one for Baggio that the enduring image of the 1994 tournament is not the jubilation of the Brazilians—a team that starred Romário and Dunga and featured a young Cafu—and their supporters at the stadium and around the world, but of Baggio with his hands on his hips, head down, in defeat. The pose only lasted a few seconds, yet it was made permanent and timeless from every angle imaginable. You can find photos of that moment from his right side, behind him, from right behind the keeper as he celebrates, and from behind the net, whose white lines seem to cut Baggio into pieces—a perfect emotional metaphor. It’s hard, by contrast, to think of iconic images of Brazil from 1994, even though Romário finished with five goals—as many as Baggio—and won the award for best player of the tournament. What defined that World Cup was the gravity of Baggio’s failure, rather than anyone else’s success.
Reflecting on that failure to The Athletic in 2025, Baggio said: “If I had had a knife at that moment, I would have stabbed myself. If I had had a gun, I would have shot myself. At that moment, I wanted to die. That’s how it was.” He has since described his miss as “a wound that never closes.”
I was too young at the time to remember seeing Baggio miss that penalty—though I must have seen it on the grainy TV screen that my dad and my cousins watched the tournament on—but I have known the image of his failure for most of my life. It is an image of true despair: the total devastation of one of the greats of the game.
Baggio fell further and harder than anyone else ever had, and he never reached that stage again. His failure overshadowed everything he did in that tournament and with Italy.
Many great players have come up short in the World Cup or even the World Cup final, but no other moment can be seen as the complete failure that Baggio’s is. Zinedine Zidane was sent off after headbutting an opponent in the 2006 final, but he had already won the World Cup eight years earlier. Lionel Messi failed against Germany in 2014, but that defeat hardly fell on his shoulders: He was the best player at that tournament, after all, and more than a decade later, he would play in another final and win it. Baggio fell further and harder than anyone else ever had, and he never reached that stage again. His failure overshadowed everything he did in that tournament and with Italy.
Baggio played in the 1998 World Cup, and he scored a penalty against Chile in the group stage to tie the game at 2-2. He placed the ball gently into the bottom left corner. His teammates swarmed him in celebration, but Baggio didn’t smile or return their affection. He ducked under the hugs and swatted away the arms looking for high fives. He celebrated like a man who was still carrying the weight of failure from four years before. When Italy’s quarterfinal match against France went to penalties, Baggio shot first and scored. But the moment brought no redemption—Italy was knocked out of the tournament minutes later. His dream was to play in four World Cups, but when 2002 came around, he was excluded, thanks in part to a serious knee injury. (Baggio said that Italy should have taken him “even if I was in a wheelchair.”) Italy lost without him that year in the round of 16. Four years later, when they won it, Baggio had long since retired.
Baggio is near the top of the list of the greatest Italian players in the nation’s modern history, sharing a pantheon with the likes of Baresi, Paolo Maldini, Gianluigi Buffon, and Francesco Totti. It is a tragic lineage. Although he was connected to and played with members of the generation that won the 1982 World Cup and the one that won the 2006 tournament, he belongs to neither—he is right there in the middle without the same glory. Where they have images of themselves celebrating victory, his is the one with his hands on his hips in defeat. He’s lonely at the top, but for the wrong reasons.
I emphasize Baggio’s failure and the gravity of it, his lack of redemption and the enduring image of his worst moment, because when I see that image, when I think of this great player at his worst, I am not repelled—I feel welcomed by him. When Baggio failed to save Italy in 1994, he saved the rest of us. When he fell from savior to failure, he did something that so many players of his caliber could never do. He became human.
Hundreds of millions of us play football around the world, and anyone who has played the game in any formal, competitive capacity knows that the dominant experience of playing is that of failing. Talent and ability are critical, but there are so many external circumstances that go into winning that even though all players dream of the big moments, of winning the local championship, the domestic league, the intercontinental tournament, and the World Cup, only a handful actually get to experience the joy of the sport’s biggest successes at any level. The rest of us will come in second, third, fourth, and the rest of the places, all the way down to last. FIFA has 211 member nations, but only eight have won the World Cup.
On the mantle of my childhood home is a collection of soccer trophies and medals that my mother has kept from my childhood and teenage years. The first-place trophies and top-scorer awards stand out, but there are more second and third-place ones. In one U-14 tournament, I won top-scorer, and our team still lost in the final. I scored two goals but missed a late chance to tie the game up after dribbling through the defense. It was a goal I had scored countless times before and after—cutting in from the right toward the left edge of the box and then placing the ball across to the bottom of the right side of the post.
Yet that time, in the final, after two goals, the ball was just an inch or two off, and instead of nestling in the goal, it came back off the post. The keeper collected and that was it. Afterwards, I cried in the car, wearing the second place medal and holding the top-scorer award. I cried in the shower when we got home. And then I cried going to sleep. It wasn’t my first or last time losing, but it was when I truly learned that you can play your best and still be shunned by the fates.
Even though most of us are failures in football, it’s a shameful thing to acknowledge. You play to win and winning feels infinitely better than losing. I don’t think it would be sincere to pretend I didn’t step on the field every time wanting to win,, and that sincerity is key to Baggio’s position as the savior and patron saint of failures. It is critical that Baggio wanted to win more than anything, that his heart and soul went into that kick, and that when he missed, he wanted to die.
Through the struggle of playing—winning, losing, improving your weaknesses and maximizing your strength, challenging yourself against strong opponents and learning to work in collaboration with others—you learn about yourself and the world, and you show yourself to the world. By interpreting the game of football through your own personality and experiences, you make yourself vulnerable. Sometimes the stage is the 1994 World Cup final, but usually it is somewhere more insignificant, a regional championship or even just a public park. But wherever you are, as you step into a moment that could determine the narrative of your story, your whole being is exposed. There are few other moments in which we have full authorship over the meaning of our stories. You want to declare yourself and the whole journey leading up to that moment as worthwhile.
When you fail in those moments, there is an intense loneliness that comes not just with losing but being the reason that your team loses. It is a secluding sort of loneliness. You say to yourself, “I failed,” and that short sentence is an emotional prison. There is no way out of it, especially since the evidence before you cannot be changed no matter how much you want it to. When that happens, you simply want the ground to open up and swallow you whole, hiding your shame from yourself and the world.
Baggio felt those things. He felt what millions of us who have failed have felt, and because of that he is closer to us than the winners are.
Baggio felt those things. He felt what millions of us who have failed have felt, and because of that he is closer to us than the winners are. When great players win the World Cup, it is not only a testament to their abilities, but to how far they are from the rest of us. Zidane is a footballing god. Messi is a god. Kylian Mbappé, Ronaldo, Andrés Iniesta, Xavi, Buffon, Bastian Schweinsteiger, and so on and so forth—these are the figures that populate football’s Mount Olympus. These players have all known devastating losses, but they are defined by their victories. In the end, history will remember them as winners of the highest honor in all of football. They are immortalized in success.
Baggio is not with them, he is with us. He was the best player in the world, at the edge of true immortality. He was one penalty kick away from completing the story of the best player in the world winning the championship, the heroic narrative of football, and he fell short. He fell all the way from the top to the bottom. And I adore him for it.
This adoration changes nothing for him, and it does not redeem his failure, but it’s the lack of redemption, the finality of his failure, that elevates him into a saint of the people. Like Frodo failing at the final moment to destroy the ring, his weakness restores life to him. It snatches him back from the abstraction of greatness, from the margins of the human experience, and makes him a fragile being like any of us again. He is exceptional because he made it to the edge, but then, at the last possible moment, came back to us.
Baggio represents the greatest version of the ordinary human story. He tried his best and didn’t win. Most of us struggle with this kind of failure and know, through bitter experience, that we can do everything in our power to win and still lose. That life goes on, from one day to the next, even after defeat. We know the truth of life, that success is something to strive for, but it is not guaranteed. We feel failure as an indictment of our work and ourselves, even though we also know it is, more often than not, the result of forces that exist outside of our control. Sometimes your moment comes on the wrong day. Sometimes it is waiting for someone else, and not you.
Earlier this spring, I was playing pickup soccer with some friends at a field close to my apartment. In order to reach three teams of six, we roped in some new recruits, one of whom was someone whom I had met through work but who hadn’t played with us before. While we were warming up and passing the ball around, he said that being in that particular field was weird for him because it was where he missed a crucial penalty to win a local championship when he was twelve years old. Even though he was now in his mid-30s, being back on the field brought back all of those feelings of failure. As we shared similar stories of falling short, I felt so much closer to him. Him and I—millions of us—are children belonging to Baggio’s flock. He is always there with us, not consoling, but sharing in the pain.