Roberto Baggio Gazzetta Football Italia profile and interview from 1993

This great feature profile on Roberto Baggio was taken from the excellent Gazzetta Football Italia season video review in 1993.
Sven-Göran Eriksson (Sampdoria coach at the time) gives his opinion after coaching Baggio at Fiorentina, whilst there's also an interview with the Number 10 himself at his own sports shop 'Roberto Baggio Sports', conducted by the one and only James Richardson.

[@balajirao8426]

I loved watching Baggio as a boy, he made football look like an art form, i know how much the Italian tifosi love him, such a shame he was stuck with managers with no imagination most of his career

[@eliyashaaleph-iart5926]

Thanks one-of-a kind Fantasista 10 for extensively archiving and painting in-depth the pure mercurial poetry, beauty, and genius of Baggio, Maradona, Zico, et al. -- and especially Baggio, who is the purest expression and innateness of illuminative talent, Italy's (and Europe's) most gifted fantasista and mezzapunta beyond Meazza, Rivera, and Mazzola, as the legendary journalist Gianni Brera once said, followed by a similar insight and praise by Brian Laudrup and Alessandro Del Piero, among others -- in a very articulate, living, and refined way both on KZbin and your website, in a way that is especially rare today with the aggressively shallow dumbing down of much of football journalism and its related punditry (and easily even the Ballon d'Or). You have such a lovely scaling of the strata of understanding a pure solitary, creative, free, and imaginative number 10 (chiefly Baggio among the Fuori Classe, the genus or speciation of whom is nominally near-extinct or not encompassed today in an increasingly highly non-philosophical and non-aesthetic era of football, despite my enjoyment of Messi's pure giftedness) as that archetypal-quintessential Renaissance artist (a-la Michelangelo, Leonardo, Caravaggio, Raffaello, Perugino,...), with all his divine introversion, inner geometry, and singular vision, let alone all his romantic-poetic-prodigious qualities, joys, and tragedies, beyond just an athlete or a footballer or a memetic regurgitation or an ad hoc and post hoc statistic. ~ Roberto Bagg10 il Gen10 ~

[@fantasista1022]

Thank you for taking the time to write such beautiful thoughts and description! We must not let these types of players be forgotten and the magic and artistry in the game should never be lost - we want to inspire future generations of players that football can be beautiful, and encourage them to play freely, creatively and spontaneously. The aim of fantasista10 is to illuminate and celebrate those that have made us fall in love with football all over the world.

[@eliyashaaleph-iart5926]

@@fantasista1022 Thank you first and foremost for all that you've done and keep doing in-depth, which I won't take for granted ever: a sheer labor and artistic-poetic-philosophical curation of love and imagination. I've long been deeply touched by this channel and the fantasista10.co.uk site. Truly one of a kind, especially in the midst of the loud but shallow banalities of much of football today. My pleasure to contribute some helpful (even if "verbose", forgive me for this, not to make anyone bored but rather to touch those who mostly already deeply know in their solitude of the likes of Baggio!) comments on this channel and share your work with some friends I know (like my friend Adolfo Miglino here on KZbin, among those few pure fantasista, especially Baggio, romantics and knowers left today). Thank you everyone else who shares the heart of this channel as well and who keeps its pulsations alive. Grazie!

[@eliyashaaleph-iart5926]

For those who don't yet know Baggio beyond the extremely oversimplified surface of what he did or did not at World Cup 1994 (or those who are new to this channel's rarefied fantasista philosophy), here's a proper context and footnote about the "iconography" of Baggio. I was in Firenze (Tuscany) for a while and Baggio is so beloved there, along with Antognoni, Bergonovo, Batistuta, and Chiesa, other than in Brescia and Vicenza and Turin (where certain romantic admirers of Baggio who were traditional Juventus supporters condemned the increasingly corrupt and unorignal coup at the club after Baggio's departure, despite him having singularly, sacrificially, and catalytically helped pave the way for Juventus' future successes past AC Milan, quite like what Cantona did at Manchester United, thus marking the end of Agnelli Senior's era; it was this Agnelli who described Baggio as Raffaello and Caravaggio; and there are other special Baggio romantics, such as my friend Adolfo Miglino with his own lovely KZbin channel here) -- and in Japan (a Bodhisattva is Baggio to some!) and Argentina (ask especially some romantic Boca fans about that). And he is the purest gifted soul of genius and the closest thing of divine art and beauty as well as imagination and spirit to Maradona (or Zico) Italy (if not Europe) has. Ask the late legendary in-depth journalist Gianni Brera (for example) about this, who wrote truly poetically and philosophically about Baggio and football (other than Agnelli Senior at Juventus, not his certain more corrupt "calciopoli scandal" successors, unlike so much loud shallowness in most of today's dumbed-down sports/football journalism laden with much hodge-podge statistics, pseudo-philosophy talk, and regurgitation without depth, even a real mathematician or statistician can tell people more about certain arbitrary parametric and often substantial limits of statistics: when the few exceptional writers do write these days, you may be overjoyed). So finally a thing about Baggio's "humble trophy cabinet" at the club level (outside the Ballon d'Or, Onze d'Or, Ballon d'Platinum, Guerin d'Or, and the FIFA and World Soccer Player of the Year awards): one must know the proper in-depth context of the Serie-A in the 1980s and 1990s when, with the exception of Berlusconi's wealthy and mafia-like (mafia-run and often corrupt) AC Milan management (and Inter Milan is another example but somehow less severely corrupt, despite the deserved beauty and glory of Van Basten-Gullit-Rijkaard-Baresi's AC Milan), most Serie-A clubs (even the likes of Juventus) did not and could not distribute quality players equally between goal, defense, midfield, and attack, plus there was a rather fair limitation of having maximally three-four foreign players per team. So a real quality number 10 fantasista (outside of AC Milan) was often very alone in having to uplift his lop-sided team. That is why Baggio at Juventus (and at Fiorentina before that) had to suffer it alone (divine solitude, if you will), just like some other creative playmakers (or sometimes certain charismatic strikers) from that era like Maradona at Napoli (he was a solitary genius who elevated Napoli like so!), Zola and Brolin at Parma, Giannini (and later Totti) at Roma, Signori at Lazio, Mancini and Vialli at Sampdoria, Lentini at Torino, Matthaus and Bergkamp at Inter, Batistuta at Fiorentina, all the way to even Ronaldo Nazario at Inter Milan (who never won the league nor the Champions League, but despite subsequent deep injuries due to the harshness of Serie-A's ultra-organized defenders, he was really the world's best when winning the 1997-98 UEFA Cup, though it was the end of a long era in UEFA club-level competitions and the Serie-A before one dirty profit-oriented club/management could self-pamperingly and conveniently buy many expensive foreign players across different playing positions and stack them in one said wealthy and often corrupt team, which also much defines the post-Baggio Juventus of Del Piero, Zidane, and Nedved who were less solitary as number 10s despite their truly beautiful substantial talent, similarly for Messi today whose gifts I enjoy very much, but not the unjust and corrupt dumbing down of the Ballon d'Or in this era). So even Maradona's Italy-era club-level trophies are exactly "humble" like Baggio's (without the non-eligible Ballon d'Or at the time even ever given to Maradona), namely two Serie-A titles, one Italian Cup, and one UEFA Cup (the real dynamic and novel multi-strata embryo behind the Champions League before its characterless dumbing down into today's Europa League, though the much "calmer" and more "slower" and "predictable" European Cup was also in the mix) -- it was the pure solitary-singular-crystallized moments of individual genius, imagination, and inspiration of the pure number 10 fantasistas that matter here more than the titles and mere statistics (including Baggio's sheer moments of truth and beauty in the 1994 World Cup where a severely injured and messianic Baggio, who alone dragged Italy to the final, was forced to play in the blazing dry desert Death-Valley-like heat of Pasadena in the final, near where I live now, and random-brutish penalty lotteries as a historic game decider, instead of a rematch, are just dumb and numb and getting dumber and number, for even Platini, Zico, and Maradona had missed rather decisive penalties in the World Cup though not in a final match, besides Baggio's penalty miss was never in open full-match play and he is still the best and most elegant playmaker, dribbler, ball-curver, and penalty taker in Serie-A's history, and finally Baggio, like Cruyff and Zico before him and Messi after him, didn't even have to nominally "win" that final, unlike Italy's rather mediocre win in 2006 yet without a true individually sublime fantasista spirit's active role in that, especially with Del Piero's and Totti's unfairly wasted meagre role there, but Pirlo did shine in-depth; the 1992-93 UEFA Cup, as well as the 1994-95 UEFA Cup; and the 1990-91 UEFA Cup Winners' Cup, almost winning it alone with Juve before a near miss against Johan Cruyff's "Dream Team" Barcelona in the semi-finals, and he was also top scorer with 9 goals in 8 matches, and 27 goals and so many assists that season in total, though mainly playing as an attacking midfielder or a withdrawn trequartista behind Casiraghi and Schillaci in Gigi Maifredi's daring-innovative-liberal attacking formation of 4-3-1-2 or 3-5-2, when most clubs were grid-locked under the conventional-conservative-pragmatic 4-4-2 formation).

[@reza3275]

Loved the tone of your summary. As if it’s Ray Hudson describing Roberto Baggio.

[@Sofwan786]

Thanks

[@fantasista1022]

Welcome :)

[@eliyashaaleph-iart5926]

R. Bagg10 il Gen10: not a "footballer", but a pure Renaissance artist a-la Leonardo, Michelangelo, Perugino, Caravaggio, Rafaello... Such a pure illuminative and archetypal expression of art, vision, and imagination. His perpetually broken knee and physical fragility as well as his divine introversion and prodigious sorrow -- and the pure-marble gift of "luminous angels singing in his legs and painting such heavenly eternal and ethereal curves on the melancholic canvas pitch". A reality and quality and beauty and tragedy and fantasy and ecstasy and alienation and genius and pain and revolution and freedom so very pure. The purest and most gifted of Italian fantasistas: every singular vision, curving dribble, and curling free-kick of his is sublime poetry, painting, and sculpture. In more "mundane" footballing terms, note that the Serie-A of the 1980s and 1990s was not only the best in the world (among the Fuori Classe after Meazza, Rivera, Mazzola, and Boniperti: Platini, Zico, Maradona, Baggio, Gullit, Van Basten, Savicevic,...), but was largely ultra-defensive (that pragmatically bastardized catenaccio: "ultra-organized grid-lock system") and anti-thetical to the creative solitude and free imagination of a true play-making number 10 -- plus the pitch, like the nearly "fascist-dictatorial-jealous-unoriginal" coach, was often too rugged, weathered down, and downright oppressive and miserable, the ball was a heavy draconian leather "gift from hell", etc. (compare this with all the incredible pamperings and sumptuous comforts of today's futsal-Play Station-ish football, including super-smooth synthetic "almost digitally green" carpets, fancy-skin boots, and lighter super-slick/hyper-aerodynamic balls with "easily maneuverable spin", with all of those allowing so many more goals and goal ratios -- not to mention many expensive international players stacked in just one unfairly wealthy team, the shallow and ultra-commercial corruption of what was essentially the old dynamic format of the UEFA Cup into the Champions League, while dumbing down the UEFA Cup into the Europa League, the further corruption of the Ballon d'Or and sports journalism, etc., which was "pretty impossible" in the Serie-A and European football of the bygone era).

[@sparkidee]

Great video do you have the entire Gazetta show?

[@fantasista1022]

Sparki Dee Thank you. Unfortunately no longer any full length ones - used to have stacks of them! Please check out our other videos as some were also taken from Gazzetta 👍

[@LeoMessi-dz1rj]

Sadly a year later he lost to penalties against Brazil in 1994 World Cup final in the biggest game of he’s career

[@gojakla12]

This is something what makes me angry about this great player. Even if he'd scored the penalty for 3:3 if brasilian after him'd scored they'd lost anyway BUT the fact that in nowdays so called greatest players of the world like Messi or Ronaldo are not able to take their national teams to the final like he took Italy in 94 it's not emphasized enough.