Who wants Roberto Baggio? England perhaps, the US and Japan definitely, Italy apparently not. This week the player once known as the Little Prince of Italian soccer is in major crisis following his weekend walkout on his current side, Bologna, on the eve of a home league game against champions Juventus (who won 3-1).
Arguably the best known Italian footballer of his generation and a former World and European Player of the Year, 30-year-old Baggio (he will be 31 next month) seems to have touched a new low in a once glittering career. For this was the weekend when Bologna coach Renzo Uliveri told Baggio that he intended to drop him, leaving Baggio with the alarming conclusion that he is no longer guaranteed a first-team place even with Bologna, currently 13th in Serie A. "You know, Roberto is a quiet lad, someone who has never given anyone problems and if he does something like this, it's an indication of just how frustrated he is . . . " That comment was made yesterday by former Sampdoria, Torino and Italian midfielder Beppe Dossena, a long-time friend of Baggio. Like many in Italy, Dossena believes that Baggio may have come to the end of the road in his native land and should now think of moving on elswhere. "Everything in Italian soccer is so exaggerated, there's far too much emphasis on tactics, on how the coach prepares the game. If Baggio went somewhere else, where there is less pressure, then he would prove a hell of a good buy for some club because he is bursting inside with anger," says Dossena.
Ostensibly, Uliveri dropped Baggio because he believed that in a difficult match against a Juventus side all too capable of shutting him out, Baggio would prove irrelevant. Speaking on Italian radio yesterday morning Uliveri explained: "I explained to him why he wouldn't be playing . . . an explanation, by the way, which I didn't have to give him. All my players wanted to play against Juventus but I cannot pick a side on the basis of sentiments."
Although this was only the second time in 16 league games that Baggio has been dropped, it seemed as if the player was reliving his worst and most recent nightmares. It was all the more frustrating because he had chosen the relatively modest destination of Bologna last summer precisely to avoid such problems. An AC Milan player for two seasons, Baggio was not much surprised when he got the heave-ho last summer from re-appointed Milan coach Fabio Capello. Although Milan had received offers from clubs in England (Aston Villa), Spain (Atletico Madrid), Japan (Kawasaki Verdi) and the US (New York MetroStars), Baggio opted for Bologna because it seemed that there he was guaranteed regular first-team soccer, an essential requisite if he was to realise one of his remaining ambitions - to play his way back into Italy's World Cup squad. Since the dizzy heights of the 1994 World Cup, where his five goals powered Italy into the final against Brazil (lost on penalties), Baggio's career has gone into freefall. Persistent injury problems and indifferent form have cost him his team place at Juventus, AC Milan and with Italy.
Humiliation has followed humiliation. Firstly, Juventus offloaded him to AC Milan in 1995, convinced that they had a ready-made, inhouse substitute in Alessandro del Piero. In two subsequent seasons at Milan, Baggio spent more time on the physiotherapist's couch than on the pitch.
Even when Milan agreed to sell him last season, Baggio was further humiliated when the Parma coach Carlo Ancelotti publically rejected him after Parma directors had agreed transfer terms with Milan. Yet, earlier last spring, his career appeared to take a welcome turn for the better when Italian coach Cesare Maldini recalled him for the World Cup qualifier against Poland in Naples on April 30th. Baggio came on in that game as a second-half substitute to score the third of his side's goals in a 3-0 win.
Just to make his cup of bitterness overflow, however, coach Maldini chose last weekend to discard Baggio's possibilities of making the France '98 squad when asked about him at the European Championship draw in Ghent. Asked about the international prospects of such senior players as Giuseppe Bergomi of Inter Milan, Roberto Mancini of Sampdoria and Baggio, Maldini said: "I admire and respect them, but the Italian team's plans and projects do not involve them."
It seems there is little or no space in Italian soccer for the pace, dazzling technigue and sense of goal that first earned Baggio international recognition at Italia '90.
Even if his agent Vittore Petrone has played down the weekend incident, telling media that Baggio will be back in Bologna for training as usual today, the affair is nonetheless serious, as underlined by this comment in yesterday's Gazzetta Dello Sport: "To have Baggio in your squad and not play him against Juventus goes far beyond all tactical and technical considerations. Simply, it is an affront, a gratuitous provocation."
