More than 82,000 were packed inside the stadium, ready to witness one of Serie A’s great No.10s on the biggest day of his club career. All season long, he’d dazzled fans with extraordinary dribbling skills, befuddling defences, driving his team ever closer to glory. Now, he was ready to get his hands on the Scudetto.
On May 10, 1987, supporters had turned up at Stadio San Paolo to see Diego Maradona deliver Napoli’s first ever league title. So monumental was the achievement, so memorable the occasion, that later that evening, as joyous crowds celebrated throughout the city, fans famously hung a banner outside Naples’ biggest cemetery.
“You don’t know what you’ve missed,” stated the sign.
Thankfully, the Partenopei needed only a draw to clinch the crown that day, because they didn’t secure the victory that everyone had expected. At home to relegation-threatened Fiorentina, Maradona had been unable to get on the scoresheet.
Instead, six minutes before half-time with the hosts leading 1-0, a young playmaker stepped up to take a free-kick for the visitors on the edge of the penalty area. When his low shot found the net, the stadium was silenced – for a while at least. It was the 20-year-old’s first Serie A goal, and it was enough to save the Viola from relegation. His name was Roberto Baggio.
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Maybe Baggio’s destiny had been marked out at birth – he was named after Roberto Boninsegna, an iconic forward who played for Juventus and Inter and fell narrowly short of World Cup glory, losing a final to Brazil. Aged 13, Baggio was snapped up by his local team Vicenza – he idolised set-piece king Zico, collecting cassettes of the Brazilian’s wizardry, and quickly displayed similar flair. His first-team bow came not long after his 16th birthday.
By 1984-85, he had started to find the net with regularity and was hailed the third tier’s best player as Vicenza won promotion to Serie B. It was a division he would never play in: instead, Baggio went straight to the top, agreeing to join Fiorentina in Serie A for a hefty £1.5 million. The deal was done with a few games of that campaign left to play – in the same week that Baggio injured an anterior cruciate ligament in a match against Arrigo Sacchi’s Rimini. Fiorentina could have backed out of the transfer but opted not to, convinced his talent was worth waiting for. Knee surgery meant he wouldn’t play a league match for more than a year – Baggio
