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Looking for a home Baggio waits at home for offer to join a new club
He can make women swoon and grown men cry. His icy green eyes and stringy dark hair are as familiar to soccer fans worldwide as Ronaldo's toothy grin. His talent is genuine, crystalline, bordering on the flawless, but it is his creativity and imagination which set him on another plane and which earned him a spot among the all-time greats. And he's unemployed. Roberto Baggio is currently holed up at his home in Caldogno, in the north of Italy. He alternates between Buddhist meditation, hunting trips, training and looking for a new club. His agent and personal manager Vittorio Petrone is with him every step of the way. It's all rather handy, since Petrone also happens to be a devout Buddhist, hunting enthusiast and personal trainer. He has been contacted by no less than twenty-eight clubs throughout the world. It seems like everybody has had a nibble. From the mighty (Barcelona and Deportivo La Coruna) to the downtrodden (Reggina and Perugia). From the exotic (Jubilo Iwata and Marconi Sydney) to the sentimental (Vicenza and Napoli), with plenty in between (Borussia Dormund, Udinese, Perugia, Atalanta...). It's not a question of money. The asking price is the same for everyone. Baggio is available for free, all you have to do is offer him a two-year contract which pays him around US $4 million a season.
Granted, that's a little stiff for many clubs, but then, for some teams, Baggio would be a virtually self-financing player. Just imagine the shirts you could flog, the return in terms of image and profile you would enjoy, if you were, say a J-League or MLS club. Baggio's presence alone would help put an obscure team on the map. Beyond that, his salary is high, but not enormous. Aston Villa is paying David Ginola around US $8 million over three years, but it also had to fork over a US$5 million transfer fee to Tottenham Hotspur. Ginola is a month older than Baggio and he'll cost Villa (between wages and transfer) around US$4.3 million a season, which is slightly more than Baggio would have cost. Is Ginola a better player than Baggio? Does Ginola guarantee a better return in terms of image and merchandising than Baggio? I'll let you decide, but my hunch is that most observers would answer "no" on both counts. There are two other concerns when dealing with Baggio. The first is whether he can stay healthy. He is regarded as fragile, yet he has only had one major lay-off (a horrific knee injury), but that was in 1985, when he was all of eighteen years old. Since then, apart from a few knocks, he has been relatively durable. Over the past five seasons, he has appeared in roughly seventy-five percent of his club's league matches. A solid achievement, when you consider that he spent four of those five years at AC Milan and Inter, where the glut of forwards and squad rotation necessities curtailed his playing time. The other caveat is the one which has dogged him (and players like him) for his entire career: too many managers simply don't know how to fit him in their starting lineup. If Baggio had been born in Brazil twenty years ago, it wouldn't have been a problem. He'd simply be considered too good to leave out of the side. The boss would give him a free role behind the forwards and that would be it. In Brazil, you simply play your eleven most talented players. Alas, the game has changed, and Baggio had the misfortune of being born in a tactically obsessed country like Italy. Nowadays, many clubs view a guy like him as a luxury. You could play him behind two forwards, but then you risk weakening the midfield. You can't ask a guy like him to tackle back and run around and his style is such that he won't sit there and spread passes around like Zinedine Zidane does. So you pretty much have to play him up front. However, if his striking partner is a speedy, counterattacking type (say, a Pippo Inzaghi, Andriy Shevchenko or Michael Owen) you won't have any size or power in the frontline and won't be much of an aerial threat. On the other hand, if you line up with a traditional target man (a Patrick Kluivert or Gabriel Batistuta), you'll need somebody to make repeated runs down the flanks and deliver crosses from the wings. While Baggio has the skills to do this, you don't want him tiring himself out and moving out wide, where he is less of a threat. These objections may seem ridiculous, but they have been raised time and again when it comes to the former Divine Ponytail. He may be the best player on your team, but there is no room for him in your lineup. That's the age-old debate between talent and tactics and there really is no answer. Most agree that to get the best out of him, you need to free him from marking and tactical responsibilities. He may not do much for much of the game, and then come up with a match-winning moment of brilliance. After all, that's what happened in his last competitive game, when he scored twice for Inter Milan, allowing the nerazzurri to beat Parma 3-1 in Serie A's Champions League playoff. And yet, he's still there, free and available, not quite a puppy dog in the window, but almost. Those close to him say part of the problem is that he does not want to go abroad just yet and that he would like to play for a big club. Alas, Serie A's heavyweights aren't interested. Going to a smaller team is an option, but, somehow, it would feel strange to see Baggio slugging it out in a relegation battle. This is a guy who has scored 160 Serie A goals. This is a former World and European Footballer of the Year who has played for Italy's three biggest clubs. This is a man who has starred in three World Cups and scored 27 goals in 55 appearances for his country (he's Italyıs fourth all-time leading scorer). But there's no room at the inn for the former Messiah of Soccer. He'll still find a club, don't worry about that. We just won't seem him on the big stage again. Romance is dead. The fact that there are no more than a handful of players worldwide that can do what he does is irrelevant. He may be an artist, but increasingly today's artists have to be built like rugby players (Rivaldo, Zidane, Figo). Either that, or they have to have the lungs and the mentality of a marathon runner (Raul, Alex Del Piero). At least we have plenty of memories. London-based Gabriele Marcotti writes a weekly column on international soccer for CNNSI.com.
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