Roberto Baggio sent the ball three metres over the crossbar in Pasadena. Italy lost the World Cup. Head bowed, ponytail still, 94,000 people watching: the image became one of the most reproduced photographs in football history.
What followed was a repricing.
THE LAST MAN STANDING
Before the final, Baggio had been the reason Italy were there. Five goals in the knockout stages: late equalisers, a crucial brace in the semi-final, all of it done carrying a hamstring problem through a California summer. He was awarded the tournament's Silver Ball. The best player in the world, unambiguously, for six weeks.
Then Baresi missed. Then Massaro. Then it came to Baggio, with Brazil needing just one more.
The narrative attached to him because he was last. The other two misses faded from the record. Baresi and Massaro: both there, both gone from the casual memory of what happened. Baggio stood alone at the spot and the image froze. A story, once written, is very hard to revise.
WHAT A STORY DOES TO A PRICE
In 1995, Juventus decided Baggio no longer fit their plans. Marcello Lippi had a new system; Alessandro Del Piero was a better shape for it. Baggio was sold to AC Milan for around £6.8 million. At Milan, he won a Scudetto in his first season, becoming the first player to win the title with different clubs in consecutive years, but never found a central role. By 1997, he was 30, released, and the clubs with options were not ringing.
Bologna FC signed him. A mid-table club with no leverage and a modest brief: survive the season.
What they got was 22 goals in Serie A. A career high. The highest-scoring Italian in the division that year. Nominations for the Ballon d'Or and FIFA World Player of the Year. A performance complete enough to earn him a place at the 1998 World Cup, where he scored twice more, then stepped up to convert a penalty against France in the quarter-final shootout. Same position. Four years later. Different result.
Bologna hadn't retained Baggio through a difficult period. They had acquired him after everyone else had decided the difficult period was a permanent condition.
THE GAP BETWEEN STORY AND EVIDENCE
Juventus and Milan had not made irrational decisions. They had read the narrative correctly. A player defined by a penalty miss, ageing through his early thirties, no longer fitting the tactical shape. The market agreed. The price was low.
What they had not done was ask whether the narrative and the evidence were the same thing.
They rarely are, especially after a public failure. The failure becomes visible and fixed. The quality underneath continues, unglamorously, to exist. Organisations that manage perception respond to the story. Organisations that assess evidence respond to the quality. The first group moves on cleanly. The second group gets 22 goals.
The biggest clubs watched what Baggio became at Bologna and filed it as someone else's gain. The image from Pasadena never changed. What it meant depended entirely on what you thought it was evidence of.
Some read it as proof of who Baggio was.
Bologna read it as a price.
TRY IT YOURSELF
🚩 Think of someone in your organisation who had a very public failure. Ask three questions:
📊 What did we change about how we use them after it happened? If the answer is "everything", you responded to the narrative, not the person.
🔍 Could you separate the failure from the underlying quality? The miss and the ability to take the next penalty are two different things. Did you treat them as one?
💷 Who got them next? If someone else now has the best version of that person, consider what information you used to make your decision, and what you didn't.
The image from the moment never changes. What it means depends on whether you read it as proof of who they are, or as a price.
FURTHER READING
📚 The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig (Free Press, 2007) Rosenzweig argues that one visible outcome, success or failure, radiates outward and colours how we read everything else about an organisation. It's the same mechanism that buried Baggio's market value after Pasadena.
📰 "Roberto Baggio at Bologna: The story of the season that relaunched his career" — Sky Sports A long-form account of the 1997-98 season: how Baggio arrived at a mid-table club with nothing to lose, and what teammate Giancarlo Marocchi later reflected: "We were the ideal team for him to relaunch himself."
🎬 "Baggio: The Divine Ponytail" — Netflix (2021) A biographical film covering Baggio's full career, from his difficult early years at Fiorentina to his return from Pasadena. Worth watching for the shape of the career the single image obscured.
If this piece resonated, you might also like Celtic Scored. Nobody Reviewed the Process.: the mirror argument, where a good outcome obscures a flawed process just as readily as a bad outcome obscures real quality.
SOME FINAL WISE WORDS
"Price is what you pay; value is what you get."
— Ben Graham, quoted by Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter, 2008
Until next time
The world's best business lessons, told through the stories of sport.
