USA 1994: Baggio's penalty, the elbow on Luis Enrique and Andrés Escobar's death
- Roberto Baggio missed a decisive penalty in the 1994 World Cup final that eliminated Italy from the competition
- Luis Enrique suffered an elbow during the tournament that marked a controversial moment in the championship
- The death of Andrés Escobar, Colombian defender, was a tragedy that mourned the tournament after his team's elimination
FIFA gambled on bringing the World Cup to a country where football meant almost nothing to anyone. It worked at the box office — no World Cup has ever drawn bigger crowds, before or since — but turned weird everywhere else: midday kickoffs for European television, 40-degree heat and a tournament that generated more headlines off the pitch than on it.
🇺🇸 The 1994 World Cup in numbers
- Host nation
- United States
- Teams
- 24
- Champions
- 🏆 Brazil
- Runners-up
- Italy
- Final
- Brazil 0-0 (3-2 pens.) Italy
- Stadium
- Rose Bowl · Pasadena
- Attendance
- 94,194
- Top scorer
- Oleg Salenko and Hristo Stoichkov, 6 goals each
Tassotti's elbow
Let's start with our own grievance, because Spain still hasn't gotten over it. Quarter-final, 9 July, Foxboro near Boston. Spain 1-2 Italy, and in the 88th minute, with the ball nowhere near play, Italian defender Mauro Tassotti elbowed Luis Enrique in the face inside the box. He broke his nose. Luis Enrique got up with blood pouring down his face.
The Hungarian referee didn't call a thing. No penalty, no foul. And Spain went home.
What happened next matters: FIFA reviewed the footage and banned Tassotti for eight matches, the longest suspension ever handed out to a player at a World Cup. In other words: they officially acknowledged what had happened, but only once it was too late to matter.
Andrés Escobar
Colombia arrived in the United States as one of the favourites: they'd just beaten Argentina 5-0 in Buenos Aires in qualifying and Pelé had tipped them as title contenders.
They crashed out immediately. In their second match, against the United States, centre-back Andrés Escobar tried to cut out a cross and scored an own goal. Colombia lost 2-1 and were eliminated.
On 2 July 1994, ten days later, Escobar was shot dead in a car park outside a bar in Medellín. He was 27. His murder shocked the football world and Colombia itself; over a hundred thousand people attended his funeral.
It's the darkest story in this entire series and deserves to be told carefully, because it's often told wrong. The documented facts are below.
Maradona, sent off
Maradona arrived at his fourth World Cup at 33 years old and in fine form. He scored against Greece and celebrated with a wild-eyed roar straight at the camera — another image that went around the world.
After the match against Nigeria, he tested positive for ephedrine and was expelled from the tournament. He always maintained it came from a supplement he'd been given and he didn't know what was in it. His quote from those days became one of his most famous: "they cut my legs off".
Argentina, who had started like a steamroller, fell apart and crashed out in the last 16.
The most boring final
17 July, Rose Bowl in Pasadena, 94,194 people and scorching midday heat. Brazil 0-0 Italy after 120 minutes. It's the only World Cup final ever to end goalless.
And it was decided by the first penalty shootout in World Cup final history. Baresi, Massaro and, fatally, Roberto Baggio all missed, Baggio sending his over the bar. The photograph of Baggio from behind, hands on hips and head bowed, is one of sport's most iconic images.
Brazil won their fourth World Cup, twenty-four years after Pelé's. Romário was the tournament's best player, and his celebration with Bebeto rocking an imaginary baby — Bebeto had just become a father — became the most imitated celebration in history.
That drug traffickers who had bet money on Colombia executed him as punishment for the own goal, and that the killer shouted «goal» with each shot.
That we need to separate what's proven from what's been repeated. Proven: Escobar was shot dead in Medellín on 2 July 1994, ten days after the match; there was a conviction for the crime; people involved in the case were closely linked to drug trafficking. Not proven in court: that the motive was the own goal or a lost bet. The account in the trial points to an argument in a car park that got out of hand, and the detail about shouting «goal» comes from testimonies that have been repeated for thirty years without being verified. That Colombian football back then was rotten by drug trafficking is a fact; that this goal was the direct cause of his death is an oversimplification that's been told so many times it sounds like evidence. Out of respect for him, it's worth telling it accurately.
That Roberto Baggio cost Italy the World Cup by missing the decisive penalty.
That Italy missed three penalties, not one: before him, Franco Baresi and Daniele Massaro also missed. And most importantly: Italy wouldn't have reached that final without Baggio, who scored five goals in the knockout stages and dragged the team through the last sixteen, quarter-finals and semi-finals almost single-handedly. Plus he played the final injured, with his thigh strapped up. Pinning the loss on him is one of football's most repeated injustices.
That at the opening ceremony Diana Ross missed a penalty and the goal split in two anyway, leaving a ridiculous scene.
That it's all true and it was actually planned: the goal was rigged to split in two regardless of whether the ball went in, so when she sent it wide, the set fell apart anyway. It wasn't a technical failure in the show: it was a missed goal within a choreography that hadn't accounted for missing. It's become the symbol of how bizarre that World Cup was.
What lasted
Two records remain standing. One: the Russian Oleg Salenko scored five goals in a single match, against Cameroon, something no one has done since in a World Cup — and he finished as joint top scorer with Stoichkov on six goals, despite Russia not getting out of the group stage. Two: in that same match, Roger Milla scored at 42 years old and remains the oldest goal scorer in tournament history.
And there was a rule change that shaped football ever since: three points for a win was introduced, so no team would be happy settling for a draw. It came about because the 1990 World Cup had been so tedious.
- On Andrés Escobar's murder: here we distinguish what's in the judicial record from what's been repeated for thirty years without evidence. It's the least he deserves.
- Note on the photos: almost all match material from 1994 belongs to agencies. The images in this chapter are in the public domain or Creative Commons, and several are portraits taken years later; each caption indicates this.
