Paolo Rossi

• 1. Introduction

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  Paolo Rossi was born on the 23rd of September 1956 in Prato, Tuscany, in the area of Santa Lucia. Twenty-six years later, he stood at the centre of one of the most improbable recoveries in World Cup history. The question that summer in Spain was not whether Italy would win the tournament. Nobody thought they would. Rossi had barely played competitive football in two years. He had been banned following a match-fixing scandal, described by his own fans as a ghost on the pitch during the group stage, and written off by most of the press before the knockout rounds had even begun. Yet by the time the final whistle blew in Madrid on the 11th of July 1982, Rossi had scored six goals, won the Golden Boot as top scorer, the Golden Ball as best player, and claimed the Ballon d'Or as European Footballer of the Year. No player before or since has won all four of those awards in a single year. To understand how that happened, you have to go back to a boy in Tuscany who could barely stay healthy long enough to play.

• 2. The Making of a Striker

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  Rossi made his first appearance in professional football for Juventus in 1973, picking up a runners-up medal in that year's Intercontinental Cup almost as a footnote to an injury-plagued start. Knee trouble haunted him constantly. Between 1972 and 1975 he made only three Coppa Italia appearances for Juventus and scored no goals at all. Three knee operations later, the club sent him to Como to get some experience, where he made six Serie A appearances in the 1975-76 season, this time as a right winger, and again failed to score.

  The turning point came when Vicenza Calcio, then known as Lanerossi Vicenza, took him on loan. Coach Giovan Battista Fabbri had a problem: injuries had taken out his regular centre-forward just before the season started. Almost by accident, Fabbri moved Rossi from the wing into the centre of the attack. The effect was immediate. Rossi won the Serie B Golden Boot in that first season with 21 goals, showing what the source calls a tremendous knack for getting open in the box.

  The following season, 1976-77, Rossi led Vicenza to promotion from Serie B to Serie A. The season after that, he scored 24 goals, becoming the first player in Italian football history to top the scoring charts in Serie B and Serie A in consecutive seasons. He also led Vicenza to a second-place finish in Serie A in 1977-78, behind only Juventus, the club that technically co-owned him. Italy manager Enzo Bearzot had seen enough. He handed Rossi his international debut on the 21st of December 1977, in a 1-0 friendly win over Belgium.

• 3. A Record Fee and a Rising Star

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  Up to the point of the 1978 World Cup, Rossi was jointly owned by Vicenza and Juventus under a co-ownership arrangement common in Italian football at the time. When the two clubs were required to settle who retained his registration, Lanerossi made a bid of 2.612 billion lire, a sum described at the time as shocking. Rossi became the world's most expensive player, and Italy's most costly sportsman ever up to that point.

  At the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, Rossi proved the fee was not unreasonable. Italy played a fluid attacking system in which Rossi, Franco Causio, and Roberto Bettega rotated positions, with Causio moving left, Bettega going to centre, and Rossi drifting back to his original right wing. The tactical flexibility created serious problems for opposing defences. Rossi finished with three goals and four assists as Italy reached fourth place, earning the Silver Ball as the second-best player in the tournament. His very first goal for Italy had come in that tournament's opening group match, a 2-1 win over France on the 2nd of June 1978.

  Back at Vicenza for the 1978-79 season, he made his European debut in the UEFA Cup and scored 15 goals in Serie A, but injuries returned and the club was relegated. Rossi was then loaned to Perugia for the 1979-80 season, where he scored 13 goals in Serie A and helped the club reach the round of 16 in the UEFA Cup.

• 4. The Totonero Scandal

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  During his season at Perugia, Rossi became entangled in the Totonero scandal, a widespread betting corruption case that shook Italian football in 1980. As a result, he was disqualified for three years, later reduced to a two-year ban. He missed the 1980 European Championship, in which Italy finished fourth on home soil.

  Rossi always maintained his innocence. He stated publicly that he had been a victim of an injustice. The ban meant he was absent from competitive football at the height of his physical powers, from a career that had already been interrupted repeatedly by knee surgeries. Juventus, nonetheless, repurchased him in 1981 despite the suspension still running.

  When he returned to the pitch for the tail end of the 1981-82 Serie A season, he managed one goal in three appearances and helped Juventus clinch the title. It was barely a warm-up. What came next in Spain would make everything before it seem like a prelude.

• 5. Six Goals in Spain

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  Italian journalists and supporters were not optimistic at the 1982 World Cup. Rossi had played only three Serie A matches after two years away. He went through the group stage contributing nothing, and one account from the time described him as a ghost aimlessly wandering over the field. Manager Enzo Bearzot remained publicly committed to him. That decision looked either brave or foolish, depending on who was watching.

  In the second round, Italy faced Argentina and then Brazil. Against Argentina, Claudio Gentile and Gaetano Scirea neutralised the young Diego Maradona as Italy won 2-1. Against Brazil, a side containing Socrates, Zico, and Falcao and widely regarded as favourites for the title, Rossi scored three times. Italy won 3-2. The hat-trick, scored on the 5th of July 1982 at the Estadio Sarria in Barcelona, ended Brazil's tournament and sent Italy to the semi-finals.

  Rossi added two goals against Poland in the semi-final. In the final against West Germany at the Estadio Santiago Bernabeu in Madrid on the 11th of July, he scored the first of Italy's three goals, from a set-piece assist by Gentile, and Italy won 3-1. His six goals across the tournament meant he was directly responsible for 58 percent of his team's total in the competition.

  After the final, Italian fans hung banners calling him Man of the Match. Peter Mason, writing for The Guardian, observed that the victory was a cathartic moment for the nation, which had been subject to significant social and political unrest for a number of years. Italy had not won a World Cup since 1938. The nicknames that summer in Spain were Pablito and the torero.

• 6. Juventus and the Final Chapter

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  After Spain, Rossi returned to Juventus and kept scoring. In the 1982-83 season, he helped the club win the Coppa Italia with five goals and reached the European Cup Final, where Juventus lost to Hamburg; he finished as the tournament's top scorer with six goals. In the 1983-84 season, he added his second Serie A title with 13 goals, and Juventus also won the UEFA Cup Winners' Cup and the 1984 UEFA Super Cup.

  In 1985, Rossi finally won the European Cup, the one major club honour that had eluded him. He finished that campaign with five goals, behind only teammate Michel Platini and Sweden's Torbjorn Nilsson, who each scored seven.

  He moved to Milan for a season in 1985, where his most memorable contribution was a two-goal performance in a derby against Internazionale. Italy called him up for the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, but an injury left him unable to complete the fitness tests. The high altitude of the venues made the struggle worse, and he was replaced in the starting line-up by Giuseppe Galderisi. His final appearance for Italy came on the 11th of May 1986, a 2-0 friendly win over China in Naples. He ended his club career at Hellas Verona in the 1986-87 season, helping them to fourth place in Serie A before retiring.

  Across his international career, he scored 20 goals in 48 caps. His nine World Cup goals, six from 1982 and three from 1978, place him level with Roberto Baggio and Christian Vieri as Italy's all-time leading World Cup scorer. After retirement, he went into real estate with former teammate Giancarlo Salvi, and later worked as a television pundit for Sky, Mediaset Premium, and Rai Sport.

• 7. How He Played

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  Rossi was not built like most strikers of his era. He lacked physical size and was not powerful in the conventional sense. What he possessed instead was speed, agility, sharp technique, and an exceptional reading of where the ball would arrive inside the penalty area. His finishing was accurate with both feet and with his head, which allowed him to compete in the air despite his relatively small stature.

  His career began on the right wing, and that background gave him an unusual range of movement for a centre-forward. In his later years at Juventus, with Michel Platini and Zbigniew Boniek arriving in midfield, Rossi was used in a supporting forward role, a position known in Italian football jargon as a centravanti di manovra. The role involved holding up the ball, dragging defenders out of position, and creating space for teammates' runs rather than simply finishing. It is a role similar to what is now called a false 9.

  He was not effective at set pieces, a rare gap in his game. But his positional intelligence more than compensated. In 2004, Pele named him one of the top 125 greatest living footballers as part of FIFA's 100th anniversary celebration, and that same year Rossi placed 12th in the UEFA Golden Jubilee Poll.

• 8. Legacy and Death

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  Rossi died on the 9th of December 2020 from lung cancer, at the age of 64. He was survived by his second wife, Federica Cappelletti, and three children. His funeral was held in Vicenza on the 12th of December and was attended by thousands. During the service, his house in Bucine was robbed.

  In 2007 he received the Golden Foot Football Legends award. He was inducted into the Italian Football Hall of Fame in 2016, and received the Enzo Bearzot Award in 2020. In 2025 he was inducted into the Juventus FC Hall of Fame.

  His record from 1982 stands alone: the World Cup title, the Golden Boot, the Golden Ball, and the Ballon d'Or, all in the same year. No other player in the history of the sport has achieved that combination. The measure of how unlikely the story remains is that it nearly did not happen at all. Rossi returned to competitive football after two years away, was publicly written off during the group stage, and then scored all six of Italy's critical goals across the knockout rounds including a hat-trick against the tournament's most celebrated attacking side.