“Ciao Toto. Eroe delle Notti Magiche.” The post from the X account of the Italy national team contained just six words but they were enough.
Toto could mean only one man – Salvatore Schillaci, the scoring hero of Italia 90. As for “Notti Magiche”, or magical nights, that was the official song of that tournament and it lives on as shorthand in Italy for a summer when the country hosted the World Cup and a Sicilian with a wild look in his eyes made millions of Italians dream. Today, they are mourning the premature passing of that same man, at just 59.
“Goodbye my dear friend, even this time you wanted to surprise me,” said his old attacking partner Roberto Baggio on social media – a reference to Schillaci’s improbable moment in the sun as the World Cup’s Golden Boot winner.
“Sometimes I ask myself, ‘How did it happen?’” is what Schillaci himself told me when I met him in Palermo, his home city, while researching my book on Italia 90, World In Motion. “Did it really happen to me?”
After all, the then 25-year-old had only made his Italy debut three months earlier and had not scored for his country before stepping off the bench and – with his first touch – heading the only goal of their opening game against Austria.
Even then he had to wait for the third group fixture against Czechoslovakia to start, scoring the first goal in a victory embellished by a beautiful Roberto Baggio slalom strike.
Then the goals really did flow: against Uruguay, the Republic of Ireland and Argentina, the latter in a semi-final that ended with the pain of a penalty shootout loss to Diego Maradona’s Argentina. But with a sixth goal in the third-place play-off against England he secured the Golden Boot to go along with his Golden Ball for player of the tournament.
It was a World Cup of maverick marvels: England had Paul Gascoigne, Cameroon had the 38-year-old Roger Milla, and then there was Schillaci, a Sicilian who earned the adoration of even those in the industrial north of Italy who might typically scorn their southern brethren.
What a player, 1990 Legend xxx RIP xxx pic.twitter.com/awUGq3NaU5
— Paul Gascoigne (@PaulGazza_8) September 18, 2024
Giuseppe Bergomi, a centre-back in that Italy team, described him to me as a player “all about instinct”. “You couldn’t cage him in schemes and formations,” he added. Yet Schillaci had speed and a nose for goal.
When he left Serie B to join Juventus in 1989, the Bianconeri president Gianni Agnelli had told him: “You’ve got goals in your blood.” When England played Italy at Wembley in November that year, he was at Brighton’s Goldstone Ground with the Under-21s (along with Gazza, incidentally) yet his 15 goals in his debut Serie A season earned him a World Cup squad place. The rest is history.
As he told me on the day of our interview at the Scuola Calcio Toto Schillaci – on the site of the club where he began playing organised football – he listened to the Rocky theme before each World Cup match.
“If you were writing a film script, you’d say it couldn’t happen,” he added. That encounter took place in 2017 when several hair transplants later, he arguably looked younger than the thinning-haired figure we had seen on our TV screens in 1990.
A tough paper round was the least of it in his Palermo boyhood. From the age of 11 he was out working and he seldom attended school. Not till 17 did he sign for his first club, Messina. This meant that when the magical nights ended, he struggled to make sense of it all.
“I’d feel embarrassed when they called to speak to me on TV because I’d not had much of an education,” he told me. “Becoming famous around the world was the hardest to handle.”
He scored only one more goal for Italy and after a six-month scoring drought at Juventus, moved on to Inter for an unhappy spell there. There was an acrimonious divorce from his first wife, Rita. By 29, he had departed Europe for Japan’s J-League.
Schillaci, who had been diagnosed with colon cancer in late 2021, became famous to a subsequent generation of Italians through his appearances on reality TV. Yet as was apparent from scanning the photos of the clubhouse of his football school – one with Pope John Paul II, another with Baggio and the Uefa Cup – it was football that took him to undreamed-of heights.
As Baggio added in his poignant farewell message: “Those magic nights of Italia 90 that we lived together will remain with me forever.”