Gabriel Batistuta

• 1. Introduction

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  Gabriel Omar Batistuta was born on the 1st of February 1969 in the Argentine town of Avellaneda, to a slaughterhouse worker and a school secretary. He grew up in the nearby city of Reconquista, where football was not even his first sport. Yet by the time he retired in 2005, he had scored more goals for Argentina than anyone who had ever worn the shirt before him. How does a boy who preferred basketball become the most feared striker of his generation? And what does it cost to be a man whose own body becomes his enemy before he ever reaches 40? This is the story of Batigol.

• 2. An Unlikely Beginning

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  Basketball was Batistuta's game as a child, chosen largely because of his height. Argentina's victory in the 1978 FIFA World Cup changed everything. Watching Mario Kempes that year, Batistuta devoted himself to football. He played with friends on the streets and with a small local side called Grupo Alegria before joining the Platense junior team in Reconquista.

  It was a provincial championship match against Newell's Old Boys that put him on the map. Batistuta scored two goals for the Reconquista representative team, and those goals caught the eye of the opposing coach, Marcelo Bielsa. Bielsa signed him to a professional contract with Newell's in 1988.

  At Newell's, Batistuta's first year was difficult. He was away from home, sleeping in a room at the stadium, separated from his family and his girlfriend Irina. He also had a weight problem that slowed his early progress. Bielsa loaned him to a smaller team, Deportivo Italiano, where he competed in the Carnevale Cup in Italy and finished as top scorer with three goals. In his autobiography, Batistuta described Bielsa as the most important coach he had ever had, and quoted him directly: "the one who taught me how to train on rainy days, he taught me everything."

  From Newell's, Batistuta moved to River Plate in mid-1989, where he scored four goals and won the Argentine Primera Division in 1990. Manager Daniel Passarella then dropped him mid-season, for no stated reason. Passarella himself predicted at the time that "when Batistuta finds a team that be able to play to him he will be lethal." He was not wrong. Batistuta moved to Boca Juniors in 1990, found his best position in the centre of attack under new manager Oscar Tabarez, and finished that season as the league's top scorer as Boca won the championship.

• 3. Florence and the Faithful

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  Fiorentina's vice-president watched Batistuta play at the 1991 Copa America and signed him on the spot. Batistuta scored 13 goals in his debut Serie A season. The following year, Fiorentina were relegated to Serie B despite 16 league goals from him.

  Batistuta stayed. That decision to remain with a relegated club, when offers from bigger sides were available, forged the bond between the striker and the city of Florence that would define his career. He contributed 16 goals as Fiorentina won the 1993-94 Serie B title under Claudio Ranieri and returned to the top flight.

  Once back in Serie A, Batistuta found his peak form. He was the division's top scorer in 1994-95, with 26 goals, and he broke Ezio Pascutti's 32-year-old record by scoring in all of the first 11 matches of that season. In 1995-96, alongside Rui Costa and Francesco Baiano, he helped the club to a 15-match unbeaten run, and Fiorentina finished fourth in the league. That season, the club also won the Coppa Italia and the Supercoppa Italiana against AC Milan. In the two-legged Coppa Italia final against Atalanta, Batistuta scored in both fixtures as Fiorentina won 3-0 on aggregate.

  The fans of Florence responded in kind. In 1996, they erected a life-size bronze statue of him in the city, while he was still playing. When he was inducted into the club's hall of fame in 2014, Batistuta told the audience at the ceremony: "From the moment I arrived at Fiorentina I wanted a place in the history of the club -- and now I can say I have succeeded."

  For the next several seasons, Batistuta scored over 20 league goals each year, powering through Serie A -- at the time regarded as the strongest and most defensively demanding league in the world. He scored against Arsenal and Manchester United in the UEFA Champions League, and in 1999 he finished third for FIFA World Player of the Year.

• 4. The Move to Roma

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  After years without a Serie A title at Fiorentina, Batistuta agreed to join Roma in the summer of 2000 for a fee of 70 billion lire, equivalent to 36.2 million euros. He signed a three-year contract worth 14.8 billion Italian lire, or 7.6 million euros, per year before tax. At the time, it was the highest fee ever paid for a player over the age of 30.

  The payoff came in the 2000-01 season. Roma clinched the Scudetto for the first time since 1983, and Batistuta scored 20 league goals during the campaign, including a goal in the 3-1 title-deciding victory over Parma on the 17th of June 2001 at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome.

  The most resonant moment of that season came on the 26th of November 2000, when Roma hosted Fiorentina. In the 83rd minute, Batistuta struck a right-foot volley from 30 yards to win the match. He refused to celebrate. Before kick-off, he had run to the section housing the 3,000 Fiorentina fans and saluted them. He did the same at full time, receiving their adoration in return, and then left the stadium in tears. The match reporter for The Guardian, Sean Ingle, wrote: "Batistuta breaks Florentine hearts, and his own."

  The following season, Batistuta changed his shirt number from 18 to 20, a reference to the 20 goals he had scored during the title-winning campaign. In 2002, he wore number 33 on his Roma shirt, matching his age. By 2003, aged 34, he had lost form, and Roma loaned him to Inter Milan, where he scored two goals in twelve matches and provided assists for Christian Vieri. A move to Fulham in England was discussed but never completed. He departed Italy for Qatar and the Al-Arabi club later that year.

• 5. Argentina's Record Scorer

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  Batistuta first appeared at a Copa America in 1991, playing in Chile, where he finished as the tournament's top scorer with six goals as Argentina won the title. The following year he won the FIFA Confederations Cup, again finishing as top scorer. In 1993, at the Copa America in Ecuador, he scored both goals in a 2-1 win over Mexico in the final, as Argentina retained the title.

  At the 1994 World Cup in the United States, Batistuta scored four goals in four games, including a hat-trick in Argentina's opening match against Greece. Argentina were beaten by Romania in the last 16, with the team's morale damaged by Diego Maradona's doping suspension.

  The 1998 World Cup brought his most historically significant individual performance. Against Jamaica, Batistuta scored a second World Cup hat-trick, becoming only the fourth player ever to achieve the feat across different tournaments. Sandor Kocsis, Just Fontaine, and Gerd Muller had done it before him, but none of them had done it in two separate World Cups. Batistuta was the first. Argentina were ultimately knocked out by the Netherlands, who scored a last-minute winner through Dennis Bergkamp after the two sides had been locked at 1-1 for more than 70 minutes.

  In 2002, with Marcelo Bielsa now as national coach, Argentina were placed in a brutal group. They beat Nigeria -- Batistuta scoring the only goal -- but lost to England 1-0 and drew 1-1 with Sweden, and were eliminated in the opening round for the first time since 1962.

  Batistuta finished his international career with 56 goals in 78 official matches, making him Argentina's all-time leading scorer, a record he held until the 21st of June 2016, when Lionel Messi surpassed it. On losing the record, Batistuta admitted he was "a little annoyed," but then added: "The advantage I have is that I'm second to an extraterrestrial."

• 6. The Price of the Body

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  After retiring in 2005, Batistuta's ankles deteriorated severely. Speaking on Argentine television in 2014, he described the pain as so acute that he "urinated in bed with the toilet only a few steps away. I couldn't move." He asked a doctor he knew to amputate his legs. The doctor refused. Surgery was eventually performed to relieve pressure on his cartilage and tendons, and his condition improved slightly. In a 2017 interview, he stated that he still faced difficulty walking and ongoing mobility problems, the result of overexerting himself throughout his career.

  Despite this, he scored twice in a charity match in Italy in 2014, one of them a powerful 35-yard strike into the roof of the net. He had completed his coaching badges in Argentina but chose not to pursue it, citing his difficulty walking as the primary reason. He once summed up his relationship with the sport in stark terms: "I don't like football, it's only my job."

  In a later interview with FIFA he elaborated: "I lived and breathed football," and then: "when I was playing football I never enjoyed it that much, I was never happy... if I scored two goals, I wanted a third, I always wanted more. Now it's all over I can look back with satisfaction, but I never felt that way when I was playing."

  His career statistics tell one side of the story: 248 club goals in 444 appearances across his professional career, plus 56 for Argentina in 78 matches. Pele named him in the FIFA 100 list of the world's greatest living players in 2004. Diego Maradona stated that Batistuta is the best striker he has ever seen play the game. And yet the man himself described his working life not as a passion but as a compulsion, one that left his body broken before his 40th birthday. His statue in Florence still stands with both arms raised, fists clenched -- the goal celebration that became his signature, frozen in bronze on the banks of the Arno.