Batistuta, Gabriel

Gabriel Batistuta, in full Gabriel Omar Batistuta, (born February 1, 1969, Reconquista, Argentina), Argentine professional football (soccer) player whose prolific scoring made him an icon of both the Italian Serie A league and the Argentine national team.

Batistuta made his professional debut in Argentina in 1988 with the Rosario-based Newell’s Old Boys. He scored seven goals in 24 games during his initial season as the team made the final of the Copa Libertadores, an annual tournament consisting of the top South American football clubs. His stellar performance propelled him onto the rosters of the two most popular teams in the country: first River Plate, for which he saw little action, and then Boca Juniors, to which he was transferred in 1990. With Boca he revealed himself as a lethal forward, finishing as the league’s top scorer in 1990–91 with 23 goals in 29 matches.

Batistuta’s play caught the attention of European clubs, and in 1991 he signed with Fiorentina of Italy’s top league, Serie A, where he again proved to be a goal-scoring machine, earning the soon-to-be internationally recognized nickname “Batigol” (an amalgam of the first part of his surname and the Italian word for goal).

Batistuta’s successful stint with the squad from Florence included several memorable team achievements—notably Fiorentina winning the Italian Cup and the Italian Super Cup in 1996—and a slew of standout individual accomplishments. During the 1994–95 campaign he set a record by scoring in 11 consecutive games on his way to collecting 26 goals for the season. In 1998 he was named Serie A’s Foreign Player of the Year.

In 2000, in one of the most expensive transfers in football history to date, Batistuta moved to AS Roma. There he achieved what he had failed to accomplish during his nine-year stay in Fiorentina: winning the Serie A championship (the scudetto) in his first season with Roma, to which he contributed by tallying 20 goals. With his new team he also would earn an Italian Super Cup and another nickname, “El Rey Leon” (“The Lion King”). After a short stay on loan to Inter Milan in 2003, he moved on to the last team for which he would play, Qatar’s Al-Arabi SC, with which he won a league championship in the 2003–04 season while leading the league in scoring with 25 goals.

Batistuta made his international debut for Argentina on a national team that won the 1991 Copa America, and he was in the lineup again when they repeated that triumph in 1993. He also won the award as the leading scorer in the 1991 and 1995 Copa tournaments. In the three World Cups in which he participated (1994, 1998, and 2002), Batistuta recorded 10 goals, becoming Argentina’s all-time leading scorer in World Cup play. With 54 goals in 78 international matches, he was the Argentine national team’s all-time leading scorer until his record was broken by Lionel Messi in 2016. In 2004, the year before an accumulation of late-career injuries ended his 17-year-run, he was included in FIFA 100, a list of the world’s 125 best living players.