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Gabriel Omar Batistuta (born 1 February 1969), nicknamed Batigol (Italian:
hits goals), is a former professional footballer. The prolific Argentine
striker played most of his club football at Fiorentina in Italy, and he is
the 8th top scorer of all time in the Italian Serie A league with 184 goals
in 318 matches between 1991 and 2003. On the international level, he is the
all-time highest scorer for Argentina's national team with 56 goals in 78
national team matches, and he represented his country at three FIFA World
Cups. In 2004, he was named in the FIFA 100 list of the "125 Greatest Living
Footballers".
When his club Fiorentina was relegated to Serie B in 1993, Batistuta stayed
with the club and helped it return to the top-flight league two years later.
A hero in Florence, the Fiorentina fans erected a life-size bronze statue of
him in 1996, in recognition of his performances for Fiorentina. He would
never win the Italian league with Fiorentina, but when he moved to AS Roma
in 2000, he finally won the Serie A championship to crown his career in
Italy.
***
***
He played his last in season in Qatar with Al-Arabi before he retired in
2005. Now he is one of Televisa Deportes` comentators in the Germany world
cup games and the show "La jugada".
Batistuta was born on 1 February 1969 to slaughterhouse worker Omar
Batistuta and school secretary Gloria Batistuta, in the town of Avellaneda,
province of Santa Fe, Argentina, but grew up in the near city of
Reconquista. After him, his parents had three girls, named Elisa, Alejandra
and Gabriela.
At age 16 he met Irina Fernández, his future wife, on her quinceañera, a
rite of passage on her 15th birthday. It is said that Irina Fernández
completely ignored him at the beginning. Some five years later, on December
28, 1990, Irina and Gabriel were married at Saint Roque Church. The couple
moved to Florence, Italy, in 1991, and a year later their first son Thiago
was born. Thanks to good performances in the Italian championship and with
the Argentine national team, he gained fame and respect. He filmed several
commercials and was invited onto numerous TV shows, but in spite of this,
Batistuta always remained a low-profile family man.
In 1996, during Fiorentina's 2-1 victory at A.C. Milan, he celebrated
scoring the match's decisive goal by saying Te amo, Irina ('I love you,
Irina', to his wife) for the cameras. The mix of sex appeal and faithfulness
cemented Batistuta's heart-throb reputation among Argentine and Italian
women. In 1997 Batistuta's second son, Lucas, was born, and a third son,
Joaquín, followed in 1999. In 2000 the Batistuta family moved to Rome and
two years later to Milan, following Gabriel's changes of team. In 2002,
after more than 10 years in Italy, the family moved to Qatar where Gabriel
Batistuta had accepted a lucrative celebrity playing contract with a local
team, Al-Arabi. A fourth son, Shamel, was born in 2003.
Batistuta ended his career at Al-Arabi, retiring in March 2005, after a
series of injuries that prevented him from playing. Soon afterwards he moved
to Perth, Australia. In April 2006, the city's established A-league
franchise, Perth Glory was put up for sale and it was reported that
Batistuta was among the bidders.
As a child Gabriel preferred other sports to football. Thanks to his height
he played basketball, but after Argentina's victory in the 1978 World Cup,
in which he was particularly impressed by the skills of Mario Kempes, he
devoted himself to football. After playing with friends on the streets and
in the small Grupo Alegria club, he joined the local Platense junior team.
While with Platense he was selected for the Reconquista team that won the
provincial championship by beating Newell's Old Boys from Rosario. His 2
goals drew the attention of the opposition team, and he signed for them in
1988.
He signed professional forms with Newell's Old Boys Club, whose coach was
Marcelo Bielsa, who would later become Batistuta's coach with the Argentine
national team. Things did not come easily for Gabriel during his first year
with the club. He was away from home, his family and his girlfriend Irina,
sleeping in a room at the stadium, and had a weight problem that slowed him
down. At the end of that year he was loaned to a smaller team, Deportivo
Italiano, of Buenos Aires, with whom he participated in the Carnevale Cup in
Italy, ending as top scorer with 3 goals.
In mid-1989 he made the leap to one of Argentina's biggest clubs, River
Plate, where he scored 17 goals. However, all did not run smoothly. He had
numerous run-ins with coach Daniel Passarella (with whom he had later
confrontations with the national squad) and he was dropped from the squad in
the middle of the season.
In 1990 Batistuta signed for River's arch-rivals, Boca Juniors. Having gone
so long without playing, he inititally found it hard to find his best form.
However, at the beginning of 1991 Oscar Tabárez became Boca's coach, and he
gave Batistuta the support and confidence to become the league's top scorer
that season as Boca won the championship.
In 1991, Batistuta was selected to play for Argentina in the Copa América
held in Chile, where he finished the tournament as top scorer with 6 goals
as Argentina romped to victory.
It was during the Copa América that the vice-president of Fiorentina got the
chance to see Gabriel's skills and signed him for the Italian club. However,
the following season Fiorentina were relegated to the Serie B secondary
division, in spite of Batistuta's 13 season goals. It took two years, and 16
Batistuta goals before the club, now managed by Claudio Ranieri returned to
Serie A.
In 1993, Batistuta played in his second Copa América, this time held in
Ecuador, which Argentina again won. The 1994 World Cup, held in USA, was a
disappointment: after a very promising start Argentina were beaten by
Romania in the Round of 16; the morale of the team seriously affected by
Diego Maradona's drug-abuse suspension. Despite the disappointing Argentine
exit, Batistuta scored four goals in as many games.
On his return to Fiorentina, Batistuta found his best form. He became the
top scorer of the 1994-1995 season with 26 goals, and he broke Ezio
Pascutti's 30 year old record by scoring in all of the first 11 matches of
the season. In the 1995-1996 season Fiorentina won the Italian Cup and Super
Coppa.
During the qualification matches for the 1998 World Cup (with former River
Plate manager Passarella now coaching the Argentinean national team)
Batistuta was left out of the majority of the games after falling out with
the coach. Playing in the World Cup finals themselves, he scored 5 goals in
that competition, before Argentina lost 2-1 to the Netherlands in the
quarter-finals.
After yet another failure to win a championship of importance with
Fiorentina, Batistuta started considering a transfer to a bigger team. But,
in an effort to keep Batistuta, Fiorentina hired Giovanni Trapattoni as
coach and promised to do everything to win the scudetto. After an excellent
start to the season, Batistuta suffered an injury that kept him out of
action for more than a month. Losing momentum, Fiorentina lost the lead and
finished the season in third place, which at least gave them the chance to
participate in the Champions League in the following season.
Batistuta stayed at Fiorentina for the 1999-2000 season, tempted by the
chance of winning both the Scudetto and the Champions League. But things did
not go to plan and he was transferred to A.S. Roma in a deal worth 35
million US dollars. In spite of a knee injury that kept him out for a few
matches, he scored 20 goals for A.S. Roma in his first season with the club,
and finally realized his dream of winning a major trophy as Roma clinched
the Scudetto for the first time since 1983.
After a good series of performances by Argentina in the qualification
matches for the 2002 World Cup, hopes were high that the South Americans -
now managed by Marcelo Bielsa - could win the trophy, and Batistuta
announced that he planned to quit the national team at the end of the
tournament, which Argentina aimed to win. But Argentina's "group of death"
saw the team fall at the first hurdle, as poor results against Nigeria,
England and Sweden meant that the team was knocked out in the opening round
for the first time since 1962.
Back in Italy, Batistuta failed to find form with Roma and was loaned out to
Internazionale; however, he failed to make an impression and departed for
Qatar. |
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