Gabriel Batistuta

Lore & Background

Batistuta was born on 1 February 1969 to slaughterhouse worker Omar Batistuta and school secretary Gloria Zilli, in the town of Avellaneda, but grew up in the nearby city of Reconquista. He has three older sisters. Batistuta is a Roman Catholic. At age 16, he met Irina Fernández, his future wife, at her quinceañera. They married on 28 December 1990. The couple moved to Florence, Italy, in 1991. Batistuta has five sons: Thiago (born 1992), Lucas (1997), Joaquín (1999), Shamel (2004 or 2005), and Uzi Isman (2006). He lived in Perth, Western Australia, but due to personal reasons moved back to Argentina.

Reader's Guide

After beginning his career in Argentina in 1988 with Newell's Old Boys, followed by River Plate and Boca Juniors where he won titles, Batistuta played most of his club football with Serie A club Fiorentina in Italy; he is their all-time top scorer in Serie A with 151 goals. When Fiorentina was relegated to Serie B in 1993, Batistuta stayed with the club and helped them return to the top-flight league a year later. He became an icon in Florence; the Fiorentina fans erected a life-size bronze statue of him in 1996.

Despite winning the Coppa Italia and the Supercoppa Italiana with the club in 1996, he never won the Serie A title with Fiorentina, but when he moved to Roma in 2000 for €36 million – the highest fee ever paid for a player over the age of 30 until Cristiano Ronaldo moved from Real Madrid to Juventus in 2018 – he won the 2000–01 Serie A title. After a brief loan spell with Inter Milan in 2003, he played his last two seasons in Qatar with Al-Arabi before he retired in 2005.

At international level, Batistuta was Argentina's all-time leading goalscorer with 56 goals in 78 official matches, a record he held until 21 June 2016, when he was surpassed by Lionel Messi. He participated in three FIFA World Cups, scoring 10 goals, making him Argentina's second top scorer in the competition after Messi, and the joint tenth-highest World Cup goalscorer of all time. Batistuta is the only player in football history to score two hat-tricks in different World Cups.

With the Argentina national team he won two consecutive Copa América titles (1991 and 1993), the 1993 CONMEBOL–UEFA Cup of Champions, and the 1992 FIFA Confederations Cup.

Did You Know?

• Batistuta scored 4 goals for River Plate, not over 200, and River Plate won the Argentine Primera División in 1990 during his time there.
• Batistuta was born in Avellaneda but grew up in Reconquista, Santa Fe, Argentina.