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The ten best ever Serie A strikers contains four imports and four playmakers
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Several won World Cups for their countries though one famously did not
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A Roman legend is Serie A’s greatest ever striker
Serie A has been plundered by some of the most feared and prolific strikers in football’s long and illustrious history.
Here we pay tribute to ten of the deadliest; players who defined themselves by goals and magic.
10) Diego Maradona
In the strictest sense, the finest number 10 of them all wasn’t a striker while even the slightly more generalised term ‘forward’ diminishes who he was and what he did.
Rather, he was a phenomenon, whose remit was to be phenomenal wherever on the pitch his genius took him.
This the Argentine legend did to such an exceptional standard for Napoli that it inspired Gli Azzurri to two Serie A titles in the late-Eighties, an achievement they had never managed before and have not done since.
An impressive tally of 81 goals in 188 appearances is a strike-rate even the most lethal goal-hanger would be proud of but of course, with Maradona the magic was found everywhere, not solely in his goals and he is an idol and icon in the city to this day.
Few Serie A predictions tipped Napoli for a shot at the Scudetto this season but they are up there challenging. How sweet it would be if they won it once more for the recently passed great in the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona.
9) Gabriel Batistuta
'Batigol’ found the net 30 times for Roma and scored a further two for Inter but it is adorning the violet of Fiorentina where he is recalled most fondly, a club so smitten by his prolificacy that they erected a statue.
A forward without any notable weakness, his 168 goals in 269 league games is a testament to a sixth sense to turning chances into goals, all of which were unerringly accurate, many of which were spectacular.
8) Alessandro Del Piero
Across just shy of two decades, Del Piero playmaked for Juventus, his ethereal gifts always a moment away from producing something special.
No player has appeared more in the famous black and white and if his 188 Serie A goals is an impressive tally it’s made remarkable by the fact that he was never an out-and-out finisher.
Under a plethora of great managers, ‘Pinturicchio’ – a nickname that references a renaissance painter – played wide on the left or as a second striker. Primarily his role was that of a ‘fantasista’; to create.
A World Cup and Champions League winner and in possession of six Scudetto medals, Del Piero is a name that will chime through the ages.
7) Filipo Inzaghi
Inzaghi played the entirety of his career on the peninsula, firing goals galore for Parma, Atalanta and Juventus before establishing a legendary status at Milan.
Opportunistic and forever on the cusp of being offside, it was his two goals that secured the Rossoneri a seventh European crown in 2007 and the Italian’s decisive second that evening against Liverpool was so typical of his traits.
The Reds suffer a momentary lapse in concentration and two blinks of the eye later the ball is nestled in their net. Inzaghi was the poacher supreme, clinical and merciless inside the box.
6) Andriy Shevchenko
A regular suggestion in our Serie A tips is to invest in a uber-reliable goal-grabber regardless of cost. Should he still be playing today, the Ukrainian would be the first name on the team-sheet.
Powerful, deadly and ice-cold, Shevchenko converted every 148 minutes in two spells for Milan, displaying a focus so detached, yet steely it brought to mind Ivan Drago in boots.
A Ballon d’Or winner while with the Rossoneri, ‘Sheva’ notched 25-plus goals in five campaigns in a league that has infamously broken the spirit of many imported strikers before him and since.
5) Giuseppe Meazza
Having won the Capocannonieri – Italy’s version of the Golden Boot – on three occasions and twice leading Italy to World Cup glory, it’s little surprise that Meazza is still held in the very highest regard even 75 years after he stopped terrorising goalkeepers.
In 1980, a year after his passing, the San Siro was named in his honour with the diminutive forward having scored a tremendous number of goals for both Inter and Milan in the years leading up the Second World War.
Indeed, he is reputed to have scored an astonishing 537 all told, though this does include friendlies.
Our Serie A betting odds suggest a fiercely fought battle is afoot for the Scudetto between Inter and AC. This would presumably please Meazza immensely.
4) Roberto Baggio
With his swishy, slaloming dribbling style Baggio was a joy to watch though perhaps the less said about his ponytail, the better.
The less uttered about his costly penalty miss in the 1994 World Cup final would also be welcomed because to attribute failure to Baggio is like pointing out a stray brushstroke in a masterpiece.
One of the all-time Serie A top scorers with 208 league goals, this generational talent was for so long a totem for Italian creativity relied upon for magic from seven clubs, all exclusively on the peninsula, and most of them behemoths.
In 2011 Baggio was inducted into the Italian Hall of Fame, eight years after receiving the Ballon d’Or.
3) Silvio Piola
Piola scored twice in the 1938 World Cup final and remains the most prolific forward to ply his trade on Italian soil, bagging 274 Serie A goals. That figure equates to a goal every other game across a 25-year career interrupted by world war.
If you bet on football online a striker as consistently lethal as Piola is a godsend, finding winners in the tightest of contests and for Lazio and Juventus that’s precisely what this brilliant attacker did time and again, as he helped each club rise to prominence.
Strangely however, club silverware always eluded him, with a raft of runner-up medals to his name.
2) Gunnar Nordahl
The prowess of Milan’s record goal-scorer was already known to the world prior to him joining the Italian giant, with Nordahl playing a pivotal role in Sweden winning an Olympic gold medal in 1948.
In the Allsvenskan meanwhile, this mighty figure with a tremendously hard shot had fired home a staggering 217 goals in 213 games.
Twelve months later, he joined fellow Swedes Gunnar Gren and Nils Liedholm to form the iconic ‘Gre-No-Li’ forward line that brought silverware in abundance to the Rossoneri throughout the Fifties.
For Milan, then briefly Roma, Nordahl scored 225 Serie A goals in 291 appearances.
1) Francesco Totti
In September 2016, a Roman deity in possession of more nicknames than most people have hats, slotted past Torino’s Joe Hart to become only the second player to reach 250 Serie A goals. The following Tuesday he celebrated his 40th birthday.
A one-club legend, Totti gave Roma’s attack a distinct feel of class for 26 years, winning the Serie A Footballer of the Year award twice along the way. Not for nothing, did Carlo Ancelotti once refer to him as ‘immortal’.
Which brings us to those nicknames. He was the ‘Golden Boy’ who soon gained the skipper’s armband and became ‘Il Capitano’. He was ‘Il Gladiatore’ and marvellously the ‘Eighth King of Rome’.
All of these monikers are exceedingly cool. He was also ‘Er Pupone’ which translates as ‘Big Baby’. That’s less cool.
