Naz Majeed 

Serie A in the 90s was a wondrous thing. There are up to 6 teams with legitimate title credentials, every side possessed several top-quality players, and Juventus would not win every single title every single year.

VAR had not yet been invented or implemented, and better yet, players had not begun to do the imaginary-TV signal to the referee asking for a VAR check. 

Alongside the likes of Alessandro Del Piero, Christian Vieri, and Ronaldo, there was Gabriel Batistuta, the powerful Argentinian forward that played for Fiorentina for nine years, joining La Viola after a successful early career in his homeland with Newell's Old Boys (under Marcelo Bielsa), River Plate, and then Boca Juniors.

Winning the league twice before firing Argentina to the 1991 Copa America (where he was top scorer), Batistuta would be snapped up by Fiorentina at the age of 22.

While Batistuta continued to bang in the goals, the rest of his Fiorentina side were less successful, and the club would be relegated despite Batistuta scoring 16 goals and the team itself scoring more than third-placed Parma and five other sides making up the top 10, their attack spearheaded by the Argentinian hitman.

With more goals than Marco Van Basten and Gianfranco Zola, many assumed the forward would leave the relegated side and be snapped up by one of the top teams, but he surprised everyone - including his own Fiorentina fans - by pledging himself to the club and their bid to return to Serie A.

Working under Claudio Ranieri now, Batistuta would prove crucial in their immediate return to the top flight, and he would be back to terrorizing Italian defenses by the summer of 1994 where he would score in each of the first 11 games of that season.

Finishing top scorer in 1994/95, he would score four more than fellow Argentinian Abel Balbo and be ranked ahead of Zola, Giuseppe Signori, Gianluca Vialli, Fabrizio Ravanelli, Enrico Chiesa, and Pierluigi Casiraghi. Once more outdoing Italy’s glut of top-class strikers, the spotlight was well and truly on Batistuta.

The following season, Batistuta would continue his stellar form, goals against Roma, Lazio, Napoli, Bari, and Torino crucial as they finished in fourth place. He would also score a hattrick against Internazionale in the Semifinal of the  Coppa Italia, before scoring in both legs of the Final to secure Fiorentina’s first major trophy since 1975.

Batistuta would again be Fiorentina’s top scorer in 1996/97, a season in which they won the Supercoppa Italia and reached the Semifinals of the Cup Winners’ Cup where he would score against Barcelona in a tie that saw Pep Guardiola score the decisive goal in the second leg. 

By now Batistuta’s star well and truly rose, and scoring over 20 goals in each of the next three seasons, Fiorentina became serious title challengers and Champions League regulars. The rest of Europe was soon familiar with his destructive blend of power and precision, watching on as he banged in goals from anywhere against anyone, placed behind only Rivaldo and David Beckham in the FIFA World Player of the Year award in 1999.

Unable to win the league with Fiorentina, however, Batistuta moved to Roma in 2000, scoring 20 goals in his debut season at the Stadio Olimpico. Those goals helped Roma to the Scudetto, their first league title since 1983, and Batistuta’s first in Italy, with Batistuta himself scoring the final goal to clinch the title on the final day of the season.

Despite this, fans and perhaps Batistuta himself would remember a different moment in the year, when he would score one of the goals of the season against Fiorentina, bringing him to tears. He would refuse to celebrate even as he was mobbed by his team-mates, the goal an 83rd minute winner, and the travelling Fiorentina fans would send him off with a standing ovation.

"I played the whole match with these conflicting thoughts in my head - I am sorry for Fiorentina,” he would later say. “It was important, though, because I want to win for Roma so I was trying hard but I can not forget my past. Certainly, I cannot say that I am happy to have scored against my former team-mates, but Roma wanted the win."

It is probably one of the few times a player’s cult hero status was secured when playing against the club that considers them a hero, but of course, Bati-gol had performed heroics for Fiorentina for such a long time already.

Fiorentina’s all-time top scorer and the only non-European player to have made more than 300 appearances for the club, he was also the catalyst for Roma’s historic title win in 2001.

A two-time winner of the Copa America, he played for both sides of the Superclasico rivalry in Argentina before being named in the Hall of Fame of both Fiorentina and Roma, as well as the Serie A itself.

A true great of the game, there were fewer strikers more prolific or passionate, more industrious or inspirational, more loyal or legendary. Destroying defences all across Europe, Gabriel Batistuta is well and truly the gold standard of strikers.