Batistuta: Argentina's finest
Gabriel Batistuta's skills are as angelic as his name. But the one thing he is not religious about is football
Date: May 2000
By: Marcela Mora y Araujo
Source: FourFourTwo Magazine
Photos by: Stuart Freedman
Scanned by: Katy Ord
"It's a pending assignment," he says, teasing, "I would really like to do one or two years in England before leaving football. Maybe I'll come in a year, maybe in two or three years' time. I just have the idea fixed in my head and hope it can come true." And which team would you like to join? He laughs, slightly sardonically.
"No... I don't have a preference for any. I'm playing in Fiorentina at the moment and that's not a club which is always fighting for the top place. If I'm going for a change I'd love to play in a team where if it's a bad year, you end up third from the top of the league, you know what I mean?"
Somewhere like Manchester United, perhaps? He admits he finds Manchester simpatico but says although the club has always shown interest in him the business side of the equation has never closed. His agent confirms the club was very interested last year, but Fiorentina president and jetset film producer Vittorio Cecchi Gori wouldn't sell. In fact, he made a counter offer Batistuta could not refuse.
Cecchi Gori has become very good at calculating exact sum that will persuade his star to stay - and he's had plenty of practice - and the latest deal is likely to have made Batistuta the best-paid player in Fiorentina, and one of the top foreign earners in Italy. Nevertheless, money is only money and can be left behind.
"If I moved now I could probably make it into an important club," says Batistuta. "Probably two or three years' time a big club won't want me because I will be quite old (he is now 31). But what matters to me is to be able to participate in the English championship."
Don't get too excited, though - when Batistuta was once asked why he was so seduced by English football, he cited the fact that in England, teams "don't concentrate" as one of the main reasons. In Italy - as in Argentina - players are rounded up together for a couple of nights before every game, wives and girlfriends are banned, a strict diet is imposed and the whole process is known as 'the concentration'.
He's learnt, though. When asked now why he would like to play in England, he says the style would suit his game. And he's keen to improve his English. "I study it all the time," he says. "I think if someone spoke really slowly to me I might understand. But I'm confident if I was exposed to it more regularly, forced to speak it, in two months I'd master it"
Every autumn, however, Batistuta is still the star of Associazone Calcio Fiorentina. At the time of writing he had scored 190 goals in 328 club matches in Italy and Argentina, earning him the nickname Batigol. For the past two or three years British clubs have been the leaders in trying to court Batistuta, with Manchester United the most prominent. Although Batistuta has signed a contract with Fiorentina tying him to the club until 2003, he refuses to rule out the possibility of Premiership football.