A love letter to strikers
This one is for the big lad who scores goals, despite looking like they’d show up to a tennis match with a snooker cue. Nobody knows how he does it, but he always finds a way. You can’t coach it and you don’t question it. This one goes out to the Bomber, the name given to the archetypal calcio goal scorer.
Christian Vieri is the Bomber poster boy, the ultimate big lad with an eye for goal. Don't expect the Bomber to pretend he’s Harry Kane. He’s a real nine, not a false one. Lee Chapman would be an English equivalent, dominant in the early nineties and probably also perfectly fits the sub-category of Bomber di Provincia the provincial club Bomber.
Despite winning the last First Division with Leeds in 1991/92, Chapman was never a member of football’s aristocracy, i.e. Manchester United or Liverpool. He wasn’t a media darling and never won an England cap.
But Chapman scored a goal every two games for Leeds across four years. In Italy, he’d have been one of many such strikers because although Italy has given so much to the world of football, the Bomber is one thing it has mostly kept for itself.
In the same way that it holds back its greatest products from export, Italy’s footballing dominance across the nineties allowed Serie A to retain its greatest talents and recruit the best foreign players, meaning the smaller clubs were fed a rich vein of strikers who left an indelible mark on Italian football culture.
L’Ultimo Uomo defines the Bomber di Provincia perfectly: ‘Without larger than life talent , they build their reputation through extreme drive for goals and their cult has grown over time, inflating their legend, confusing the imaginary with reality.”
The ‘Provincia’ refers to the clubs from Italy’s provinces, i.e. not Rome, Milan, Turin. Some would argue that Florence, and by default Fiorentina, belong on that list. But not me.
Many believe the Bomber di Provincia became extinct as modern football redefined the centre forward’s role. No longer just goal scorers, the forward is the first line of defence and should also link play like a midfielder.
Pep Guardiola may have played in Italy at the height of Bomber Mania, but its effects didn’t intrinsically alter his footballing DNA in any way. He joined Brescia in 2001/02 and that same summer, Dario Hubner left the club for Piacenza.
Hubner was a 34-year-old striker who’d somewhat reluctantly given up his career as a blacksmith in order to make the most of his natural talent for scoring goals. Nicknamed Il Bisonte (the Bison), he had a Serie A scoring record of one in two while smoking twenty a day and drinking grappa at half-time.
Cross a washing machine to me and I’ll hit it.
Guardiola’s first season in Italy ended with Hubner as the league’s top scorer, having netted 24 times in 33 games and becoming the oldest ever Serie A golden boot winner.
That season’s list of top scorers, like most in the 1990s and early 2000s, included several vintage Bombers di Provincia alongside Hubner, such as Javier Chevanton and Marco Ferrante.
These names are synonymous with the halcyon days of Italian football and some might argue that the rose tinting effect of calcio nostalgia has overblown the impact a handful of mid-level strikers actually had on the game’s culture.
Social media made a whole thing of ‘Barclaysmen’ last year, a title given to Premier League footballers from the mid-2000s. I rolled my eyes anytime this sort of discourse appeared on my feed, not least because being a Leeds fan meant I was excluded from the Barclays ‘era’, but because my millennial mind hadn’t fathomed that nineties football is no longer vogue.
But the Bomber di Provincia often had a mystique around them that the likes of Morten Gamst Pedersen could only dream of. Pasquale Luiso was the cult hero of Vicenza’s run to the Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final in 1998, scoring eight times while building a reputation for his supreme work rate and instinctive play.
But Luiso was also a character. “Cross a washing machine to me and I’ll hit it,” he once said, a reference to his love of scoring goals.
That wasn’t even his best quote:
I’ve got three certainties: my character, Padre Pio and my grandmother's prayers.
Intensive media training means few footballers will talk about washing machines or Padre Pio ever again, but this was the type of persona upon which cult followings were built. That they defied all logic and coaching to become instinctive match winners was pretty nice too.
They weren’t all Serie A superstars either. Igor Protti is another Bomber di Provincia famous for the final six years of his career spent at Livorno between 1999 and 2005. He returned to the Tuscan port city having left for Messina eleven years earlier as a bright eyed 20-year-old striker.
Protti made a name for himself in Sicily and then at Bari, whom he helped into Serie A in 1993/94. His final year in Puglia saw him score 24 top flight goals and be sold to Lazio when Bari president Vincenzo Matarrese realised the club couldn’t afford to keep him.
The Tsar, as he was known, dropped down to Serie C1 with Livorno after a few seasons as a bit part player at Lazio and Napoli. That move could have been construed as giving up, but that was far from the case.
He fired them to promotion in 2001/02, scoring 27 times and followed it up with another 23 in the second tier. His performances at the tender age of 35 convinced Livorno fan Cristiano Lucarelli to beg Torino to sell him so he could return home and help Protti take them to the promised land for the first time since 1949.
Protti bagged 24 goals while Lucarelli added another 29 as Livorno secured a historic promotion. He retired a year later and handed the mantle onto Lucarelli, ending his career as a Livorno legend and true Bomber di Provincia.
If Hubner is Pearl Jam, then Francesco Pio Esposito is Fontaines DC.
Around this time, a man who’d been a bricklayer until the age of 25 was fast becoming a Fiorentina cult hero. Christian Riganò joined La Viola after the club had gone bankrupt in 2002 and been relegated to Serie C2, Italy’s fourth tier.
Riganò had a veritable reputation for scoring in the Siclian amateur leagues and gave up bricklaying in 1999 to play for Taranto in Serie C1. At Fiorentina, however, he was the right man at the perfect time.
They had no time, nor money, to pretend they were the same Fiorentina that had won Coppa Italia the year before. They needed a striker who would guarantee goals. Riganò was the cheap option, one befitting of a club that had learned the hard way not to live a champagne lifestyle on a Lambrini budget.
Riganò scored 30 times in 32 games in his first season at Florentia Viola, as they were known while they tried to re-purchase the naming rights to the bankrupt club. They romped to the 2002/03 Serie C2 title and ended up playing in Serie B the following season as an administrative mess with Catania meant Fiorentina - as they were now called - were promoted to an expanded second tier on ‘sporting legacy grounds’.
Riganò scored another 23 goals as Fiorentina were promoted back to Serie A and would eventually go on to have one spectacular top flight season at Messina in 2006/07.
Football’s hyper-commercialisation in the 2000s coincided with the slow death of romance in the sport and, in turn, with stories like Riganò’s. Or at least it seemed that way.
Perhaps we just didn’t know where to look, or maybe the nineties spoiled us when it came to strikers. The early 2010s saw Antonio Di Natale scoring for fun at Udinese while rejecting big money moves away from Friuli. The decade ended with a thirty-something Ciccio Caputo rising from Serie B to score consistently for Sassuolo and Empoli in multiple Serie A campaigns.
Bombers are a bit like grunge bands. There were more of them in the nineties, but the scene lives on in a different way. If Hubner is Pearl Jam, then Francesco Pio Esposito is Fontaines DC.
Young, raw and talented, Esposito is the third of three brothers to join the professional ranks and may well be the best in the family. Much was made of his older brother Sebastiano when he broke into the Inter team at 16, but he hasn’t lived up to the hype as yet.
Pio has taken an altogether more secluded route, spending the last two seasons on loan from Inter’s academy at Serie B side Spezia, and the 19-year-old has benefitted hugely from playing out of the spotlight. He’s had his oldest brother Salvatore playing alongside him, possibly the best playmaking midfielder in the league. The two brothers have a decent chance of leading Spezia back to the top flight, currently sitting 3rd in Serie B with the best defensive record and fewest defeats, while Pio Esposito is the league’s top scorer with twelve goals.
Pio Esposito can count himself among a new generation of Bomber di Provincia, the rebooted version. Such is the network of modern scouting that fairytale strikers like Protti, Hubner, Riganò would have probably been spotted by a big club in their teens, meaning youngsters like Pio Esposito represent the next best thing: a big lad who scores goals.
Football needs more of them and, whisper it quietly, it seems like they’re making a comeback.
Not only do you have the top scorer in Serie A, Mateo Retegui, a throwback Bomber who makes goalscoring look truly effortless, but you’ve got the 6ft7ins Lorenzo Lucca adding his own avant garde take on the Bomber at Udinese.
Serie B is littered with Bombers, several of whom find themselves at the top of the scoring charts this season. Andrea Adorante came up from Serie C/C with Juve Stabia and has hit double figures already. Pietro Iemmello returned to his hometown club Catanzaro three years ago in search of a strong third act in his career. He’s scored almost seventy goals since.
This year’s breakout star alongside Pio Esposito has been Cristian Shpendi at Cesena. The 21-year-old, whose twin brother Stiven joined Empoli in 2023, has got ten goals, having made the jump from Serie C/B.
He’s got a bright future but the man to lead this next generation of calcio striker is Pio Esposito. He has the build of the best Bomber di Provincia, a burly figure at almost 6ft3ins and not lacking muscle.
Pio Esposito has the same eye for goal that Protti, Lucarelli and co had. The difference is that he has it at 19, perhaps a sign that he’ll smash through the glass ceiling placed on all Italian forwards since Luca Toni retired.
We might not have the bountiful crop of goal machines we once had but prioritising quality, not quantity means we can enjoy Pio Esposito’s rise to stardom, a journey that began on the mean streets of Serie B. Who knows, maybe he’ll be brave enough to volley a washing machine one day.