Fabio Quagliarella will continue to play in Serie A next season after Sampdoria announced a one-year extension to the veteran striker’s contract. If Fabio Quagliarella equals last season’s goals, Quagliarella will overtake Gabriel Batistuta as the top scorer in Serie A and even surpass Alberto Gilardino and Alessandro del Piero. With 180 goals in 525 appearances, the veteran star ranks 13th on the all-time top scorer list, just four behind Gabriel Batistuta. In modern football, it is often assumed that once you reach the age of 30, you are ‘too old or ‘beyond your prime.’ At a time, there were more than 50 footballers in Serie A beyond the age of 30. Twenty-five players are over 35, one of which is Fabio Quagliarella.
The Sampdoria striker, who turned 39 in January, has been banging around since having his Serie A debut for Torino in 1999/2000 and has undoubtedly chipped in with his good number of goals, not just in Serie A but also in Italy’s second and third levels before cementing himself at the top. In any case, the striker has scored more than ten goals in six of the previous eight seasons. The last time he failed to reach ten goals was in 2015/16, when he switched from Torino to Sampdoria in the middle of the season, completing eight in total in Serie A.
Do you know why Quagliarella had to leave Napoli? Raffaele Piccolo, a police officer, pursued Quagliarella for five years. Piccolo threatened him and his family with death and spread rumours about the forward doing crimes such as selling drugs, match rigging, and having ties to the Mafia. The strain of the circumstances pushed him to quit Napoli after just one year, which resulted in his move to Juventus, where he won three Serie A titles in a row.
With two goals in a 4-0 win over Udinese in January 2019, Quagliarella tied Gabriel Batistuta’s record of 11 straight Serie A games this season. When he tied Batistuta’s record, the Italian was a decade older. During the 1994/95 season, the Argentine was 26 years old and played for Fiorentina. The forward is Italy’s all-time oldest goalscorer, scoring twice in Liechtenstein in March 2019 at the age of 36 years and 54 days. Quagliarella had to wait a very long time to go forward from seven international strikes, as the Sampdoria player had to spend 3,048 days between Italy caps 25 and 26. There was an eight-and-a-half-year long break between a friendly against Romania in November 2010, where he equalised in a 1-1 draw, and his second cap as a substitution against Finland in March 2019.
