Francesco Totti and Roma have apparently found an agreement for the captain’s contract extension until the year 2016 for €3.2M/year. Er Pupone by then will be 40 years old, and might be ready to hang up his boots. Yes he might be ready, because the second top scorer in the history of Serie A (with his 227 goals) has never hidden his personal objective of becoming the top scorer of all times in the Italian top league. The bad news for Totti is that the FIGC (Italian Football Federation) could reveal itself as the toughest defender for the Roman, blocking his shot at the record. In fact, it is about to (re-)assign 16 goals to Silvio Piola, the current Capocannoniere.

 

Silvio Piola is considered as one of the greatest Italian football players in history. World Champion with Italy in 1938, he played from 1929 to 1954 in Pro Vercelli, Lazio, Juventus, Torino and Novara. During last Tuesday’s International fixture of Italy vs Czech Republic, Italy paid homage to one of its greatest strikers two weeks before the 100th anniversary of his birth (29th September 1913). It was probably the noise of this upcoming event that brought some people within the FIGC to actually question a record that has lasted since the mid-50s.

In 1945, just after the end of the Second World War, Italy was devastated. Football, like every other aspect of society, was trying to start over. Due to the logistical problems brought by the destruction of infrastructures and transportation systems, the Serie A was played, but it was split into two groups - a Northern and a Southern one - , with a final round robin between the top teams of the two groups. Due to the peculiarity of this formula, and due to the fact that some Serie B teams were actually participating to the Southern group, the 1945-46 Serie A is often not included in the statistics. In the end, Torino won the Scudetto, and Silvio Piola scored 16 goals for the granata city rivals of Juventus, but whereas Torino’s title always counted as their third Scudetto in the official winner list of the Federation (and the second of il Grande Torino’s record five consecutive titles, before the tragic Superga airplane crash would change forever the club’s fate), the goals scored did not. This evident contradiction finally came to the attention of the Federation, who decided that those 16 goals deserved to be counted.

This means that Totti will need 63 more goals, in order to reach Silvio Piola’s 290. The old 274 goal mark is history already. Supposing that age won’t be a factor, and that he keeps on scoring for the remaining of his contract (3 years) at the same rate as the last 3 seasons (12 goals/season), he will reach approximately 263 goals, 27 shy of the new record, and 11 shy of the old. Totti would probably need at least two more seasons in order to win his final challenge. At his age it could be an impossible mission, also for a gladiator. But then again, who could possibly think of a greater motivation in order to persevere: becoming the greatest striker in the history of Italian football (still the most difficult in terms of goal scoring), at the expense of a former Lazio legend…


Top scorers in Serie A history:
1. Silvio Piola 274
2. Francesco Totti 227
3. Gunnar Nordahl 225 
4. Giuseppe Meazza 216 
5.  José Altafini 216