Ciro Immobile has moved on. Public opinion has not. The career of one of the most prolific (and divisive) strikers of his generation continues to be viewed through the cracked prism of one ill-fated year at Borussia Dortmund. It’s a harsh reality that Immobile confronts again on Tuesday night when Lazio welcome his old team to the Stadio Olimpico for their first Champions League game in more than a decade. The 30-year-old goes into the encounter with peace of mind, even if people are reluctant to let him forget the nine miserable months he endured in Germany.
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Dortmund signed Immobile and Adrian Ramos in 2014 to succeed the frankly irreplaceable Robert Lewandowski after the Pole painfully deserted them for rivals Bayern Munich. Neither of them made up for the loss. In mitigation for failing to meet expectation at Signal Iduna Park, Immobile highlighted his predecessor’s first year at the club, referencing how Lewandowski found the net just nine times in all competitions. It was a paltry total that the Italian actually eclipsed. Immobile at least made it into double figures, with 10.
Given more time, the Italy international felt he could have turned things around in front of the Yellow Wall. “I probably wouldn’t have become like Lewandowski,” he accepted. “But I would have done better (in my second year).” Immobile has certainly done better elsewhere. He did not fade into obscurity like Ramos, who is now back in Colombia playing for America de Cali. Immobile and Dortmund are reacquainted, with him basking in the glow of last season’s European Golden Shoe. The runner-up, as fate would have it, was Lewandowski.
To be clear, the mere citation of that fact isn’t an exhibit in a case arguing that the blonde whippet from Torre Annunziata is as fine or an even better striker than the most deserving recipient of this year’s unassigned Ballon d’Or. It’s simply offered as a counterweight to the rather strange and resilient narrative that Immobile is somehow not elite, an assessment perhaps unduly conditioned by his presence outside of the establishment clubs.
Juventus still had a stake in the player under now-defunct Italian co-ownership rules when Dortmund acquired him six years ago. If they wanted him, he could have been theirs. Instead, the Old Lady sold her remaining share to Torino and didn’t stand in the way of Dortmund taking Immobile to the Bundesliga.
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It was a curious state of affairs. Would Bayern, for instance, have allowed Germany’s best striker to leave when it was, theoretically, in their control to keep him? Immobile was Serie A’s capocannoniere and he’d earned that honour, as he would again, on a gritty, unfashionable team. For context, Juventus already had Carlos Tevez and Fernando Llorente combining effectively up front. There was no room for him in attack. But they still signed Alvaro Morata from Real Madrid to act as competition rather than bring Immobile back in-house.
The rationale behind that decision was understandable enough. Morata was young and would need to earn his stripes. He joined on the basis he was the future, not the present, and would be serving as an alternative to one of the first-choice duo. The same could not be expected of the more fully-formed Immobile who, as the league’s reigning top scorer at the time, merited the status of a team’s leading man.
An unintended consequence of Juventus passing on him at that stage of his career was the notion it fostered of Immobile as not being good enough for the very best. His one start at the World Cup that summer came against Uruguay, an ignominious defeat that led to Italy’s elimination, for which Mario Balotelli was made the scapegoat. Nevertheless, Immobile’s association with a nadir like that and his subsequent travails in Germany only hardened pre-existing doubts about his pedigree.
Scepticism has been a constant companion of his.
When Immobile was the top scorer in Serie B after Pescara’s fairytale promotion to the top flight, people wondered whether he could score as freely at a higher level under a less offensive coach than the throw-all-caution-to-the-wind approach of Zdenek Zeman. As his team-mates left for bigger and better things — Paris Saint-Germain signed Marco Verratti and Napoli made space for Lorenzo Insigne in their first team — Immobile ended up in the tumble dryer of Genoa where the manager changed every couple of months and the team came perilously close to relegation. No sooner did he make it big at Torino where his 22 goals fired the club back into Europe for the first time in two decades than disaster at Dortmund set him back again.
In retrospect, it was the right club at the wrong time for Immobile. His style should have suited Jurgen Klopp down to a tee but, as with Tottenham Hotspur and Mauricio Pochettino last season, Dortmund experienced the hangover of losing a Champions League final and their charismatic coach’s cycle at the club was coming to an end. Five consecutive defeats between September and November meant they couldn’t wait for Immobile to adapt to a new culture and a different league. Dortmund went into the winter break second from bottom and although their record signing managed to make an impact in the Champions League, scoring four goals in six appearances for the club, his woeful Bundesliga form caused him to lose his place.
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Living in Unna, about a half-hour outside of Dortmund, Immobile and his young family felt alone. “In eight months, none of my team-mates invited me out for dinner,” he sighed. “When (the Swedish midfielder) Alexander Farnerud joined Torino, it was just him and his wife. They didn’t speak a word of Italian. But my wife and the other girls instantly did what they could to help them settle in, organising dinners and birthday parties.” There was, in his opinion, little to recommend Dortmund as a city. “We didn’t go out very often,” Immobile’s wife, Jessica, recalled. And when they did it was to the Italian restaurants owned by Neapolitans and Sicilians whose families had come over to work in the mines of the Ruhr.
Immobile’s impression of Germans was that they were “cold”. Dortmund put on a language tutor for him but he found it “very difficult” and conversed in Italian to Sokratis and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, both AC Milan alumni. If Klopp spoke “too quickly” for Immobile to understand, he found himself in real trouble when Thomas Tuchel, his replacement, got rid of an interpreter and held one-on-ones in German. While Immobile would point out that Franck Ribery took ages to pick up the local lingo, his inability and perceived unwillingness to communicate was an obvious source of criticism in the local media. Immobile never won them over. “Bild slaughters me, maybe because it’s a Munich paper (it’s actually Hamburg-based) and they don’t miss any opportunity to take shots at Dortmund,” he said. The stories claiming Immobile’s neighbours in Unna were annoyed at the vroom-vroom revs of his high-powered sports car did not help his cause, nor did the pictures of him sat away from the rest of the team all on his lonesome at the airport.
The writing was on the Yellow Wall and Immobile left for the warmer climes of Seville. If there’s a silver lining to be found in flopping abroad it’s that Dortmund, as we’ve seen with Lewandowski, Aubameyang, Michy Batshuayi, Paco Alcacer and Erling Haaland, are seldom wrong about strikers while Monchi, the sporting director at Sevilla, is more right than he is wrong when it comes to signings too. That clubs as celebrated for their recruitment nous as these two saw talent in Immobile isn’t a coincidence and feels significant regardless of whether his move worked out or not. While happier in sun-kissed Andalucia than he was in the rain splattered Ruhr, Immobile’s stint at the Sanchez Pizjuan was short-lived on account of his incompatibility with Unai Emery.
He returned to Torino determined to recapture his best form and for a brief while partnered his good friend Andrea Belotti, who had taken Immobile’s place in the team, not to mention the hearts of fans of the Granata in Italy’s motor city. Not big enough for the both of them, Immobile left town and headed to the capital where Lazio struck, what in hindsight, looks like one of the bargains of the decade in Serie A. They paid €8.5 million for him in the hope he might be able to replace the World Cup winner and German great Miroslav Klose.
Immobile has done so much more than that. Four years on from his arrival in the Eternal City, he stands a decent chance of becoming Lazio’s all-time top scorer by the end of this season. If he strikes against Dortmund, then Immobile will match Beppe Signori — the one-step penalty legend with size four feet — on 127 in all competitions. Once Signori is cleared, that will leave Immobile needing 33 to overtake the mythical Silvio Piola with 159 in the powder blue of Lazio. The same Piola whose overall total of 274 is still enough to make him Serie A’s all-time top scorer more than 60 years after his retirement.
Reviewing Immobile’s time in the capital, it’s hard not to be impressed at how well he has done and what he has helped Lazio achieve. From the three pieces of silverware — more than anyone apart from Juventus in the last decade — to the club-record points total and first appearance in the Champions League for 13 years, to a first win against Juventus in Turin in 15 years and another over Milan at San Siro for the first time in three decades. Immobile, who has shades of Paolo Rossi and Toto Schillaci to his own game, struck on both those occasions and, after beating more than 60 — yes, 60! — different goalkeepers in Serie A, no one can keep him down.
Last season he matched the single-season scoring record (36) which stood for more than half a century until Gonzalo Higuain broke it in 2016. It was the most prolific campaign by an Italian ever and while it featured 14 penalties — breaking the record Roby Baggio set at Bologna in 1998 — he was generous enough to give his team-mates Joaquin Correa and Luis Alberto a couple — which they missed. All told, Immobile still managed to outscore Cristiano Ronaldo and Romelu Lukaku from open play.
The number of spot kicks is a curious stick to beat Immobile with when it’s a valuable high-pressure skill and while it’s undoubtedly true the strict interpretation of the handball rule enabled him and Ronaldo to inflate their goal tallies, the pair still had to convert from 12 yards. The focus on this particular aspect of his game conforms with the curious tendency to make Immobile out to be a one-dimensional striker who took advantage of the rules to have a monster year when, in fact, the longevity, consistency and variation to his game should be lauded. Only Lionel Messi (133), Lewandowski (122) and Ronaldo (106) have scored more goals in Europe’s top five leagues than Immobile (104) since he moved to Lazio four years ago and more than 70 per cent have arrived from open play.
As he won the Serie A golden boot for a third time last season — only one player, Gunnar Nordahl, counts more (five) — the focus understandably fell on his finishing and how many more goals he could have added if he’d been a tad luckier. Remarkably, Immobile has hit the woodwork on more occasions than anyone in Europe’s top five leagues over the last two seasons (17).
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All the goals have distracted from the depth to his game as a whole and the generosity of spirit he shows in setting up chances for his team-mates too. When Immobile gets defenders on their heels he often checks back, surveys what’s around him and then plays a defence-splitting pass for a strike partner, a square ball to a midfield runner or a cross to the far post, such as the one he curled in for Nicolo Barella’s winner against Holland in September. Last year was the second time in three seasons he ended a campaign with nine league assists. Only Messi finished with more goal involvements (46) than he did (45) in 2019-20.
And yet the debate over how good he really is rages on. In part, because Immobile has, up until now, not been a regular on the Champions League stage. In part, because he went a couple of years without scoring for Italy as they failed to qualify for the World Cup for the first time in 60 years. In part, because Roberto Mancini still doesn’t know who to start up front for the Azzurri. The numbers make Immobile the obvious choice. But Mancini continues to alternate him with Belotti and now has the in-form Francesco Caputo of Sassuolo to consider too.
Tonight feels like a chance for Immobile to lay the ghosts of Dortmund to rest. The Golden Shoe he holds in his hands should serve as a source of pride and inspiration amid the persistent hesitation over whether he should be included in the conversation about the very best strikers of this era. As only the second player outside of Messi and Ronaldo to win that award this decade — Luis Suarez is the other — Immobile shouldn’t have anything left to prove to anybody. And yet so many remain unconvinced. For Immobile, it seems scoring goals is a lot easier than changing people’s minds.
(Top photo: Paolo Bruno/Getty Images)