Serie A’s rising stars: Inter’s ‘Bull’ has caught the eye of Messi and Barcelona

Lautaro Martinez, Inter Milan, Serie A, Argentina
By James Horncastle
Apr 8, 2020

There was a time when Lionel Messi only let his feet do the talking. What need is there for words when your talent for football is so immense it leaves people speechless? Publicly, expression is something Messi tended to do within the white lines of a football pitch. Comment off it only became necessary later when the leaders of his first Barcelona team either retired or moved on and the running of the club emerged as a source of some disgruntlement.

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As far as recruitment goes, Messi isn’t the first superstar to earn the right to signal his preferences ahead of a summer transfer window. Diego Maradona used to do it all the time at Napoli and much more aggressively so, with the needs of his coaches Ottavio Bianchi and Albertino Bigon often coming a distant second to the desires of El Diez.

While Messi’s presence alone is an almost irresistible lure for prospective signings, a verbal endorsement direct from the G.O.A.T’s mouth can also prove a clincher. Eulogising Lautaro Martinez in February, the purpose felt pretty transparent. One day, Messi would like to see Inter’s Argentine striker playing alongside him in Barcelona colours. “He’s spectacular,” Messi told El Mundo Deportivo in February. “In stunning form. You could always tell he was going to be a great player.”

Lauti, as his Inter coach Antonio Conte affectionately calls him, already graced the Nou Camp in October and, as one Serie A scout put it to The Athletic, if you’ve played and delivered in Superclasicos back in Argentina — in Lautaro’s case the Avellaneda derby between Racing Club and Independiente — “it’s unlikely adapting to Europe will be hard”.

Playing in front of 86,000 Catalans in the Champions League was never going to faze him. The 22-year-old scored inside 90 seconds, holding off Clement Lenglet before flashing a shot across Marc-Andre ter Stegen, who looked confident no one could beat him at his far post. The German was wrong.

Far from a flash in the pan, history repeated itself in Dortmund a month or so later. The game at Signal Iduna Park wasn’t five minutes old when Lautaro, shrugging off another World Cup winning centre-back, the humbled Mats Hummels, broke the ice again with a composed finish on his weaker left foot.

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Away goals. Opening goals — 14 of the 19 he has scored this season have come inside the first half-hour. Prestige goals — Lautaro is Inter’s top scorer in the Champions League with five in six appearances; big games bring out the best in him. It’s a special something he shares in common with the player he replaced as a substitute on his professional debut at Racing: Diego Milito, “The Prince” himself, whose clutch strikes decided the Coppa Italia and Champions League finals in Inter’s treble-winning season in 2010.

In one of those sliding doors moments, Lautaro could have been playing for Borussia Dortmund against Inter in this season’s Champions League group stage. Back at the start of February 2018, emissaries from the Bundesliga club were at El Cilindro to watch Racing play against Huracan. Inter’s sporting director Piero Ausilio was also in attendance.

Competition to sign Lautaro was already high and the hat-trick he scored that day only served to increase the sense of urgency among the clubs vying for his signature. Racing had resisted overtures from Atletico Madrid through the diplomacy of Milito who, upon hanging up his boots, started a new chapter of his career as the club’s sporting director.

“Before Diego started that role, Lautaro was really close to going to Atletico,” Racing’s club secretary, Diego Huerta tells The Athletic. “The release clause was too low. It was 9 million euros or something like that and his transfer value was much more. At that moment, Lautaro’s agent and the president of the club clashed. They were not happy with some aspects of his contract. Then Milito came and he convinced Lautaro to stay for another six months, even with Atletico chasing him.”

It was around this time that Javier Zanetti picked up the phone and dialled up his old friend and team-mate. The former Inter captain, now acting as the club’s vice-president, wished to know whether they still had a chance of attracting Lautaro to Italy. “I know that Zanetti called Milito and asked if Lautaro had already been sold,” Huerta revealed, and the answer Zanetti got elicited a smile. “‘No’, Diego said. The next thing, Ausilio (Inter’s sporting director) was coming to Argentina.”

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Back and forth Ausilio went. Huerta remembers him returning for the Copa Libertadores game against Cruzeiro later that month. “It was Lautaro’s debut in that competition and he scored three goals; three goals in his first game in the Libertadores,” he says, incredulously. Every time Ausilio saw him, he scored a hat-trick. Flying back across the Atlantic without a deal simply wasn’t an option. “They closed the signing,” Huerta laughs. For €25 million, Inter bagged themselves a bargain.

In a Q&A on Instagram last month, one of Romelu Lukaku’s followers asked him what he thinks about Lautaro. The Belgian’s response was unequivocal. “He’s one of the biggest talents I’ve ever seen.” As strike partnerships go, the “Lula” duo of Lukaku-Lautaro is probably the best in Europe at the moment.

Between them, they have scored 55 per cent of Inter’s goals this season, a little (Lautaro 5ft 8in) and large (Lukaku 6ft 3in) combination dovetailing to devastating effect. There are slick one-twos, like the one for Lautaro’s goal against Atalanta and the frankly ridiculous telepathy on display in Prague when Lukaku nonchalantly played a through ball behind the defence with the outside of his left foot for Lautaro to volley home with his right.

One always seems to know what the other is thinking. Returning to training after their exploits in the Czech Republic, the double act showed they share a fashion sense as well as matching football instincts with both rocking up in the same Givenchy sweater.

The on-field bromance between them makes a nice change to the disruption caused by the Kardashian-esque reality TV show drama produced by Wanda Nara and Mauro Icardi. Getting over the two-time top scorer in Serie A, who still ranks as one of Inter’s greatest goalscorers of all-time, never became the problem it threatened to be thanks to Lautaro and Lukaku hitting things off from the get-go.

Inter last had two strikers in double figures at the halfway point of a Serie A season 12 years ago, a time when Zlatan Ibrahimovic and “The Gardener” Julio Ricardo Cruz were pummelling defences. “You two are the best young strike partnership in Europe,” Christian Vieri explained to Lukaku. “You’re the perfect couple. You play for each other and this is fundamental. It’s a bit like what I used to do with Ronaldo, (Hernan) Crespo and (Alvaro) Recoba. Inter have always had great strikers. Now it’s you and Lautaro’s turn. You’ll score a shedload of goals.”

Lautaro hails from Bahia Blanca, Argentina’s Windy City. The gusts blowing in from the coast are so strong, a lot of sport ends up taking place indoors. It’s for that reason that it’s a basketball town. Manu Ginobili, the San Antonio Spurs legend, and Sergio Hernandez, the coach of Argentina’s national team, come from Bahia Blanca while Lautaro’s younger brother Jano shoots hoops for the Villa Mitre Warriors.

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Huerta says: “Many footballers from Bahia Blanca are good in the air. Alfio Basile, he was a coach of Argentina, a centre-back at Racing and a world champion (a key figure in the side that beat Celtic in the Intercontinental Cup in 1967). Basile was very strong in the air. You probably know his nickname ‘Coco’. He got that for his heading. In Argentina, we call you ‘Coco’ if you’ve got a big head.”

Lautaro isn’t the tallest at 5ft 8in but his timing, co-ordination and ability to judge the flight of the ball makes him especially dangerous in the air. Ashley Young and Antonio Candreva know that if they whip in a cross, there’s a good chance Lautaro will transform it into a goal, just as he did against SPAL and in the two games against Cagliari this season.

His concentration levels always stood out at Racing. The hat-trick Ausilio saw him score against Cruzeiro was remarkable from the point of view that all his goals arrived from set-pieces. Typically, one bounced off his “Coco” and in the others, he displayed a guile and level of alertness totally out of the ordinary.

“Cecilia Contarino runs our youth sector and is also a psychologist,” Huerta explains. “She makes our players do a series of exams to test their concentration. Cecilia tells me that in all her years at the club, Lautaro got the best marks. The tests are scored from one to 100. If a player gets more than 60, it usually indicates they have the concentration expected of a professional player. Lautaro would get 91, 92, 93. Every time he did it, he improved. You can see it when he plays.”

You can’t knock the hustle, either. Lautaro’s father Mario was a defender, a left-back for Villa Mitre in Nacional B, Argentina’s second division, and so was his boy until a coach at Liniers decided it was a waste of time playing him at the back. Lautaro became a marauding centre-forward, his spiky hairstyle conjuring the image of a character from a 90s video game like Megaman. When the 16-year-old Lautaro joined Racing, his team-mate Santiago Reyes nicknamed him El Toro — “The Bull” — capturing perfectly the way he charged down defenders and knocked into everyone and everything.

“In some respects, I’ve never stopped thinking like a defender,” Lautaro told La Repubblica. “Chasing down every ball comes naturally to me. That’s always been my style.”

StatsBomb data shows he leads Inter’s high press, making a successful defensive action on average 64.85 metres from goal. No one on his team with at least 900 minutes under their belt manages to make more counter pressures per 90 (4.11) or pressures in the opposing half (16.11).

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Lautaro is always snapping at someone’s heels. Milito believes he could control his temper better — the second yellow for dissent he picked up against Cagliari meant he missed the Milan derby through suspension — and perhaps he got a little lucky that his rugby-style tap tackle on Rafael Toloi (below) went unpunished against Atalanta. But don’t expect someone with Conte’s view of football to try coaching those instincts out of Lautaro’s game.

“He has a lot in common with Luis Suarez,” Messi admired in El Mundo Deportivo, not that Giorgio Chiellini should worry about Lautaro sinking his teeth into him during a Derby d’Italia. Certainly in football terms, the comparison stands up and with Suarez entering the twilight of his career at 33, the need to plan for his succession ranks high on the Barcelona agenda in spite of the arrivals of Antoine Griezmann — not to mention Martin Braithwaite.

“He’s great in one-v-one situation. He scores a lot. He moves well in the penalty area,” Messi continued. A host of reasons, equally, for Inter to hold onto Lautaro and build their team around his chemistry with Lukaku.

Before the pandemic, the €111 million buy-out clause in Lautaro’s contract, which remains a long way from expiry in 2023, had started to look cheap. Now, with the economic impact of coronavirus hurting revenues and wages being deferred or cut (by 70 per cent in Barcelona’s case), the price appears prohibitive again, at least without players thrown in as collateral.

Lautaro insists Inter is “home to me”, the same way it has always been to Argentines from Walter Samuel to Esteban Cambiasso. “Watching him every day in training at Pinetina, I can see he’s happy,” Zanetti assured Inter fans on Sky Italia this week.

And if that’s the case, the only chance Messi gets to play with Lautaro could be with Argentina.

(Photo: Getty Images; Graphic design: Tom Slator)

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James Horncastle

James Horncastle covers Serie A for The Athletic. He joins from ESPN and is working on a book about Roberto Baggio.