Why doesn’t Lazio star Ciro Immobile get the recognition he deserves?

Italy has produced some scoring icons, but Lazio star Ciro Immobile may easily be the most underrated Serie A striker of them all due to his lack of silverware.

The country shaped like a boot has given the world its fair share of talented soccer players. While goalkeepers and defenders come to mind, strikers have also played a large role.

Some of Italy’s best strikers include sepia-toned footage of Giuseppe Meazza, down through the decades to include Gigi Riva and Giorgio Chinaglia to more recent ones like Paolo Rossi and Roberto Baggio.

Meazza helped Italy win the World Cup twice, while Piola is Serie A’s all-time leading scorer. Chinaglia was the Lazio star most remembered for scoring goals in America with the New York Cosmos, while Rossi led his country to a World Cup. Baggio, although one of the world’s best players in the 1990s, failed to win the World Cup after taking Italy to the 1994 final.

So where does current capocannoniere leader Ciro Immobile rank among the all-time greats? It’s a good question given that the Lazio star is not only Serie A’s top scorer this season, but 53rd all-time and fifth-best among active players (fourth among those currently playing in Serie A).

The only other men playing in Serie A right now who have scored more than Immobile (119 Serie A goals) are the ageless Fabio Quagliarerlla (158), Zlatan Ibrahimovic (123), who only recently returned to Serie A after signing with AC Milan, and Gonzalo Higuain (122).

Zlatan got more attention than Immobile this weekend after scoring Saturday, marking his return to Serie A with a goal in a win against Cagliari. That’s saying a lot since it was Immobile’s goal late in the game that lifted Lazio to a win against struggling Napoli.

Immobile’s 119 goals in 206 league games averages out to 0.57 goals per game since he turned pro in 2009. That’s just second on the active players list with 100 or more goals, behind only Higuain’s 0.61 goals-per-match average.

The numbers, especially in soccer, only tell part of the story. Metrics aren’t a very big part of the game. Certainly, scoring goals is what is expected of every striker. In Immobile’s case, he’s done that and continues to do it.

This season alone he’s tallied 20 goals and added five assists in the first half this season. That’s better than Cristiano Ronaldo and Romelu Lukaku. Heck, that’s better than fellow Italian strikers Andrea Belotti and Lorenzo Insigne combined this season. It also puts him atop the scoring charts in all of Europe at the moment and in the running to win the Golden Shoe as the continent’s top marksman.

That’s not to say Immobile is the best player in the world. But his place among Italian-born strikers, however, is unquestionable at this point.

In just three seasons at Lazio, he was able to surpass the 100-goal mark. The 29-year-old marksman has already won the capocannoniere title (Serie A’s top scorer) twice before. The first came in 2014, when he scored 22 goals with Torino. The second was in 2018, when he tied then-Inter Milan striker Mauro Icardi for the title with 29 goals.

Serie A is a league that fawns over its foreign stars, something that dates back to the 1980s when Italy had the world’s best top flight, filled with stars like Diego Maradona and Marco van Basten. Don’t believe me? Simply compare the love Maradona and van Basten got compared to Italian strikers Gianluca Vialli and Roberto Mancini. These days, everyone gushes over the likes of Ronaldo and Ibrahimovic because they have global star power.

Immobile may be underrated simply because he hasn’t won anything major. His trophy case includes a German SuperCup with Borussia Dortmund in 2014. With Lazio, he’s won a Coppa Italia and two Italian SuperCups. With Italy, he was part of the team that crashed out of the 2014 World Cup in the group stage. In all, he’s scored just 10 goals in 39 games for his country. It didn’t help that he went on a two-year scoring drought with the national team.

Soccer is, after all, a team sport. Individual accolades and goals aside, winning championships is what elevates the stock of players and managers. Immobile will need to do the same over the next few years to get the recognition commensurate with his scoring prowess.

Only time will tell if Immobile will ever be considered one of Italy’s best strikers. For now, he’s scoring goals and dazzling Lazio fans. He’s got a shot this summer at winning the European Championship, something that would certainly help his case.

For now, he’s not underrated. Immobile has simply not won enough.