The new season begins and Victor Osimhen remains at Napoli eager to confirm his historic Capocannoniere status, but who will take the crown this time around?
The Nigerian hero became the first ever African to take the Serie A top scorer title, as well as helping to end Napoli’s three-decade wait for the Scudetto thanks to his 26 goals. Despite a summer of intense interest from numerous clubs including those in the Saudi Pro League, he seems set to stay at the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona and sign a new contract. His confidence is sky-high, albeit under a new coach in Rudi Garcia.
Inevitably, Osimhen will start out as the favourite to retain the Capocannoniere title too, but there could be a big problem when the Africa Cup of Nations is played from January 13 to February 11, 2024. Napoli have long been vocal in their irritation at the tournament’s timing and losing their top striker for a month will bound to affect his goals tally for this season.
Osimhen made history for other reasons too, as he became only the fourth in the post-WWII period to combine the Scudetto with the title of Capocannoniere. The last to achieve this was Zlatan Ibrahimovic for Inter in 2009, a sign of how rare this pairing has been. Napoli flourished also because so many of the chasing pack were tripping over themselves at different times and that inconsistency hit their top scorers too.
Kvicha Kvaratskhelia had an amazing debut season with 10 goals and 12 assists, but the majority of those were in the early stages of the campaign when he was still a novelty. A player so spectacularly two-footed ought to be unstoppable, yet the Georgia international must learn to vary his moves more, having become rather predictable in the later months.
Lautaro Martinez can usually be guaranteed to challenge for top scorer, especially now that he has been given the captain’s armband at Inter too. His strike partners keep changing, as Marcus Thuram and Marko Arnautovic bring very different styles to Romelu Lukaku and Edin Dzeko, so it remains to be seen how he will combine with them. El Toro’s main problem at club and international level has always been that he blows hot and cold. The Argentine can go weeks without scoring – as he did at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar – or have a flurry of games where he seems simply unstoppable. It has become enough of a pattern for fans and coaches not to be concerned when he goes through another dry patch.
Milan and Roma spent all summer looking for strikers and the season kicks off with still no sign of the new additions. Olivier Giroud will be stretched pretty thin with the Champions League too and is not getting any younger. Rafael Leao could get a significant boost from the change of system to 4-3-3 and the addition of so many attacking players, although in turn that could also allow the Rossoneri to spread the goals around a little more evenly than in previous campaigns.
Christian Pulisic has found the net regularly in pre-season and could suit Serie A very well, along with Samuel Chukwueze and Noah Okafor, though none of them are being used as real centre-forwards.
Juventus have the benefit of missing out on European football and can therefore avoid squad rotation, but the constant speculation around Dusan Vlahovic, his fitness issues and the obvious clash of styles with coach Max Allegri make him an unlikely bet for Capocannoniere. That is all assuming the Serbian is still in Turin once the transfer window shuts.
Ciro Immobile was pretty low down the list last time around, finding the net only 12 times in Serie A last season due to injuries and the difficulty of adapting to Maurizio Sarri’s tactics, while this season he’ll have the rare pleasure of participating in the Champions League too.
There are some impressive new additions to the Capocannoniere race, including Gianluca Scamacca who has returned to Serie A joining Atalanta. Mateo Retegui is another Italy international who took literally 30 seconds to find the net on his Genoa debut in the Coppa Italia and is already earning comparisons with Diego Milito at Marassi. Fiorentina are always ones to keep an eye on for prolific strikers and Lucas Beltran arrives from River Plate hoping to follow in the footsteps of Gabriel Batistuta. There is certainly no shortage of scoring opportunities in a Vincenzo Italiano team, it’s just a matter of putting it in the net.