Mateo Retegui: The gluttonous goalscorer who Mancini likens to Batistuta

This summer, we are running a series profiling 50 exciting players under the age of 25 — who they are, how they play, and why they are attracting interest during this transfer window. 

You can find all our profiles so far here, including “the Gen-Z Sergio Busquets”, the Canada striker determined to become a household name and the French midfielder that can do it all.

Watching Mateo Retegui play football feels a little bit like time travel.

The Tigre forward, who came to global attention when he was called up to play for Italy earlier this year, is a throwback to a simpler time when strikers only traded in one base currency.

Forget your false nines, your assist figures, your decoy runs and your selfless multi-functional attack nodes. Retegui was placed on this earth to do one thing and one thing alone: take giant, gleeful handfuls of goals from the goal mine and shove them down his throat.

He is a pure one-track-mind goalscorer. A goalsmith. A goalman. And yes, this is all very overblown, but there is something undeniably seductive, even if just on a conceptual level, about a footballer so elemental, so stripped-back. Run, David; here comes Goaliath.

“I don’t want to exaggerate, but he reminds me a bit of Gabriel Batistuta,” was how Italy coach Roberto Mancini put it in March, and while that definitely flatters Retegui, there are certain stylistic echoes.

Like Batistuta, the 24-year-old never seems to have his internal intensity gauge set to anything below 11. He’s always leaping, rampaging, barging. He clobbers shots with such violence that you wonder what the goal net did to offend him. He doesn’t head the ball; he headbutts it. He is always, always shooting.

Is he actually good? That’s an open question, but it’s very hard not to like him.

Retegui comes from sporting stock. His sister Micaela represents Argentina in field hockey; their father, Carlos, is a bona fide legend of that sport, having played at international level for 17 years and coached the Argentina men’s team to Olympic gold in 2016.

For a while, it looked as though Mateo would also go down the hockey route. He was an Argentina youth international and continued to juggle hockey and football well into his teens, making a final choice only when he joined the Boca Juniors youth system in 2016.

The family name preceded him in those early years, but he was determined to walk his own path.

“I don’t mind being known as Carlos Retegui’s son,” he said in 2019. “I’m proud to be connected to my dad, but I’m going to grow and earn everyone’s respect. Maybe one day he will be known as Mateo Retegui’s father.”

Retegui playing for Italy (Photo: Matteo Ciambelli/DeFodi Images via Getty Images)

Initially, Retegui was a defensive midfielder. He still retains a little of the guard dog spirit today, snapping away at defenders, but his academy coaches pushed him forward and made a welcome discovery: Retegui could finish. Right foot, left foot, in the air; it didn’t really matter to him.

After racking up the goals at youth level, Retegui made his senior Boca debut in 2018, replacing Boca idol Carlos Tevez in a league game against Patronato. And then… well, nothing, really.

Retegui went on loan to Estudiantes, producing a few flashes of quality but failing to do enough to convince Boca he was ready to play a part for them. It was the same story at Talleres. Only in the last 18 months, at Tigre, has he truly established himself at senior level.

Hence some of the lingering doubt about him. It is quite a small body of work.

Luckily for him, it is also a very eye-catching body of work. Retegui exploded in 2022, netting 23 times in all competitions and finishing the Argentine league season as top scorer — all for a newly promoted team.

In fact, Retegui fired Tigre to the giddy heights of seventh, and while they have fallen off drastically this year, he has continued to add to his tally. All told, he has 34 goals in 66 games for the side from San Fernando.

“He is a predator inside the penalty box,” says Manuel Luis-Larre, who covers Tigre for the Argentinian website TyC Sports. “When chances fall to him, he puts them away. He’s good in the air, good with his feet. He’s a proper finisher.”

Retegui’s highlight reel bears that out. His is a real plunderer’s portfolio, full of opportunism. He deals in rebounds and loose balls, penalties and close-range headers, the kind of scrappy strikes that proper forwards value every bit as highly as wonder goals.

Of his 23 goals from open play for Tigre, 17 have been first-time finishes, which hints at both the instinctive nature of his shooting and at his knack for being in the right place at the right time. He is one of those players to whom the ball seems to have a magnetic attraction inside the opposition box.

Retegui averaged 3.87 shots per match in the Argentine top flight in 2022 — more than any other player. Incredibly, that number has risen to 3.96 this term. Retegui is just not that interested in getting involved in the build-up, as highlighted in the graphic above: he scores very low on ‘link-up play volume’ and ‘progressive passing’ (see our Smarterscout pizza chart glossary for a full guide to interpreting these metrics).

Predictably, Retegui rates highly for ‘shot volume’ and ‘receptions in the opposition box’: he is primarily a penalty-area operator who is keen to shoot when he gains possession. More interesting is ‘disrupting opposite moves’. The higher this number, the more the player unsettles opposition attacks through tackling, fouling, blocking and clearing, per minute out of possession.

The nuisance factor — in other words — is high with Retegui. He looks like a scrapper — and he is. “He is the team’s first defender,” explains Larre.

It was an attractive enough package to convince Mancini that Retegui — whose maternal grandparents are from Sicily — was worth a place in the Italy squad for the Euro 2024 qualifiers against England and Malta in March.

“We have a lot of faith in him, but we have to give him a bit of time,” said Mancini, but Retegui was not just there for a free holiday. He scored in both matches and was back in the squad for the final stages of the UEFA Nations League last month.

Retegui’s defection elicited a few raised eyebrows in Argentina, but nothing more. “It makes no sense to affect the player’s future if we are not convinced,” national team coach Lionel Scaloni said after being asked whether he should have called him up first. “We have many players who we rate highly in that position.”

Nor is he the only one to look at Retegui’s recent exploits and shrug. It is instructive that, even at the end of last year after Retegui’s breakout season, Boca turned down the option to bring him back to the Bombonera. That single, eight-minute run-out as a substitute five years ago remains his only appearance for his parent side.

With all that in mind, it probably makes sense that he is being linked with clubs just below the European elite. Fiorentina — another Batistuta link — are rumoured to be at the head of the queue. Lazio and Inter have also been credited with interest.

It will be interesting to see whether he can parlay his promising form over the last 18 months into something more substantive; whether he can keep sating his thirst for goals in Italy.

For Larre, who has watched him closely at Tigre, the outlook is encouraging.

“Retegui is young and still has a lot to learn, but he doesn’t have any glaring weaknesses,” he says. “He’s a very complete player. He’s strong, good in the air, uses his body well, takes up good positions in the box. He’s definitely got the talent to do well in Europe.”

(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)