Italy’s Top Attacking Talents: Using xGold To Find The Next Lautaro Martínez – Data Analysis

Serie A currently has some serious high-value talent playing in it – Kvicha Kvaratskhelia, Nicoló Barella, Rafael Leão, and Victor Osimhen are all players worth over £65m currently, according to Transfermarkt (TM).

But the most valuable player in Italy’s top tier is Inter Milan’s talismanic striker, Lautaro Martínez – the 2023/24 Serie A Golden Boot winner.

With an impressive 30 G/A in 33 appearances in Serie A, Martínez is undoubtedly one of the best players Serie A has to offer right now.

According to TM, the Argentinian forward is currently valued at £92.6m.

Martínez is currently in his prime at 26 years of age, and while many clubs would love to have him in their team, most of those clubs could only dream of such a happening.

However, clubs will undoubtedly be on the hunt for the next Serie A goal machine, the next Lautaro Martínez.

In this data analysis, we will use TFA’s comparison tool xGold to identify some potential future stars in Italy who show similarities to Inter’s star man.

Criteria

As we want to find stars of the future in this analysis, we will limit our search to CFs aged 23 and under who played for Serie A, B, or C clubs in the 23/24 season – players who were on loan from a club outside of those three leagues will not be featured.

As Martínez has been known to play as an attacking midfielder/second striker occasionally, we will allow the search to highlight players who play as a winger/attacking midfielder as well as a striker, with the aim of finding players with positional versatility.

There is no limit in terms of market value.

The search will produce a list of 80 players who meet the criteria – ultimately, the top 80 U23 strikers in Italy who are similar to Lautaro Martínez in terms of play style.

The table below shows the 80 players, highlighting their similarity rating and overall quality rating according to xGold’s algorithm.

It is worth noting that the search highlights players that were at Italian clubs at the start of the 23/24 season – for example, Rasmus Højlund appears in the search despite moving to Manchester United in August of 2023.

Of course, the top players we recommend and analyse further will be current Serie A/B/C players.

Those who follow Italian will be familiar with a good number of the names on the graph above – the search produced a high number of players in the second and third tier of Italian football, giving us a good variety of players & levels to choose from.

We have selected seven players for analysis, but there are other players within the above data who could, of course, go on to be successful centre-forwards in elite football.