OFFICIAL: Valentina Giacinti joins Fiorentina on loan

Fiorentina have officially confirmed the loan signing of Valentina Giacinti from Milan. After the recent arrival of her Milan teammate Verónica Boquete, there is at last some much needed enthusiasm around the Fiorentina side. It seems only fair, with both Martina Piemonte and Alia Guagni now at Milan.

As was the case with Boquete, it would seem there has been a breakdown in the relationship between Giacinti and Milan manager, Maurizio Ganz. This became very evident when the striker was left out of the club’s recent Supercoppa games with Roma and Juventus. Before that, Giacinti had been removed from the club captain role, with Valentina Bergamaschi taking the armband. The player had extended her contract at the club in the summer, ignoring interest from abroad. The situation at the club has since deteriorated, and Milan are struggling to even stay in the top four this season, having achieved Champions League qualification at the end of the last campaign.

Valentina Giacinti is a player who scores goals wherever she goes. Even this season, with all that’s been going on, she is the club’s top scorer, and by a long way. No other player at Milan has scored more than twice in the league, while Giacinti’s seven goals put her just one behind our own Daniela Sabatino in the goal scoring charts.

This will be the third club in which Giacinti and Sabatino will link up in Serie A. In the 2017/18 season, Giacinti signed for Brescia from Mozzanica, where she would have a chance of Champions League football. This was a squad which along with Sabatino, also contained Cristiana Girelli and Bergamaschi. Giacinti took over as top scorer at Brescia, with 21 league goals (along with seven in the Coppa), with Girelli on 17 goals and Sabatino on ten.

Giacinti finished that season as top scorer not only at Brescia, but in Serie A. Brescia only lost out on the Scudetto in a play-off with Juventus, which went to a penalty shoot-out. The club also lost out in the Coppa Italia final, to Fiorentina, but they did win the Supercoppa against the Viola at the start of that season. This was to be the last season of the Brescia club in Serie A, as their place was taken by Milan for the 2018/19 season. Sabatino and Giacinti stayed to become a part of Milan’s first ever women’s team in Serie A.

They formed a formidable strike force, and with the new club finishing third in the table, they were the two top scorers in Serie A. Giacinti led the way with 21 goals while Sabatino netted 17 times.

Sabatino then moved on to Sassuolo while Giacinti remained at Milan. The 2019/20 season was cut short due to the Covid pandemic, and Milan narrowly missed out on Champions League qualification to Fiorentina. Giacinti scored nine times in her 15 league games that season.

Last season, while Fiorentina slipped to fourth place, Milan finally clinched a place in Europe, having finished as runners-up to Juventus. This was in large part thanks to Giacinti’s 18 league goals, two more than Sabatino scored with the Viola. Valentina started this season strongly, two goals against Verona on the opening day and putting four past Lazio in an 8-1 away demolition on match-day three. Since then, the forward has struggled to find the net, scoring just once more, the equaliser against Roma on October 10th.

This is a player however, who knows where the goal is. She has been capocannoniere of Serie A on three occasions. In the first of those, with Mozzanica in 2015/16, she scored an incredible 32 goals in 22 league games. Giacinti also has 16 goals to her name with the Italian national team. We’ve got ourselves a player with a lot of Serie A experience, having made her debut at aged 16 in 2010 with Atalanta. She also had a season at Napoli, and a short spell in the US with Seattle before returning to Italy and joining Mozzanica where she stayed for four seasons.

Patrizia Panico now has plenty of attacking options, with Boquete supporting Sabatino and Karin Lundin, and now Valentina Giacinti. We may be out of the running in Serie A, although we can definitely look to move further away from the bottom of the table, but we do still have the Coppa Italia to play for, a trophy that Giacinti would love to get her hands on, having lost out on penalties to Roma in last season’s final.

As the tattoo on her wrist says, ‘Impossible is Nothing’.