gabriel omar batistuta the argentian football player?

Question

did gabriel omar batistuta the argentian football player convert to islam and what is his story

Answer 1

So far as I know, Batistuta has not converted to Islam. He is reportedly covering the current world cup for 'Televisa Deportes'. He retired from football last year after playing for his last club Al-Arabi.

His mum was a secretary and his dad a slaughter house worker and they were both Argentinians

Answer 2

Omar Batistuta

Answer 3

gabriel omar batistuta's mother is syrian but i dont think he has converted to islam

but in these day any thing can happen

the french team has more than five muslims

Answer 4

i hope he does

Answer 5

hope so

Answer 6

IS EXPERT COMMENTATOR FOR MEXICAN T.V.

Answer 7

Gabriel Omar Batistuta (born 1 February 1969), nicknamed Batigol, is a former professional footballer. The prolific Argentine striker played most of his club football at ACF Fiorentina in Italy, and he is the eighth top scorer of all time in the Italian Serie A league with 184 goals in 318 matches between 1991 and 2003. On the international level, he is the all-time highest scorer for Argentina's national team with 56 goals in 78 national team matches, and he represented his country at three FIFA World Cups. In 2004, he was named in the FIFA 100 list of the "125 Greatest Living Footballers".

When his club Fiorentina was relegated to Serie B in 1993, Batistuta stayed with the club and helped it return to the top-flight league two years later. A hero in Florence, the Fiorentina fans erected a life-size bronze statue of him in 1996, in recognition of his performances for Fiorentina. He would never win the Italian league with Fiorentina, but when he moved to AS Roma in 2000, he finally won the Serie A championship to crown his career in Italy. He played his last in season in Qatar with Al-Arabi before he retired in 2005. Now he is one of Televisa Deportes' comentators in the Germany world cup games and the show "La jugada".

Batistuta was born on 1 February 1969 to slaughterhouse worker Omar Batistuta and school secretary Gloria Batistuta, in the town of Avellaneda, province of Santa Fe, Argentina, but grew up in the near city of Reconquista. After him, his parents had three girls, named Elisa, Alejandra and Gabriela.

At age 16 he met Irina Fernández, his future wife, on her quinceañera, a rite of passage on her 15th birthday. It is said that Irina Fernández completely ignored him at the beginning. Some five years later, on December 28, 1990, Irina and Gabriel were married at Saint Roque Church. The couple moved to Florence, Italy, in 1991, and a year later their first son Thiago was born. Thanks to good performances in the Italian championship and with the Argentine national team, he gained fame and respect. He filmed several commercials and was invited onto numerous TV shows, but in spite of this, Batistuta always remained a low-profile family man.

In 1996, during Fiorentina's 2-1 victory at A.C. Milan, he celebrated scoring the match's decisive goal by saying Te amo, Irina ('I love you, Irina', to his wife) for the cameras. The mix of sex appeal and faithfulness cemented Batistuta's heart-throb reputation among Argentine and Italian women. In 1997 Batistuta's second son, Lucas, was born, and a third son, Joaquín, followed in 1999. In 2000 the Batistuta family moved to Rome and two years later to Milan, following Gabriel's changes of team. In 2002, after more than 10 years in Italy, the family moved to Qatar where Gabriel Batistuta had accepted a lucrative celebrity playing contract with a local team, Al-Arabi.

Batistuta ended his career at Al-Arabi, retiring in March 2005, after a series of injuries that prevented him from playing. Soon afterwards he moved to Perth, Australia. In April 2006, the city's established A-league franchise, Perth Glory was put up for sale and it was reported that Batistuta was among the bidders.

As a child Gabriel preferred other sports to football. Thanks to his height he played basketball, but after Argentina's victory in the 1978 World Cup, in which he was particularly impressed by the skills of Mario Kempes, he devoted himself to football. After playing with friends on the streets and in the small Grupo Alegria club, he joined the local Platense junior team. While with Platense he was selected for the Reconquista team that won the provincial championship by beating Newell's Old Boys from Rosario. His 2 goals drew the attention of the opposition team, and he signed for them in 1988.

He signed professional forms with Newell's Old Boys Club, whose coach was Marcelo Bielsa, who would later become Batistuta's coach with the Argentine national team. Things did not come easily for Gabriel during his first year with the club. He was away from home, his family and his girlfriend Irina, sleeping in a room at the stadium, and had a weight problem that slowed him down. At the end of that year he was loaned to a smaller team, Deportivo Italiano, of Buenos Aires, with whom he participated in the Carnevale Cup in Italy, ending as top scorer with 3 goals.

In mid-1989 he made the leap to one of Argentina's biggest clubs, River Plate, where he scored 17 goals. However, all did not run smoothly. He had numerous run-ins with coach Daniel Passarella (with whom he had later confrontations with the national squad) and he was dropped from the squad in the middle of the season.

In 1990 Batistuta signed for River's arch-rivals, Boca Juniors. Having gone so long without playing, he inititally found it hard to find his best form. However, at the beginning of 1991 Oscar Tabárez became Boca's coach, and he gave Batistuta the support and confidence to become the league's top scorer that season as Boca won the championship.

In 1991, Batistuta was selected to play for Argentina in the Copa América held in Chile, where he finished the tournament as top scorer with 6 goals as Argentina romped to victory.

It was during the Copa América that the vice-president of Fiorentina got the chance to see Gabriel's skills and signed him for the Italian club. However, the following season Fiorentina were relegated to the Serie B secondary division, in spite of Batistuta's 13 season goals. It took two years, and 16 Batistuta goals before the club, now managed by Claudio Ranieri returned to Serie A.

In 1993, Batistuta played in his second Copa América, this time held in Ecuador, which Argentina again won. The 1994 World Cup, held in USA, was a disappointment: after a very promising start Argentina were beaten by Romania in the Round of 16; the morale of the team seriously affected by Diego Maradona's drug-abuse suspension. Despite the disappointing Argentine exit, Batistuta scored four goals in as many games.

On his return to Fiorentina, Batistuta found his best form. He became the top scorer of the 1994-1995 season with 26 goals, and he broke Ezio Pascutti's 30 year old record by scoring in all of the first 11 matches of the season. In the 1995-1996 season Fiorentina won the Italian Cup and Super Coppa.

During the qualification matches for the 1998 World Cup (with former River Plate manager Passarella now coaching the Argentinean national team) Batistuta was left out of the majority of the games after falling out with the coach. Playing in the World Cup finals themselves, he scored 5 goals in that competition, before Argentina lost 2-1 to the Netherlands in the quarter-finals. On the game against Jamaica, he recorded the second hat trick of his World Cup career, becoming the 4th player ever to achieve this (the others were Sándor Kocsis, Just Fontaine, and Gerd Müller) and the first one to score a hat trick in 2 World Cups.

After yet another failure to win a championship of importance with Fiorentina, Batistuta started considering a transfer to a bigger team. But, in an effort to keep Batistuta, Fiorentina hired Giovanni Trapattoni as coach and promised to do everything to win the scudetto. After an excellent start to the season, Batistuta suffered an injury that kept him out of action for more than a month. Losing momentum, Fiorentina lost the lead and finished the season in third place, which at least gave them the chance to participate in the Champions League in the following season