Luca Toni was born in Pavullo nel Frignano on 26 May 1977. He grew up in Modena’s youth system and made his debut with the Gialloblu in the 1994/95 season in C1. He didn’t burst onto the scene as a youngster, and in fact he only made his breakthrough in 1999/2000 when he scored 15 goals for Treviso in Serie B, which made people notice him and earned him a move to Vicenza in Serie A. He then spent two seasons at Brescia where he made clear his potential before moving to Palermo where he hit the big time. In 2003/04 he embraced the challenge of helping the Sicilians earn promotion into Serie A: he carried the Rosanero to league victory, and thus promotion, with 30 goals before then scoring 20 times the following season to lead the club to UEFA Cup qualification.

In 2005 he moved to Fiorentina and earned a call-up to the National Team, that was to be his ‘golden’ year as he won the Golden Boot with 31 league goals. However, it was on the following 9 July that he reached the pinnacle of any footballer’s career: lifting the World Cup to the sky in Berlin wearing the Azzurri shirt after an epic journey that ended with the Final against France, a victory that banished all the disappointments of previous years and immortalised that night into football history.

He went on to make 47 appearances and score 16 goals for the Azzurri. Perhaps still bedazzled by this fox in the box a year after that triumph on German soil, the Bayern managers decided to bring him to Bavaria. There he continued to score goals with great regularity and became a fan favourite with several chants dedicated to his name.

In January 2010, he returned to Italy and almost won a sensational Scudetto with Roma, a missed opportunity that he identified as his biggest regret. He then moved to Genoa and later Juventus where he scored the first goal in their new stadium in the curtain raiser against Notts County in September 2011. He went on to play in the UAE for Al-Nasr, which proved to be a brief, fruitless spell. However, before hanging up his boots for good he returned to Italy to play for the Viola in 2012/13 and scored just minutes into his second debut in Florence, he hadn’t lost it. His final move was to the newly promoted Hellas Verona side where he spent two sensational seasons, scoring 44 goals and earning the Serie A Golden Boot in 2014/15. He finally called time at the end of the 2015/16 season by scoring his 324th career goal on the final matchday against Juventus. That was no normal goal either, it was a champions’ finish: a Panenka from the spot that earned a standing ovation from the Bentegodi, who gave a true champion the send-off he deserved.