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This was the week of the undesignated penalty taker in Italian football. On Tuesday, Ademola Lookman missed a spot-kick against Club Brugge and then listened to his manager, Gian Piero Gasperini, tear him to shreds for having the audacity to step up when team-mates encouraged him to. The responsibility was supposed to fall to Charles De Ketelaere, but Lookman claimed the Belgian had told him to go for it.
Gasperini used his post-game press conference to roast Lookman, calling him “one of the worst penalty takers I’ve ever seen,” and adding that: “even in training he has a very low conversion rate. He shoots them really badly.” Four days later, Gasperini claimed surprise that his words had caused the striker to feel disrespected.
“Mine was not meant as an offensive phrase,” insisted Gasperini at a press conference before Atalanta’s game against Empoli. If that seemed implausibly naive, the discourse was about to get weirder. “Yesterday we had a situation in Udinese’s game against Lecce that could have become a whole drama broadcast around the world. Luckily there were lads there who showed some good sense.”
Words to make you question whether you exist in the same reality. Gasperini was talking about Lorenzo Lucca, whose penalty for Udinese on Friday night might be the most viral moment of the entire Serie A season, in a match that barely anyone outside of Italy would have noticed were it not, specifically, for the way this one incident was handled.
The game was in its 27th minute when Udinese’s Sandi Lovric challenged Gaby Jean for a bouncing ball inside the Lecce area. Jean got his head to the ball first but Lovric had position, and the defender pushed an arm into his face trying to get back in front. The referee Kevin Bonacina initially waved play on but subsequently awarded the penalty after a pitchside review.
Lucca, a 6ft7in centre-forward, had claimed the ball for himself in the meantime. But unlike De Ketelaere, Udinese’s designated penalty taker, Florian Thauvin, did object. So did his teammates, more than half of whom rushed over to join the argument, some of them physically obstructing Lucca from putting the ball down on the spot. The fracas dragged on so long that he eventually got booked for time-wasting.
In the end, Lucca prevailed, keeping the ball and striking his penalty cleanly into the top left corner. Not one of his team-mates joined him as he wheeled away to celebrate. Thauvin, who also happens to be club captain, was so unhappy that he requested to be substituted, appearing at one point to start taking off his armband.
Instead it was Lucca who came off five minutes later. Udinese’s manager, Kosta Runjaic, had sent Iker Bravo to warm up to replace him before the penalty was struck. Keep in mind here that we are not even at half-time yet, and that Lucca is the team’s top scorer.
Perhaps Gasperini’s approval referred less to this series of events than the comments made afterward. Udinese went on to win 1-0, Lucca’s penalty the only goal of the game. At full-time, Runjaic complimented him on a “fantastic” finish but said that his actions still had to be punished.
“I made the decision because someone who is not following the rules in that moment is not showing respect for the whole team,” said Runjaic. “And we are a team. All that we have achieved so far as a team, these 36 points, was a team performance. So, nobody’s bigger than the team, nobody’s bigger than the club. Such things happen. I’m quite clear and I’m quite calm. We’ll speak about this, but it’s not for me a big story.”
Udinese’s vice-captain, Jaka Bijol took a similar line, apologising to fans and saying: “We want to apologise to all our supporters. We know these things shouldn’t happen but Lucca always wants to score goals. He’s one of us. We will turn the page and go forward together.”
Exactly what that looks like is not yet clear. La Gazzetta dello Sport reported Lucca will be fined by Udinese and could be sold in the summer, but the club has not yet confirmed the former detail and the latter was probably always on the cards. Lucca is one of Italy’s emerging talents, a player starting to deliver consistently at 24 years old on the promise that many have seen in him.
His height and power have always marked him apart but so has his self-assurance. Lucca started out in Torino’s youth team but preferred at 16 to go play with the adults in Italy’s sixth tier than work his way up through a professional club’s academy. He spent the next five years bouncing between different clubs, eventually landing at Pisa in Serie B, then playing a season with Ajax before returning to Italy with Udinese in 2023.
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He scored eight goals in Serie A last season, but this has felt like a breakout year. The strike against Lecce ought to have been a happy landmark, taking him into double figures for the first time in a top-flight campaign.
Lucca made his debut for Italy in October, as a late substitute during a Nations League win over Israel. In an interview with Sportweek magazine last month, he spoke candidly about his ambition to become a fixture for the national team. “To be a starter means to be one of the 11 best Italians,” he said when asked if he saw a long-term future in Udine. “To do that would mean playing for one of the top teams in Italy or abroad.”
Might such words have played a part in the scene we saw on Friday, teammates tiring of a player who thinks he has better places to be? As a counter-point, in the same interview he credited Udinese for helping him to realise his potential.
Asked what differed from his previous clubs, Lucca gave a reply that now reeks of foreshadowing: “Continuity in playing, then the esteem and the faith of the club, which helped me through my mistakes. Last year I made a lot of them. This season I hope to make fewer mistakes, but I will still make some. Knowing that the people around you will not crucify you becomes important.”
A penny for Gasperini’s thoughts on that sentiment. Lookman was back in the Atalanta starting XI on Sunday, scoring a hat-trick in a 5-0 demolition of Empoli, but when a reporter asked him at full-time whether any issues with the manager were behind them, the player promptly ended the interview, replying simply: “Are we done?”
Not that Lucca would worry what outsiders think of his situation anyway. He cites his idols as Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Cristiano Ronaldo, players who have always walked their own paths. Even as he sat on the bench being chastised by the substitute goalkeeper Daniele Padelli after his substitution, Lucca hardly looked apologetic.
His penalty, after all, would win the game for Udinese, giving them 10 points from their last four games and opening conversations about whether this team that a month ago was focused on avoiding relegation could yet fight for a European place. He might not be the designated taker, but Lucca has converted both penalties he has taken this season. Thauvin has one out of three.
