Domingo Tarasconi

Domingo Alberto Tarasconi (20 December 1903 – 3 July 1991) was an Argentine football forward.

Raising from Club Atlético Atlanta, he played most of his career for Boca Juniors where he won 9 official titles and became the all-time 4th highest scorer in the club's history, behind Martín Palermo, Roberto Cherro, and Francisco Varallo.

Tarasconi's first steps in football were in Atlanta, where he debuted in 1921.

One season later he moved to Boca Juniors where he became one of the all-time top scorers not only of the club but of Primera División.

During his ten years in the team, Tarasconi played 226 official matches, scoring 186 goals.

He also won 9 titles with Boca Juniors.

Apart from those achievements with the club, Tarasconi was Primera División topscorer on five occasions between 1922 and 1934, being also one of the all-time top scorers in the league, having scored 208 goals in 289 matches between 1921 and 1934.

He was also top scorer of Primera División in 1922, 1923, 1924, and 1927.

He played 24 games for Argentina, netting 18 goals between 1922 and 1929.

With Argentina, he also won two Copa América titles in 1925, and 1929.

He scored 7 goals in the successful 1925 tour to Europe being the 2nd scorer of the tour behind Manuel Seoane.

Tarasconi also played for the Argentina national football team, winning the silver medal and being topscorer of the Summer Olympics held in Amsterdam in 1928 with 11 goals in 4 matches.

His outstanding performance in the competition still holds a record.

Tarasconi was also mentioned in the tango Patadura, released in 1928 and performed by legend Carlos Gardel.

He also played in the 1928 Olympic games where he finished as tournament top scorer.

Tango singer and legend Carlos Gardel performed the song Patadura, a humorous tango released in 1928 that used football as a metaphor to describe to ineptitude of the person described in the song.

The word patadura is a local term currently used to describe a person with no skills to play football.

The song (with lyrics by Enrique Carreras Sotelo and music by José López Ares) named Tarasconi (calling him by his nickname Tarasca) "to score a goal from the middle of the field", referring to Tarasconi's strong shot and accuracy.

Other notable footballers of those times mentioned in the song are Manuel Seoane, Luis Monti, Pedro Ochoa (who was also friend of Gardel, who composed the tango Ochoíta in his honor).

Gardel was also honorary member of the club, having attended some matches such as the 1928 Copa del Rey Final.

Gardel then recorded a new version of Patadura in 1929 in Paris, where the lyrics where slightly changed replacing the original Argentine men's footballers by players of FC Barcelona (Vicente Piera, Ricardo Zamora, Josep Samitier, Franz Platko) with whom Gardel had established a friendship (especially with Samitier) as part of becoming a fan of the team.

After Tarasconi left Boca Juniors in 1932 there are no records of any match played by him until 1934 where he joinded Sportivo Barracas, which played in the official association (AFA) that remained amateur opposed to dissident Liga Argentina de Football (LAF), the first professional league in the country.

Tarasconi only played 6 matches there with no goals scored before moving to General San Martín, where he played 20 matches with 16 goals within the same season.

In 1935 Tarasconi moved to Sportivo Barracas, finishing his career in Argentinos Juniors, where he played 8 matches in the 1936 season before retiring from the activity.

Tarasconi won 9 titles with Boca Juniors and two Copa América with the Argentina national team.

Tarasconi is still the 13th highest scoring player in the history of the Argentina national football team.