Martín Satriano is a Uruguayan forward who joined Lyon on loan from Lens for the 2025-26 season. He arrived at the end of the summer transfer window when Lyon had been left without a senior striker following the sudden departure of Georges Mikautadze to Villarreal. Lyon had also lost club legend Alexandre Lacazette during a summer of financial turmoil and were in desperate need of someone experienced to lead the line.
Satriano had actually signed a permanent deal with Lens only a couple of months earlier, having spent the previous season on-loan there from Internazionale of Milan. That loan deal included an obligation to buy for €5 million if Lens avoided relegation from Ligue 1 in 2024-25, which they duly did. However, they weren’t counting on him for the following campaign and made him available for transfer.
Lyon reportedly paid a €1 million loan fee to Lens to secure the Uruguayan’s services and have an option to make the move permanent next summer for €5 million (including add-ons). This is the fifth season in a row that Satriano will spend on-loan rather than playing at his parent club. He turned 24 in February 2025 and has reached the stage of his career where he needs to finally establish himself as a regular starter somewhere.
Italian roots
Born in Montevideo in 2001, Martín Adrián Satriano Costa, to give him his full name, is eligible to represent both Uruguay and Italy in international football courtesy of Italian ancestry on his father’s side of the family. In fact, his father, Gerardo Satriano, is a former footballer who represented Club Atlético Bella Vista of Montevideo in the 1980’s. Satriano junior began his own career in the Uruguayan capital when he joined the ranks of local giants Nacional as a fourteen year old and he quickly emerged as one of their hottest young prospects.
Martín Satriano’s playing style drew comparisons with that of another illustrious Nacional academy product, Luis Suarez. However, unlike Suarez, Satriano never went on to represent the first team at Nacional. Instead he was scouted by Internazionale and tempted into making the move to Europe shortly before his nineteenth birthday in early 2020. Inter reportedly paid Nacional a transfer fee of around €2.4 million.
Move to Milano
Initially he played in the Primavera (U-19) team at Inter but it was a challenging time to try and settle in a new country. He arrived in Italy as the world plunged into the turmoil of the Covid-19 pandemic and northern Italy was particularly hard hit. Satriano made just four appearances in the Primavera 1, scoring once and providing three assists, before the season was abandoned due to the first lockdown.
The 2020-21 campaign was also disrupted by further lockdown mandates, but they did at least manage to complete the season and Satriano was a regular starter up front for Inter in the Primavera 1. He made 30 appearances for their U-19 side in the league and cup, scoring 14 goals and laying on 6 assists. Those performances earned him a promotion to Simone Inzaghi’s senior squad for the start of the following season and he made his full Inter debut on the opening weekend of the 2021-22 Serie A calendar.
San Siro debut
Those first steps as a senior pro came at the San Siro where he came off the bench in the 77th minute to replace Hakan Çalhanoğlu with Inter leading 3-0 against Genoa. The home side went on to secure a 4-0 victory. All in all, Satriano went on to make four Serie A appearances for Inter in the first half of the season, all as a late substitute. He was involved in three wins and a draw.
Travelling with the first team squad meant that his Primavera appearances were now limited. He did manage three appearances for them but his playing time was further curtailed by a suspension after he picked up the first red card of his career for violent conduct in stoppage time of a defeat to Roma. Midway through the season, in January 2022, the Inter hierarchy decided that the best plan for Satriano’s development was to send him out on loan to gain experience in senior football and hopefully get some more playing time.
First spell on loan
So it was that Martín Satriano arrived in Brest for his first taste of Ligue 1 in the far-flung reaches of west Brittany. After a couple of substitute appearances, manager Michel Der Zakarian handed him a first start in a home match against lowly Troyes and he responded with a quick-fire brace. Those first two goals of his senior career set his new club on the way to a thumping 5-1 win. He followed it up with another strike a week later in a 1-1 draw at Reims and then had to wait a few games before finding the net again in a 2-1 win at Montpellier.
Satriano was a starter for Brest when Lyon visited the Stade Francis-Le Blé in April 2022 and his intelligent forward play caused plenty of problems for Peter Bosz’s team. He ran himself into the ground and was substituted shortly after the home side scored their 74th minute winner, having also picked up a yellow card. There were to be no further goals for Satriano that season and his loan spell ended with a tally of four from 15 Ligue 1 appearances.
International call-up
The following season Inter decided to keep their young prospect closer to home and give him a taste of Serie A via a loan to Empoli. It was a tough introduction to life in the Italian top flight as Empoli were not a free-scoring side, finding the net only 37 times in 38 games during their battle to a respectable 14th place finish. Manager Paolo Zanetti placed a lot of faith in the young Uruguayan, making him Empoli’s most used striker during the season, but Satriano was only on the scoresheet twice (against Salernitana and Monza).
Despite his struggle for goals, Satriano had caught the eye of Uruguay boss Diego Alonso and he was called up to the national team squad in September 2022. He earned his first, and to date only, cap in a friendly against Canada at the Tehelné Pole stadium in Bratislava. He came off the bench in the 61st minute to replace Darwin Núñez with the Uruguayans already two goals to the good and helped them see out the 2-0 victory.
Back to Brest
Come the start of the 2023-24 season, Internazionale still didn’t consider him ready to compete for a first team spot, so he was loaned out once again. Brest, now under the stewardship of former Lyon midfielder Éric Roy, were eager to bring Satriano back to Brittany for a second stint, so this time he joined them on a season-long deal.
It proved to be a remarkable campaign for ‘Les Pirates’ as they defied all expectations to record the highest finish in their 121 year history. Third place in Ligue 1 was secured on the final day of the season, which qualified them for the UEFA Champions League for the first time. Satriano won many plaudits for his workrate and unselfish team play when leading the line, although he only managed a slightly disappointing four goals in the league from 33 appearances. In mitigation, it is worth noting that the goals were shared quite evenly around the Brest squad, with no player scoring more than eight.
Injury nightmare at Lens
Never one for spending two seasons in the same place, Martín Satriano didn’t stick around in Brittany to experience the Champions League football that he had helped to earn. Instead he was loaned from Inter to Racing Club de Lens for 2025-26, with the aforementionned obligation to buy. Unfortunately that loan spell turned into something of a personal nightmare as he tore cruciate ligaments in just his fourth match for ‘Les Sang et Or’. The injury consigned him to a spell of seven months on the sidelines and he only returned to action for the last three games of the season.
His comeback match was against Lyon at the Groupama Stadium in May. He came off the bench to play the final twenty minutes of a 2-1 win for Lens and made further substitute appearances in the following two matches. However, it was essentially a lost year for the striker, as his total playing time for Lens amounted to a meagre 81 minutes with no goals scored. Despite his injury woes Lens were, of course, obliged to buy him, having finished eighth in the table.
Loan to Lyon
All of which brings us back to the current season and his loan from Lens to Lyon. As a striker who has never managed more than four goals in a season and is feeling his way back from a serious injury, he’s not exactly hot property at the moment. However, Lyon were in desperate need of a striker available on the cheap, so he’s been handed the chance to rekindle his career at another big club.
It has been a slow start for Satriano at Lyon so far, with no goals and a solitary assist from his six appearances in Ligue 1. He did find the net in the UEFA Europa League in a 2-0 win against RB Salzburg, but has looked an isolated figure at times in a Lyon shirt. He often seems to be ploughing a lonely furrow up front and his game isn’t ideally suited to that of a lone targetman. It seems doubtful that he’ll be able to score enough goals to convince the Lyon management that he’s a long-term solution to their striker problem, but he has a good work ethic and is doing a decent enough job in the short term.