This is the story of Mario Balotelli’s time in England. Daniel Taylor chronicles the on and off-field fireworks of his life as a lovable rogue at Manchester City between 2010 and 2013 and Simon Hughes explains why there was so little of that love for him at Liverpool, from his surprising arrival in 2014 to his release by Jurgen Klopp in 2016.
Over time, you come to realise that everybody who encountered Mario Balotelli in the Manchester City years has a story to tell.
Garry Cook’s goes back to the period when City were trying to crack the American market with their first pre-season tour of the United States and the moment, half an hour into a friendly against LA Galaxy, when Balotelli made it clear he was bored of playing nice.
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Balotelli had scored from the penalty spot when David Silva teed him up for what should have been a simple goal. Except Balotelli, six yards out, chose to go for the more difficult option, turned half-circle to try a back-heel and made a complete pig’s ear of it. Manager Roberto Mancini substituted him in a fit of rage. And Cook, then City’s chief executive, was sitting next to Philip Anschutz, the billionaire who owned Galaxy and was one of Major League Soccer’s founders.
“He looked at me and his exact words were, ‘What an asshole!’” Cook tells The Athletic. “I was embarrassed. All I could say was, ‘Ah, that’s Mario. He is a bit crazy sometimes.’ Roberto was pointing and screaming at him … it wasn’t exactly the impression we wanted to make.”
Cook is laughing as he tells this story because, deep down, he never thought Balotelli was an asshole. Nobody at City did. And on the occasions Balotelli did behave like an asshole … well, he was their asshole and, as such, City often cut him a bit of slack. Even if there were times when the staff, his team-mates and Mancini, in particular, gave the impression they could happily throttle him.
Mancini used to call him “the crazy one” and flick his fingers beneath his own chin, in that Italian way, but only because he cared about his player. Pablo Zabaleta would shake his head when Balotelli was mentioned and wonder if “his brain is gone” but again it was fondness, mostly, in his voice.
Micah Richards scrapped with Balotelli on the training ground (as did Jerome Boateng and, infamously, Mancini himself) but rocks with laughter now. “I loved the guy,” he says. And so did the City fans who, despite everything, serenaded Balotelli to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and would guarantee him a hero’s welcome if he ever went back.
At the same time, there will always be an element of professional regret when the Balotelli story is told from those years.
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During Mancini’s lunches with journalists at San Carlo Cicchetti, his restaurant of choice in Manchester, he would make a case that Balotelli, with some care and guidance, could establish himself alongside Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo as the best three players on the planet.
Mancini was determined to oversee that process and, on the face of it, City ought to have been the place where Balotelli let all that potential fully flower. He was away from the overt racism that pursued him in Italy. He had a manager who believed in him. City were on the up. Everything was in place for him.
No longer, though.
Balotelli plays these days for a Brescia side who were bottom of Serie A before the coronavirus shutdown. Mancini, now the Italy national manager, gave up on him a long time ago. And so, in truth, did English football, once it became clear that Jose Mourinho’s assessment of the player was not mistaken. Balotelli, according to Mourinho, was “unmanageable.”
Mourinho used to reckon his book of Balotelli anecdotes from Inter Milan would stretch to 200 pages. Yet City could bring out an anthology from Balotelli’s two and a half years in Manchester. The title would have to be “Why Always Him?” The front cover could be Mario wearing “the Rooster”, his five-pointed woolly hat.
Or the picture of him, perhaps, holding up his Bonfire Night guidelines as Manchester’s fireworks safety ambassador (his penance for the indoor fireworks show that almost burned down his house). And, by his own admission, there would be more words about his life off the pitch than on it. Which, unfortunately for him, is not a good look for anyone who pertains to be an elite footballer.
One memory is of Balotelli, with his shirt off and his mohican cut high, being interviewed on television after Yaya Toure’s goal had won the 2011 FA Cup final against Stoke City. Balotelli seldom celebrated his own goals because, as he once pointed out, a postman does not celebrate delivering a letter. And he did not look too thrilled to be collecting the man-of-the-match award, either.
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“Was that the best game you have ever played for Manchester City?” the interviewer wanted to know.
“All my season was shit,” Balotelli replied, on live TV. “Can I say that?”
He was a jester and a king and, for the football writers on City’s beat, they were certainly interesting times when at least once a week there would be unconfirmed reports that Balotelli and Manchester were getting to know one another.
The numerous sightings, for example, of him driving up and down Deansgate, with his window down, handing out £50 notes to the homeless. Or the times at Christmas when he would apparently be out on the road again, this time dressed as Santa, for various other acts of philanthropy.
Sadly, many of these stories were, of course, apocryphal.
It was not true that he paid to fill up every car in the petrol station where he had taken his Maserati one day.
Balotelli never walked into a library to pay all the overdue fines for students who had taken their books back late.
Yet the fictitious stories were barely necessary when the reality was so wild and eccentric anyway: the car crashes, the parking tickets, the rows, the fights, the visits to Knowsley Safari Park, the struggles putting on a practice bib, the “Why Always Me?” T-shirt, the time he thought it would be a good idea to lean out of a training ground window and chuck a few darts at the youth-team players below. “I was bored,” Balotelli, fined a week’s wages, would later explain.
Who could not like the story of the time he went to buy an ironing board at his nearest John Lewis department store and came back instead with a trampoline, a quad bike and a table-tennis table?
There was the shopping expedition to the Trafford Centre when he invited a magician back to his house to teach him a few tricks.
Also true: City sent him into the mountains of Vermont, USA, where it was snowing and the temperatures were minus 20 degrees, for treatment on a persistent knee injury because they wanted to find somewhere, anywhere, that he could not get up to mischief.
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It was not true, however, that he won £25,000 at a casino and immediately gave £1,000 to somebody begging for money outside.
Balotelli did not walk into one of the roughest pubs in Manchester to challenge everyone to a darts match.
He did not own a unicorn. In his own head, perhaps, but not in reality.
Another well-told story was of a young autograph-hunter telling him he was being bullied and Balotelli driving to the boy’s school to take up his cause with the headteacher. That was not true either. It was a soap opera. The paparazzi followed him everywhere. Every new anecdote added to his urban legend.
The bigger problem for Mancini was that, maturity-wise, Balotelli seemed incapable of playing serious, grown-up football over a sustained period. There were sporadic flashes of brilliance. But sporadic flashes were not enough for a club with City’s ambitions. They needed reliable excellence — and that was beyond him.
Balotelli was in his early 20s but, in another sense, locked in football’s equivalent of the terrible twos. His fascination, for example, with the automatic sliding doors going into the reception of City’s old training ground. Staff would watch in bemusement as he reversed his favourite car — a camouflage-wrapped Bentley Continental GT — on to the kerb and inched towards the doors, determined to find out how far he could go before they opened.
At City they still talk about Balotelli’s fondness for the ginger and white cat, Wimblydon (named after the way the club’s Spanish contingent pronounced Wimbledon), that lived at the training ground.
They remember how he liked to eat al fresco at Burger Baz’s snack bar, a roadside greasy-spoon just a short drive away. On one occasion, Balotelli asked the man with the frying pan if he could join him behind the counter to flip the bacon himself. Very soon, he was juggling with the cutlery.
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“The easiest way to describe him is to say that he was like a 12-year-old,” James Milner writes in his book, Ask A Footballer. “That might sound like I’m digging him out but I’m just trying to explain what he was like. He had this fantastic skillset and a great physique but in other ways he was like a big kid who hadn’t grown up.
“If a few of us were having a conversation and he was on the opposite side of the dressing room, he would make a loud noise or something daft so that he would get attention.
“A lot of the things he did — throwing darts, wearing that glove-style hat and even the car he drove with the camouflage wrap — seemed to be about trying to get attention. Whether that was out of insecurity, or whether he had found it hard to grow up because he had such a difficult upbringing, that was what he was like.”
One member of staff found Balotelli one day, laughing almost uncontrollably at a DVD he was watching on his laptop. “Laurel and Hardy,” the player explained, announcing it was his favourite television show.
“I wasn’t laughing the time he drove his car into mine in the car park,” Milner would say. “It’s not easy trying to get camouflage paint off your car. But you couldn’t ever stay frustrated with him for long.”
Zabaleta used to talk about a player who can “either score the best goal in the history of football or be sent off after five minutes… when I retire, I will never forget Mario.” Noel Gallagher reckoned the only way Balotelli would leave City was by being fired from a cannon. Balotelli, former colleagues recall, used to “smoke like a chimney.” If he was substituted, he would often head down the tunnel for a crafty cigarette.
The paradox was that, beneath his City shirt, Balotelli used to wear a gold medallion inscribed with three words: “Professionalism, Endeavour, Humility.”
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It was a gift from his adoptive mother, Silvia, who would regularly fly into Manchester to spend weekends at his city centre apartment and meet whichever girl he was dating at the time. Silvia liked to visit Manchester Cathedral and was introduced to a couple of football writers by her daughter, Cristina, then a journalist for the Financial Times. Cristina did the translating as Silvia explained why she had bought the medallion.
“Because he should listen to his mother,” she said.
He certainly didn’t listen to his manager, which was possibly the silliest thing of all given that Mancini was one of the few people who seemed to understand Balotelli and never lost sight of the fact that his circumstances were unique.
Abandoned by his Ghanaian parents at the age of two, Balotelli had found a loving foster family but grown up in Concesio, just north of Brescia, as the only black boy in a white neighbourhood. Racism had scarred, and shaped, his life for almost as long as he could remember.
“A lot of his behaviour, I feel, came from a feeling that he was somehow different and maybe a little insecure,” Sergio Aguero, interviewed by the Argentinian writer Daniel Fresco, said in 2015. “We’d go out on the training pitch and he’d kick the balls away in different directions just to be silly, or he’d throw cheese over people in the dining room. I couldn’t help but wind him up from time to time, calling him silly names and toying with him, but he knew it was always affectionate because I loved Mario — everybody loved him, though he drove us nuts at times.”
The Mancini-Balotelli dynamic was certainly not the usual manager-player relationship. “They would fight like cat and dog during training and then walk off with their arms round each other’s shoulders,” Aguero recalled. “They would shout and swear at each other but later they would be like father and son.”
City’s experiences with some of their big-money signings had made them conscious about keeping a watch on their players and Mancini once floated the idea that, if Balotelli kept on getting into trouble, the manager might have to move him in with his own family. After a few moments of deliberation, his verdict was that he “would keep him in the cellar.”
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By the end, though, even Mancini had been worn down by the player’s too-young-too-long culture.
Balotelli’s record of 30 goals from 80 appearances was not too shabby but closer analysis of his statistics tells a truer story. Nine of his goals came from the penalty spot, where Balotelli’s record was immaculate. “Probably the best I’ve seen,” Milner recalls. “He would take penalties all the time in training and he would drive Joe Hart mad.”
Yet there were only 23 occasions in all the various competitions when Balotelli played a full match for City and, remarkably, his longest run of 90-minute performances in the Premier League was three. There were 24 yellow cards, four reds, and another four-match suspension courtesy of the Football Association for stamping on the head of Tottenham’s Scott Parker.
Mancini admitted it was too risky to play him in big games and, in the worst moments, Balotelli was close to being a liability. He was the boy who refused to grow up, never too sure whose floor he might wake up on.
Yet there has never been a single player from City who has spoken badly of him. “He was very young and probably did some silly things,” Costel Pantilimon, City’s former goalkeeper, tells The Athletic. “But I just think he didn’t realise how many people follow him and how celebrity can change his social life. He was acting normal even if people around football looked at him like a superstar. I have only nice words. He was very respectful with everyone and very talented, one of the best strikers I ever played with.”
“Mario isn’t mad,” is Milner’s take. “He wasn’t a bad guy at all. He just craved that attention. That’s what some people are like.”
And, though it was never easy knowing with Balotelli whether the good outweighed the bad, it can never be forgotten he made one very important contribution to City’s modern history.
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“That is one thing that stuck with me,” Cook, the chief executive who signed Balotelli from Inter for £22.5 million in 2010, says. “It was the day we won the league, on the last day of the season, with the famous goal from Sergio Aguero. An unbelievable goal and an unbelievable day.
“I wasn’t working for City by that stage but I went down to say hello (to Mancini) and we shook hands. Both of us always had the greatest sympathy for Mario Balotelli. He (Mancini) had told me the life story of Balotelli many times. We had met his mum many times. We both had tremendous compassion for him and, that day, I remember Roberto saying to me: ‘Mario won us the title.’
“I knew what he was saying because, 99.9 percent of the time, Balotelli’s pass for Aguero was not what he would have done. Maybe he was off-balance, but that pass was not who he was. If he’d tried to flick it up and go for the overhead kick, like he normally would have done, it would never have happened. Yet for some unknown reason, he did it that day. And that was the moment.”
A moment of magic from Sergio Aguero…#PLMoments pic.twitter.com/66hf6XEFbX
— Premier League (@premierleague) October 20, 2016
The Liverpool years
In the summer of 2016, new photographs of Balotelli, started circulating across social media. Since departing City in 2013, he had joined Milan twice, once permanently and on another occasion on loan after a season at Liverpool where he scored just one league goal.
He was back at Melwood where according to some team-mates, he spoke quietly about trying to win the confidence of Jurgen Klopp. That, however, was never going to happen. With players he believes in, Klopp will give more opportunities to prove themselves than most managers. But he is also decisive and having already decided to sell Christian Benteke and remove Mamadou Sakho from his plans because of indiscipline, Balotelli was never going to get a second chance at Liverpool.
He had made his mind up about him years before as Borussia Dortmund’s manager. Balotelli, he concluded, had ability but he simply did not work hard enough.
It was Klopp’s first pre-season and he took his squad to America. Balotelli was left on Merseyside and told to find another club. Klopp wanted to ensure he was in the sort of condition that would help him secure a move, so Liverpool’s under-18 team were sent from the academy to train with him. It was recognised that asking Balotelli to go instead to Kirkby had the potential to create unnecessary headlines.
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What Balotelli delivered that day, according to one of the more experienced juniors, was “one of the best training sessions I’ve ever seen in my life.” When Balotelli was sent through one-on-one with a goalkeeper, he stopped the ball and finished the move off with a Rabona flick. Michael Beale, the then under-21 manager, later told all of the youngsters present that they had much work to do to reach the first team, considering he was nowhere near it at the time and able to produce such brilliance.
One of the players who had trained with Balotelli regularly almost two years earlier can think of only a few sessions in that period where Balotelli did anything that stood out, either good or bad.
“He was just there,” says the former Liverpool youngster, who remembers being told by Mike Marsh, the first-team coach, to mark Balotelli in a small-sided game. “Marshy told me that he didn’t want Balotelli getting a kick, but he didn’t move the whole session. It was easy. He made me look like Beckenbauer. I was able to bring the ball out and thread it into Gerrard. He wasn’t trying to stop me.”
Balotelli was 24 then and nearly 26 in the summer of 2016. He seemed happier surrounded by younger players than seniors. In the past, he’d been one of the quickest to get away after training but following that session at Melwood made memorable for his Rabona, Balotelli stuck around in the changing room for an hour or so and posed for photographs with youngsters like Ben Woodburn and Harry Wilson, both of whom have since played Premier League football.
“Everyone was saying what a sound fella he was,” says one source, but to those who had spent more time around him it felt like “classic Mario,” the footballer who always wanted to impress the wrong crowd and was unwilling to prove himself to the people whose decisions mattered the most.
Two years earlier, and just 16 months after leaving City, Balotelli was available again. As a teenager, Balotelli had turned up to Inter training wearing AC Milan socks, but his allegiance did not bring a new focus. Privately, manager Massimiliano Allegri pins some of the reasons behind his exit from the San Siro in 2014 on Balotelli’s performances and behaviour — “a player he did not want in the first place,” says a source in Italy.
Milan’s financial problems were also mounting. It was decided a fresh start was needed and after Allegri departed, Balotelli’s agent Mino Raiola was told he could find a new club for his client. The haste at which Raiola operated accelerated after a World Cup where Balotelli was blamed by some of his team-mates for Italy’s group stage exit after he did not follow the tactical instructions of coach Cesare Prandelli in a defeat by Costa Rica.
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Prandelli later said that Balotelli was “fundamentally a good guy — he is not a bad person. But he lives in a place that is far from reality.”
At the start of the summer, Balotelli was not on the radar of Liverpool — a club back in the Champions League for the first time in five seasons, only without the team that had taken them there.
They had finished second in the Premier League in 2013-14 largely due to the performances of a strike force led by Luis Suarez and supported brilliantly by Daniel Sturridge and Raheem Sterling. The trio accounted for 65 of Liverpool’s 110 goals but it was Suarez who shone the brightest and this led to interest from Barcelona that ultimately Liverpool could not resist.
Even before Suarez’s departure, Liverpool’s manager Brendan Rodgers acknowledged that he would need extra firepower in 2014-15 and signed Rickie Lambert from Southampton.
Yet it became clear to staff, including Rodgers, on Liverpool’s pre-season tour of United States that Liverpool had signed the 32-year-old at the wrong moment. “As soon as he put that yellow kit on, which we seemed to wear in every friendly that summer, it felt like we’d got another Robbie Keane,” says one of Liverpool’s backroom team from that period, remembering how Keane — a Liverpool fan — had moved to Anfield in 2008 before returning to Tottenham Hotspur inside six months.
With Sturridge struggling for fitness following the World Cup, the same source says Rodgers was beginning to panic. “Sturridge barely made the first game of the season against Southampton at Anfield and there was a feeling of, ‘We’re fucked here…’”
The source says Rodgers had originally been desperate to replace Suarez with Barcelona’s Alexis Sanchez, who was keen on a move to England. Yet Rodgers underestimated how much Arsene Wenger wanted to sign him as well as his reach, with Arsenal’s manager meeting Sanchez’s representatives in three Brazilian cities during the course of a World Cup where Rodgers and chief executive Ian Ayre based themselves in Rio de Janeiro and waited for their chance.
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After failing to get Sanchez, Liverpool almost signed Loic Remy but he failed a medical in Boston during the pre-season tour. Rodgers had considered Swansea’s Wilfried Bony but the Ivorian’s wage demands were excessive. Balotelli’s availability was well known but when Rodgers was asked about whether he might be interested at the start of August following a friendly with a Milan team that included Balotelli in Miami, he told the media: “I can categorically tell you that Mario Balotelli will not be at Liverpool?”
Three weeks later, Balotelli was a Liverpool player. So what changed his mind?
The team’s problems were laid bare after returning to Merseyside when there was an in-house game at Melwood. It is remembered by many of those who took part in it because of the scoreline. Usually, such games are designed for forwards to score as many goals as possible and boost their confidence ahead of the opening weeks of the campaign. This one finished 0-0.
“A moment of reckoning,” one of Liverpool’s players describes it as. “Everyone was looking at each other thinking the same thing, ‘Fuck, we need a forward otherwise we might struggle here…’”
Depending on who you listen to, it was either Rodgers’ decision to sign Balotelli or that of Michael Edwards who by then was in charge of Liverpool’s scouting department albeit without the title to justify it. Barry Hunter and Dave Fallows had been poached from Manchester City to work with Edwards on the infamous Transfer Committee, a term first used by owner John Henry, which ended up leading to questions about who was really making the most significant decisions at Liverpool.
“Barry and Dave knew all about Mario and I got the impression they were quite resistant towards signing him,” says one Melwood source. “My feeling was, the recruitment team were not in on it at all and that Brendan pushed it over the line. He was in quite a strong position because of what he’d done the year before. I don’t think the club were on board with it at all but Brendan was powerful and desperate.”
There is a web of unusual friendships in football and despite an emerging rivalry, Liverpool were able to consult the advice of other figures who had worked with Balotelli at City. The message that came back was: on his day, Balotelli could be a game-turner — a player capable of doing things few others could achieve — but he did not perform well when expectation was placed upon his shoulders.
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At Liverpool, there was a hope he would become the club’s main striker.
Various members of Rodgers’ old coaching staff stress that he had always been keen to sign a taller, more physical striker. It had been a misunderstanding that he favoured small, technical players in all positions.
At Swansea, where he enjoyed the most success in his managerial career to date, Danny Graham had played a crucial role and ever since his arrival at Anfield in 2012, Rodgers had been looking for an upgrade on that style of centre forward. He had stopped before only because he realised Suarez had the physique and appetite to play as a No 9.
“In losing Suarez, he felt he was also losing his character — his ability to not give a shit,” says one of Rodgers’ former backroom staff. “There was a bit of this in Mario. Despite the flak that always seemed to come his way, he had the ability to turn up in big games. In the moment of desperation when you don’t have that clarity of thinking you forget about all of the baggage and the shit that comes with him, I think the more than one person panicked, and thought, ‘It’s this or nothing.’”
When Rodgers introduced the idea to his staff at a planning meeting in mid-August 2014, he did not give the impression that he’d had the move enforced on him, though he always did his best to look like he had everything under control.
There was a conversation about Sturridge being England’s No 9. Would it be such a bad thing if he had Italy’s No 9 as well? Balotelli was another player with something to prove and Rodgers had helped to improve the performances of Sturridge, who arrived at Anfield as a back-up at Chelsea. He had also built a team around Suarez, for whom there were not many other offers when he left Ajax in 2011. Now, he was at Barcelona and the most talked about centre forward on the planet for many good reasons as well as bad.
There was a sense that he believed he could help to send the career of another wayward striker on an upward trajectory. “What we wanted and what we needed was a player who could really press at the top end of the field,” said Rodgers in 2016. “It wasn’t just a goalscorer we were after.
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“I felt Mario was someone who wouldn’t work for us. But come the end of the summer, we were struggling to get someone who could do the role we wanted. I think the ownership group thought that this could be a player I could develop. They were thinking that maybe he is a £50 million player that we can get for £16 million. So, when the owners are wanting you to go down that route and there are no other options, then of course you give it a go.”
Captain Steven Gerrard was starting his last season at the club. He remembers Rodgers, again in mid-August, approaching him as the players warmed up before a training session. Gerrard recalled in his autobiography: “He said, ‘You know we’ve missed out on a couple of signings. I’m basically left with no option but to have a bit of a gamble.’ Brendan paused before he spoke again: ‘The gamble is Mario Balotelli.’ My instant reaction was, ‘Uh-oh.’”
Gerrard was concerned that Rodgers was replacing one of the world’s greatest strikers in Suarez with a player that nobody else wanted, his status reflected by the knock-down price. That Balotelli’s contract was heavily incentivised proved this. Aside from a £85,000 a week wage, he was on a £500,000 season bonus if he avoided trouble on and off the pitch, as well as a £150,000 bonus each time he played five games in a row.
On his debut, Rodgers decided to give Balotelli the sort of defensive duties that he had never been issued with before and after a victory at Tottenham, Rodgers was taking credit for Balotelli’s attention in making two headed clearances from corners.
Rodgers concluded that nobody had given Balotelli responsibility because they assumed he couldn’t cope with it but by giving him some early on, he might get his buy-in in a way that other leading managers like Roberto Mancini, Jose Mourinho and Allegri had not.
From the bench, Balotelli looked “massive” according to one of the substitutes and occasionally Tottenham’s defenders bounced off him. Liverpool would win 3-0 at White Hart Lane that Sunday afternoon. Though Balotelli did not score, there were some signs of an understanding with Sturridge but that was before the England striker sustained an injury which left him on the sidelines for months.
“It was a pretty satisfying day,” one of Liverpool’s coaches recalls. “[Alberto] Moreno bombed up and down the left side and he scored. There were early signs that relationships were clicking between Balo and Studge. But that was almost as good as it got. It was a terrible season.”
In their first meeting Rodgers had suggested to Balotelli that he should work with Dr Steve Peters, the sports psychiatrist. Though sessions were arranged, Balotelli never turned up.
From inside the club it was at least one coaching staff’s impression that Balotelli may have privately been dealing with the turmoil of his adopted father’s deteriorating health throughout his season at Liverpool, at the end of which Francesco Balotelli would sadly pass away from cancer. There was also sympathy because he was estranged from his one-year old daughter.
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Staff, indeed, would speak about why Balotelli was the way he was and though a lot of cod-psychology was applied it was commonly believed that he had grown up in an environment with few restrictions and little discipline to older adopted parents who were prepared to defend and accept “naughty Mario” for who he was rather than who he could be.
Inside 12 months, Liverpool went from fielding a Sturridge, Suarez and Sterling front three to Sterling leading the line supported by Fabio Borini and flanked by Jordon Ibe and Lazar Markovic. It became clear inside six weeks, according to one of Rodgers’ staff, that Balotelli was never going to “reach the level of maturity” required to lead the team, with a tipping point coming at a game at Queens Park Rangers in early October.
By then, he had been in trouble for staying up late before a humbling Champions League defeat in Basel. Friends had driven to Switzerland from Milan and they were still in the hotel lobby at 2am, with Balotelli joining them for smokes at regular intervals. The following night, he delivered a “hopeless” performance according to Gerrard who “made my mind up pretty quickly after that about Balotelli.”
While Gerrard says he got on fine with the striker superficially and as captain tried to cajole him, at Loftus Road later that month his team-mates lost their patience for the first time. Liverpool won 3-2 that day but the manner of the victory was unconvincing, with a late sequence of goals turned the result in Liverpool’s favour.
Initially, it had seemed that QPR would secure a rare win after Gerrard’s own goal in injury time only for Philippe Coutinho to equalise before Steven Caulker put through his own net. All of the goals came in the second half and at the break, both Jordan Henderson and Adam Lallana told Balotelli what they thought of his performance.
“He barely moved,” says one player who thinks there was no way back for Balotelli from that point onwards because of his response to the criticism. “A lot of the lads caned him but there was very little comeback other than a few scowls and ‘fuck you.’ He didn’t try to justify anything or tell anyone else what they could be doing better. That’s always a sign that he’s not really thinking or interested.”
Rodgers substituted him at half-time of the next game, a 3-0 defeat by Real Madrid at Anfield where he swapped his shirt with Sergio Ramos as he left the pitch.
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“It was a big call to take him off,” reflects one of the coaching staff. “Most managers will buy themselves 10 minutes rather than face the moment of confrontation. I’m not sure whether Brendan knew about the shirt swap. I got the impression the decision to take Mario off was another attempt to try and provoke a reaction, but it never came.”
Though he scored his second Liverpool goal in a narrow League Cup victory over Swansea City, by the start of November Balotelli was out of the team and this coincided with a 13-game unbeaten run in the league that heaved Liverpool from 10th place to fifth.
In the new year, Balotelli was steadily reintroduced but only as a substitute and by the end of the campaign he was playing again, as Liverpool capitulated, losing five of their final nine league games. Meanwhile, Lambert had been preferred in the remaining Champions League games and though Balotelli would score the winner in a Europa League tie with Besiktas, even that goal provoked an enquiry in the dressing room afterwards.
Henderson was Liverpool’s captain for only the second time and he had assumed Gerrard’s penalty taking duties only for Balotelli to pick up the ball with five minutes remaining and refuse to give it back to Henderson.
Among the squad it was viewed as another sign of his disrespect for authority. “You just don’t do that to the captain,” says one of the Liverpool players who believes that even though he wasn’t necessarily ostracised, very few if any team-mates could find a likeability in Balotelli who was no longer viewed as a mischievous young footballer who got himself into trouble every now and again but was forgiven because he would win the team a game every now and then.
Balotelli did not go out of his way to get to know any of his new team-mates. “He wasn’t disliked but he wasn’t particularly welcomed either because he didn’t make much of an effort,” says one player. “Mario always tried to give this air of not being bothered.”
There was a feeling that Balotelli on the pitch possessed the same sort of arrogance as Zlatan Ibrahimovic but failed to realise that the Swede was only able to act in such a way because of the confidence he gained from training. “Zlatan can behave like that in games because he does everything else so well. It always felt like Mario was trying to prove that he didn’t have to try so much and that doesn’t go down well with players,” one player says.
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When Rodgers decided to drop him from the squad in November 2014, there wasn’t any discussion inside the dressing room about whether that was the right decision. “You couldn’t trust him to do what was asked of him, even the basics,” says one Melwood insider. “Somewhere in there, there was a good heart. But the minute your team-mates don’t believe in you — even more so than the manager to some degree — you’re on a slippery slope.”
It was a bit of a joke at first, where senior players would say they were already one man down in practice matches “because Balo won’t move…” In possession drills, the same comments were made because he was so careless with the ball and unwilling to create new angles for team-mates.
“But nobody ever really called him out,” says a youth team player sent to Melwood where he soaked every small detail in. Occasionally, Kolo Toure and Sakho would reprimand him for doing something wrong, “but it wasn’t like it would have been had Carragher or Bellamy been there.”
Gerrard, he says, was always more of a lead by example sort of captain and was the player who tried the longest to get through to him, “even though you could tell he knew he was getting nowhere.”
Balotelli was unbelievably powerful and there were rare occasions, which tended to be when he was wound up, where his opponents could not compete with him physically. “He had a next-level strength,” says one team-mate. But if there was ever a competition in training and he sensed he might lose, he’d stop. “It was his way of trying to show he wasn’t trying. It was a childish way to be. Though he could compete, if his ego was going to take a hit from not winning a particular duel he’d give up.”
In the same week, there were two incidents, one bigger than the other. The first involved him interrupting a talk from assistant manager Colin Pascoe by shouting at Jon Flanagan who was already warming up on the other side of the pitch.
There are different variations of the same story but ahead of a fixture at Arsenal, Balotelli then deliberately scored an own goal when the opportunity was there to score at the right end towards the end of a training session. Some players remember him getting frustrated with the quality of his team-mates because he was on the weaker team, likely to be made up of substitutes for the game at the Emirates, “which was rich considering his own efforts” before turning around and hitting a shot from 50 or so yards away past Brad Jones.
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This prompted Rodgers to end the session and as the players walked off the pitch, Sakho started berating him. Balotelli’s reaction to that was to purse his lips. Others say Balotelli started laughing after seeing his shot fly into the net. Either way, nobody knew what he was thinking.
After that episode, Rodgers stopped making an effort with Balotelli. With the players he liked, he would speak to them all of the time; breaking away before during warm ups training sessions for chats or later inviting them into his office. That season, he always seemed to be in conversation with Sterling, Sturridge and Ibe. But never Balotelli.
When one team-mate was asked to think about Balotelli’s time at Liverpool, he stretched into his bank of memories but came up short. “It felt like he was there but then, he wasn’t,” he replied. “I mean, he was there but you don’t really remember him.”
Balotelli, it is said, lost out on moments where relationships are developed because he missed home cooking so much that rather than eating at Melwood before and after training, he organised for lunch and dinner to be delivered to his Formby mansion from an Italian restaurant called Sorrento where the owner Luciano still has one of his shirts hung up on the wall.
After being banned from driving for being caught speeding at 109mph on the M62 in December 2014, he leaned on his friend Desmond N’Ze to take him everywhere. The pair had met at Inter as teenagers. When Balotelli signed for City, N’Ze won a contract in the Japanese third division but by 2015, Balotelli had effectively hired him as his gopher.
Initially, Balotelli had brought his friend into Melwood and he waited in the canteen for him to finish training sessions. The sight of N’Ze sleeping in the back seat of Balotelli’s red Ferrari in the car park became a regular theme after Christmas. N’Ze is described by one training ground source as “a fucking nuisance” because he kept on wandering into rooms where private meetings were taking place.
There was one occasion when Balotelli dispatched N’Ze to a nearby Tesco after discovering one of his team-mates was in possession of the new iPhone 6. This seemed to annoy Balotelli who it is said pulled up in training holding his hamstring. By the time the Liverpool squad had returned to the dressing room an hour and a half later, they were greeted by a grinning Balotelli, the proud owner of Apple’s latest smartphone; his injury seemingly a distant memory.
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N’Ze lived with Balotelli on Formby’s Kirklake Road, a safe distance from the majority of other players who either bought or rented houses on the millionaires row that is Victoria Road. A new home, Balotelli apparently had a paintball fight with friends on the day he moved in and this meant the property needed redecorating straight away.
One Formby resident, a Liverpool fan, can remember Balotelli overtaking him while crossing the town’s main bridge even though he did not know what was coming the other way. A few weeks later, early one morning, the same resident was awoken by what sounded like a Formula 1 car’s engine revving. Suddenly, bedroom lights were being switched on and texts were sent round: “Did you hear that? What was it?” Balotelli and his friends were amusing themselves by “doing laps of Formby.”
In the periods where N’Ze went back to Italy, team-mates took turns in giving lifts to Balotelli en route to home games. He was late so often for training, a rough system was put in place to try and help him. Occasionally, he would ask to be dropped off at the nearest petrol station so that he could pick up his smokes before going to bed.
There was one lift, indeed, where he heaved himself into the passenger seat of a car and found another team-mate sitting behind him. It turned out that he had trained with this mysterious character for months, and played in the same team as him. But Balotelli did not recognise Joe Allen.
(Top Photo: Matthew Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images)
This is part of a series of articles inspired by questions from our readers. So thank you to Louis G for the inspiration for this piece after he suggested a long read on Mario Balotelli.