It’s one of the strangest transfers of recent times.
When, at the end of the summer when they lost Luis Suarez,
Liverpool decided in the Autum of 2014 to add Mario Balotelli to their forward line.
Balotelli’s failures to make an impact on the pitch are well-known. Less remembered
are the incidents which occurred away from the cameras, but which still characterise his
short and bizarre stay on Merseyside, which lasted just 16 Premier League appearances.
It became clear inside six weeks, according to one of Brendan Rodgers’ staff at Liverpool,
that Balotelli was never going to “reach the level of maturity” required to lead the team,
with a tipping point coming 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 captain Steven Gerrard,
who says he got on fine with the striker and often tried to cajole him.
But at Loftus Road later that month his team-mates lost their patience. Liverpool won 3-2 that day,
but both Jordan Henderson and Adam Lallana told Balotelli what they thought of his performance.
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.
Balotelli never really went out of his way to get to know any of his new team-mates. .
“Mario always tried to give this air of not being bothered” remembers one player.
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 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.
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. Though he could compete,
if his ego was going to take a hit from not winning a particular duel he’d give up.”
Sometimes his antics were just bizarre.
There are different variations of one story, but – essentially - ahead of a fixture at Arsenal,
players remember him getting frustrated with the quality of his team-mates in a practice match,
before turning around and hitting a shot into his own goal from 50 yard away.
In response, Brendan Rodgers ended the session and although Mamadou Sakho started berating him,
Balotelli’s reaction was just to purse his lips.
It wasn’t easy for Balotelli, though. It’s said that he 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.
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.
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.
In another incident, Balotelli apparently had a paintball fight with friends on the day he
moved in to his new Formby home, meaning that the property needed redecorating straight away.
And the antics weren’t just indoors. One resident
was awoken one night by what sounded like a Formula 1 car’s engine revving.
In reality, Balotelli and his friends were amusing themselves by “doing laps of Formby.”
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. There was also
sympathy because he was estranged from his one-year old daughter.
But whatever the truth, this was another chapter in a career which never quite made sense.
Balotelli has had five clubs since leaving Anfield and now, at 31, he finds himself
playing in the Turkish Super Lig, still with all of that potential locked away.