Volatile star of Milan clubs and Manchester City
Mario Balotelli in action for Italy's national team |
He currently plays in Ligue 1 in France for Nice, who
finished third behind Monaco and Paris St Germain in the 2016-17 season, helped
by 15 goals from the Italian international Balotelli.
Balotelli scored 20 goals in 54 Premier League matches for
Manchester City and made the pass from which Sergio Aguero scored City’s
dramatic late winning goal against Queen’s Park Rangers on the last day of the
2011-12 season, which gave City the title for the first time since 1968.
He had a difficult relationship with City manager Roberto
Mancini, with whom he first worked at Internazionale in Milan, and with
Mancini’s successor in charge of the nerazzurri, Jose Mourinho. His volatile temperament has also brought him
more red and yellow cards than he and his managers would have liked.
Yet he still won three Serie A winner’s medals with Inter in
addition to his English title and won the Coppa Italia with Inter and the FA
Cup with Manchester City.
Balotelli is also a Champions League winner, having
been part of the Inter squad in 2009-10, when Diego Milito’s two goals beat
Bayern Munich in the final in Madrid.
Balotelli was a sensation in his early days at Internazionale |
He was taken in by Francesco and Silvia Balotelli, a white
couple from the town of Concesio, in pretty countryside in the Val Trompia to
the north of Brescia.
Although bureaucratic obstacles prevented the Balotellis
from ever adopting Mario formally, they raised him as their own son, alongside
their own children Giovanni, Corrado and Cristina, who made him feel part of
the family.
Subsequently he came to regard Francesco and Silvia as his
true parents and distanced himself from his blood family. He insisted that without the Balotellis' love and
support his football career would not have happened and when he scored twice
for the Italian national team as they beat Germany 2-1 in the semi-finals of
Euro 2012 in Warsaw his first instinct at the end of the match was to look for his
adoptive family in the crowd.
A picture of him embracing Silvia appeared in newspapers
round the world.
Much as he felt safe and loved by the Balotellis, he still
regularly encountered racism as he grew up.
Although Italy accepts many immigrants, including refugees, from
northern Africa, they form a tiny percentage of the population and tend to be
more widely scattered than in some European countries.
Mario Balotelli lines up with the Italian national team at the finals of Euro 2012 |
His talent for football did help, but only up to a point. He
encountered jealousy at school and when he made his debut at 15 years of age
for Lumezzane, the Serie C club 20 minutes from his home where he took his
first steps towards a professional career, he was subjected to racial abuse by
a section of the crowd.
This continued after he joined Inter at the age of 16, with
racist chants and monkey noises a particular problem in matches against the
Turin club Juventus.
Nonetheless, his talent shone through. He made his Inter debut aged 17 in a friendly
in England in November 2007, scoring twice in a match at Bramall Lane,
Sheffield, to mark the 150th anniversary of Sheffield FC, the world’s
oldest association football club. He also scored twice in his first competitive
start, in a Coppa Italia match against Reggina on December 19.
Balotelli in his time at Liverpool |
In all, Balotelli scored 20 goals in 59 Serie A appearances
for Inter, 20 in 54 Premier League games for Manchester City and 26 in 43
top-flight matches for AC Milan, to whom City sold him in 2013 for €20 million,
a move Mancini believed would be better for his career, allowing him to live
closer to his family home.
The only fallow periods in his career came at Liverpool, for
whom he scored only once in 16 Premier League matches, and in a second spell
with AC Milan, on loan, which again yielded just one goal in 20 Serie A
appearances. But his goalscoring form
has been restored since moving to France, where his 15 goals for Nice in his
first season, following a free transfer from Liverpool, came in 23 Ligue 1
games, including two on his debut against Marseille.
At 18 years and 85 days, Balotelli was the youngest goalscorer
in Champions League history when he found the net for Inter against against Cypriot side
Anorthosis Famagusta in November 2008. His career tally of Champions League
goals stands at eight, with 13 from 33 appearances for Italy, for whom he last
played in the 2014 World Cup finals.
Balotelli has been an object of fascination for the media,
from the glossy magazines for whom he has done fashion shoots to the tabloid
newspapers in England, who reported many off-field incidents of unusual
behaviour, some of the them true, others not.
Concesio, where Balotelli grew up, is in the Val Trompia,
historically a mining area due to its rich mineral deposits. The route between the
valley and the city of Brescia has been called La Via del Ferro e delle Miniere
- The Road of Iron and Mining - which takes visitors through a largely undiscovered
area of forests, adventure parks and ski slopes with many restaurants featuring local cheeses, meats, game and river trout.
Likewise, the city of Brescia tends not to attract many
tourists, partly because Bergamo, Verona and the lakes are nearby. Yet its history goes back to Roman times and
there are many notable attractions, including two cathedrals – the Duomo
Vecchio and its younger neighbour, the Duomo Nuovo – and the pretty Piazza
della Loggia, with a Renaissance palace, the Palazzo della Loggia, which is the
town’s municipal centre.