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With Manchester City making all the headlines this weekend, in large part thanks to the Italian’s exploits at Old Trafford, it seems like a good time to review Mario Balotelli’s Premier League career so far. Whilst Manchester City dropping points seems about as likely as their owner Sheikh Mansour running out of cash at the moment, one thing remains a bit of a doubt for the sky-blues; their controversial Italian forward.
When Balotelli arrived in Manchester back in August 2010 there was definitely an element of doubt as to whether he would settle. Public spats with Jose Mourinho, then the manager of Inter Milan, not to mention the infamous images of him in an AC Milan shirt on television must’ve caused doubts to creep into the minds of even the most excited City fans. However, the addition of yet another exceptional talent to the squad, and one who scored on his debut probably did much to ease the doubters. Nonetheless, since his debut in the Europa League all those months ago the Italian still manages to make the headlines, and not just for his goals at the weekends.
Whilst Balotelli’s first few months in Manchester were, by his standards anyway, relatively quiet, he soon set about providing the tabloids with headlines. In late March 2010 the Italian was caught throwing darts at City youth team players, this was following, not surprisingly, yet another controversial sending off against Dynamo Kiev which resulted in manager Roberto Mancini being so angry with his forward that he resorted to throwing a suitcase at him. It is fair to say that Balotelli’s disciplinary record on the pitch for Man City has been littered with both yellow and red cards, ones which, like his so called ‘flying kick’ against Kiev, were fully justified. Having almost seriously injured both opposition players and City youth players, Balotelli then sought to test the patience of Manchester’s traffic police a short time afterwards.
In April of 2010, it was revealed by The Sun that Balotelli had racked up £10,000 in parking fines and that he had his luxury Maserati impounded a total of 27 times. Not contented to simply leave his Maserati where he pleased, Balotelli also conspired to carry £25,000 in cash on his passenger seat and responded to the Greater Manchester Police upon questioning of this matter in a manner befitting a £100k a-week playboy. The response he gave when asked why he had enough money in his car to have the words ‘why always me?’ printed on his shirt more than 2000 times, he answered - “Because I can.”
With Balotelli’s off-field antics making headlines on a regular basis it was only a matter of time before such nonchalance was imprinted onto the football pitch once again. One only needs to type the phrase “Balotelli back-heel” into Youtube to see his now infamous miss against LA Galaxy back in July of this year, if you haven’t seen it then take a look at the video below.
In his most recent outburst of boyish behaviour the Italian accidentally set fire to his home whilst attempting to fire fireworks out of a window. Coming just two days before the Manchester derby it is fair to say that Roberto Mancini, who often seems to find himself acting as a disciplinarian father figure to Mario more than a manager, that he would not have been impressed with his forward’s latest escapade. So what does all this history tell us? Well, nothing really. Mario Balotelli remains a young and exceptional talent who’s goal scoring record is nothing to be scoffed at (16 in 35 appearances and 5 in 5 in the Premier League so far this season.)
Whilst he remains, and it seems will do so for some time, a controversial figure, when he plays as well as he did this weekend against the old enemy Manchester United; alongside arguably the best striker in the country (Sergio Aguero), Manchester City fans will care little about his off the pitch escapades. And I would have to say, neither do I.
Wow, that's nowhere near as bad as I thought it was gonna be, from the press I thought it was going to be a clear open goal.
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