The answer to whether Liverpool made a mistake in signing Mario Balotelli is an unequivocal yes.
Balotelli joined in a deal worth £16 million last summer, moving from Serie A side AC Milan after previous spells with Inter Milan and Manchester City. His arrival received a mixed reaction, but for a relatively low price, the signing of an Italy international with Premier League and European pedigree seemed too good to turn down.
On Balotelli’s unveiling, manager Brendan Rodgers described him as a “calculated risk,” according to Andy Hunter of the Guardian.
“I think to get someone of that quality in this market is a very good deal for us,” Rodgers outlined. “He is a world-class talent and it is an area we need to strengthen.
“It is a calculated risk but one where we believe we can help him as a player and to mature as a young man.“
This gamble has not paid off for Rodgers or the club, with Balotelli now exiled from the first team as they look to offload him. Signing Balotelli turned out to be a mistake for a multitude of reasons.
On the Field
Naturally, the first port of call when considering Liverpool’s error is the striker’s 2014/15 form.
Brought into the side toward the end of August and making his debut against Tottenham Hotspur, Balotelli initially impressed; his performance in the 3-0 win at White Hart Lane suggested the Reds had acquired a maverick striker—evidenced by his attempt at lobbing Hugo Lloris from long range—who would become a valuable goalscorer when given time to adapt.
His relationship with Daniel Sturridge at the top of Rodgers’ 4-4-2 diamond formation hinted at a devastating partnership to come.
Balotelli continued to show promise in the following weeks, but this became an all-too-fleeting occurrence. Despite injury to Sturridge, Balotelli remained on the margins at Anfield, with sporadic appearances from the bench hampering any progress on the field. He scored two goals in his first three months, going on to wait another four months before finding the back of the net again—incidentally, that February strike was his first in the Premier League.
That goal, in a 3-2 win over Spurs, kick-started a brief renaissance for the Italian, during which he sparked a 2-1 FA Cup win over Crystal Palace and converted the winning penalty in Liverpool’s Europa League round-of-32 first-leg triumph over Besiktas.
Unfortunately, this was not enough to earn Balotelli a regular starting role under Rodgers, and his season petered out as Liverpool finished sixth in the Premier League, again failing to add silverware to their trophy cabinet. In 28 games for Liverpool in 2014/15, Balotelli only scored four goals. He completed the full 90 minutes just four times.
But whether this was entirely due to poor performances is questionable, as Rodgers outlined in conversation with Sky Sports in December:
I think we’ve seen [defending from the front is] not really his game. Working with Mario, we see someone who is better around the box. That level of intensity and pressing isn’t part of his game but you try and get the best out of the players you have and the qualities that you have.
So that’s something that we will focus on, but the most important thing is that he’s available after his ban. It adds another player to our squad and another player who is available, especially with Fabio Borini unavailable.
Throughout the season it became clear Balotelli could not function in the single-striker system Rodgers was looking to implement. This system required Rodgers’ centre-forward to not only spearhead attacks but also contribute to Liverpool’s pressing game off the ball and build attacks by dropping deep—it is a very challenging role that will see new signing Christian Benteke take time to adapt in 2015/16.
Balotelli was at his best alongside Sturridge on his Reds debut, never eclipsing that zenith. This raises the question, did Liverpool and Rodgers not know the type of player they were signing? Surely his time with City in the Premier League—largely alongside Sergio Aguero in a 4-4-2 formation—should have been enough evidence of how to best utilise the striker.
Off the Field
If the club had taken further observations from Balotelli’s time with the Citizens, they would have noted his questionable attitude on the training ground and out of football.
“The Northern Irishman was committed to making it work,” James Pearce of the Liverpool Echo detailed recently on the relationship between Rodgers as manager and Balotelli as player. “But all the promises Balotelli made him in his Melwood office prior to signing about knuckling down and committing to the team ethic were quickly broken.
“Balotelli wasn’t interested in learning and adapting his style. A succession of pitiful excuses meant he regularly missed training. Rodgers’ patience with him had snapped long before May.”
Pearce’s revelation that Balotelli failed to attend training sessions is at least removed from the striker’s physical training-ground clashes with Roberto Mancini and Micah Richards during his time with City, but it outlines a clear lack of application from the striker. This is a notion that was recently furthered by Simon Hughes for the Independent:
Two stories reflect Balotelli’s listless attitude. During training Colin Pascoe, then Liverpool’s assistant manager, gathered the squad in a huddle close to Melwood’s perimeter wall. Thirty or 40 yards away, Jon Flanagan was hobbling by, an injured player facing almost a year on the sidelines. Balotelli started shouting towards him for no apparent reason, ‘Hey, hey…’ interrupting Pascoe’s flow. For that, the Italian was threatened with banishment to the changing rooms.
Later in the afternoon, Balotelli scored a jaw-dropping goal from near the halfway line. Witnesses stood open-mouthed: first-team players shook their heads in disbelief, youngsters smirked nervously at the brilliance in front of them. One problem: the goal was at the wrong end.
Hughes’ initial anecdote, paired with those head-to-heads with his former manager and his senior team-mate at City, highlights a disruptive tendency in Balotelli, while his second suggests an unavoidable arrogance. Again, this is not new territory: Paul Handler of the Manchester Evening News provided an overview of Balotelli’s City transgressions in 2014, including throwing darts at a youth-team player, breaking pre-match curfew for a late-night curry and the infamous “Why always me?” t-shirt.
During his time with Liverpool, as Hughes continued, Balotelli failed to integrate into the first-team squad—not knowing the names of some key members of the Reds’ starting lineup—and regularly invited friend and former Fujieda MYFC defender Desmond N’Ze to training sessions before N’Ze was banned from entering Melwood, with his presence another disruption Rodgers was forced to deal with.
The training-ground own goal echoes the pre-season pirouette and backheel effort Balotelli attempted during City’s clash with LA Galaxy in 2011. Mancini immediately substituted the striker in what served as both a public humiliation and a signal of contempt.
Then-City midfielder James Milner, who replaced Balotelli, told Sky Sports (h/t the Mail) after the game:
Obviously I would like him to put that into the back of the net, but Mario is Mario, he does some strange things sometimes. I think he’s shown since he’s been here he has obviously got great potential, but he’s still young and still learning and hopefully he will get better and maybe learn from these sort of experiences.
If Milner had joined Liverpool a year ago rather than this summer, he could have warned Rodgers as to the destructive nature of Balotelli—a player who has seemingly not learned from his experiences—but with all of these hallmarks of disruption clear from his time in the Premier League with City, Liverpool’s decision to sanction his signing remains an interesting case.
Why Sign Mario Balotelli?
“I can categorically tell you Mario Balotelli will not be at Liverpool,” Rodgers told the Press Association (h/t the Guardian) at the beginning of August 2014.
Three weeks later, Balotelli was a Liverpool player. Whether this categorical denial was a well-worn smokescreen technique from Rodgers is impossible to tell, but Pearce’s detailing of the situation is telling: “Rodgers may not have wanted him initially but he gave the deal the green light when deadline day was looming and he was faced with a straight choice between Balotelli and Samuel Eto’o.”
The £16 million Liverpool spent on Balotelli, nine years Eto’o’s junior, represented less of a risk than the high-wage free transfer that would have brought the former Barcelona and Chelsea striker to Anfield—this was arguably a wise move, given Eto’o’s miserable, short spells with Everton and then Sampdoria last season.
But the signing of Balotelli—a categorical failure—is made more dispiriting given, as Chris Wheeler of the Mail reported in December, the club pulled out of a £20 million, £100,000-a-week deal to sign Wilfried Bony from Swansea City earlier in the summer.
“Having declined an opportunity to sign the Ivorian when he was given a two-week trial at Melwood in 2007 by Rafael Benitez, Liverpool once again decided to look elsewhere,” Wheeler wrote, continuing:
What subsequently made little sense, however, was that they agreed to similar terms to sign Balotelli—a problem player who had left Manchester City 18 months earlier more famous for the fireworks in his own bathroom than anything he was producing on the pitch.
Bony is a proven goalscorer in the Premier League, arguably of a higher calibre than Balotelli’s replacement, Benteke. Balotelli proved only slightly less expensive than the Ivory Coast international, who subsequently joined City—ostensibly replacing Balotelli, albeit 24 months later.
So why did Liverpool opt for the less dependable option?
Perhaps signing Balotelli was something of a vanity project for Rodgers; coaxing consistent quality out of a player of undeniable talent but questionable mentality would likely have appealed to the paternal side of Rodgers. The manager said at the time of his signing, as reported by Hunter: “We believe we can help him as a player and to mature as a young man.”
The perennially renewed optimism of Liverpool supporters certainly backed this notion, with the remarkable talent of the now-25-year-old a symbol of hope for the Anfield faithful, who hoped Rodgers could be the man to mould Balotelli into a world-class centre-forward.
Perhaps, however, Balotelli was a mere last resort. But given his ill-fitting within Rodgers’ Liverpool system and his perceived disruptive character—unreformed from his time with City—this was a gamble too far for the Reds.
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