Genoa have become the 12th club to sign Italy’s great enigma, who has one last chance to finish his unfulfilled business
IAN HAWKEY ON EUROPE
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Why Always Me?” The question, 13 years on from its reveal on a Manchester City undershirt, still has a resonance, a brand. Genoa, the 12th club in the upand-down career of Mario Balotelli, carefully recreated it in their video to announce, last week, the signing of their new centre forward. The short film has Balotelli, looking moody in a hoodie, tearing a flyer off a graffitied urban wall to leave just its top half, so it reads, “Why Always?”
Why always the demand, at the tail — or beyond — of every other transfer window, for a footballer with such a chronic record of dwindling impact at the clubs who gamble on him? In Genoa’s case the reaching out to the Balotelli enigma is easily explained. They sit at the foot of Italy’s Serie A, have two points from their past eight games and an evergrowing list of strikers in recuperation from injury. Balotelli was available and, if rusty — he has not seen any competitive action since early May when his last match for Adana Demirspor ended with a red card in a 6-1 defeat by Gaziantep — has kept himself fit enough to be in contention for a place on the Genoa bench for at least one of this week’s fixtures, away to Parma this evening and at home to Como on Thursday.
Balotelli turned 34 in August and had been out of contract since the beginning of the summer. There were various approaches for him, according to his representatives, so why pick Genoa? He had been holding out for a return to his native Italy and, well, there are fewer and fewer Italian cities left where a Balotelli comeback hasn’t fizzled, or, for that matter, where he hasn’t been collared at least once by the local traffic police.
Balotelli at Genoa looks like the last chance to complete the unfinished, unfulfilled business that probably the most gifted Italian striker of his generation has with Serie A and, if it works out well, with the Italy team too, for whom Balotelli won his most recent (36th) cap in 2018. He has the backing of the Genoa head coach, Alberto Gilardino, a former Azzurri team-mate who can at least glimpse some evidence that his recruit is in better shape than the last time he bounced back into Italian football.
That was for Monza, then of Serie B, where, by his later admission, Balotelli had not trained with the same rigour over a preceding period without a club as he has done over the past four months. In his half a season with Monza he still scored a goal at better than every 90 minutes; it was just that a full 90 minutes per match day was too big an ask. That was four years ago. Monza missed out on promotion in the play-offs.
His previous adventure in Serie A — a competition in which, as a teenage prodigy, Balotelli collected three winners’ medals at Inter Milan and in which he later thrived with AC Milan — had perhaps the saddest ending of any of his many exits. That was at Brescia, where Balotelli had arrived for what was supposed to be a fairytale homecoming. He grew up nearby and served as a ballboy there; his mother cried when he told her he was coming back. Balotelli left Brescia within less than a year, in a swirl of disputes about salary arrears and over the circumstances that had him barred, at one stage, from the practice ground. That was 2020. Brescia were relegated.
In the years since, Balotelli hopscotched between notoriously erratic employers: Sion, of Switzerland, best known for the spectacularly high rate at which coaches are fired, and Turkey’s Demirspor, infamous for unpaid wages. Balotelli had his moments at the most elevated end of Demirspor’s salary scale, including a Puskas Award nomination for a roll-backthe-years goal, a sequence of seven successive stepovers finished off with an angled rabona. That was in 2022.
There are very few Italian cities left where a Balotelli comeback hasn’t fizzled or where he hasn’t been collared by traffic police
He moved to Switzerland the following August, which meant he missed Demirspor climbing to fourth place in the Turkish Super Lig. By the time Balotelli re-signed for them last year they had fallen out of the Conference League. He has not played in any Uefa competition since representing Nice in the Europa League in February 2018.
And it’s the Nice precedent that Gilardino hopes to replicate at Genoa. Balotelli had a mostly happy time on the Côte D’Azur, offloaded there by Liverpool. For most of his 2½ years at Nice — 76 games, 43 goals — being the biggest fish in his corner of the Mediterranean seemed to suit player and club.
He’s still box office. At Genoa they have been maximising what remains of the Balotelli stardust. Alongside the “Why Always?” branding, the club released a mock Super Mario cartoon, 1990s Nintendo-style. They had him posing in Genoa’s new third strip, black with gold trim, in the city centre barely 48 hours after the announcement that he had signed for the rest of the season.
“He’s come here with great motivation and I know what he can give us,” Gilardino said. A stirring debut? That’s a sound bet. Even in the years of gradual fade he scored immediately on his return to Adana last season and in his first games for Nice, Marseille and AC Milan. Likewise on his City debut and on his first start for Inter half a lifetime ago.
“We’d all like to see a marvellous goal on his debut,” Cesare Prandelli, under whose tutelage as Italy head coach Balotelli enjoyed his peak as an international footballer, said. Prandelli can still imagine a Super Mario renaissance. “It would be a fairytale. A big ask, I realise, but if we close our eyes we can believe in fairytales,” he told Gazzetta dello Sport. “He must appreciate that this last chance is the most important one for him to make a mark.”
