Why Liverpool shouldn't escape blame over Mario Balotelli failure

Only some of Super Mario’s powers have waned. Mario Balotelli may have departed England with his playing prowess in grave doubt, but his herculean ability to generate headlines and opinions remains as strong as ever. So when he followed up a debut brace for Nice by appraising his move to Liverpool as the “worst mistake of my life”, both duly arrived in abundance. And predictably enough, the overriding response was a kind of mass-scoff – howls of digital derision that he had the nerve to make such a claim after two seasons displaying the sort of productivity levels would put a Seth Rogen character to shame.

Not that anyone especially disagreed with him: Balotelli’s second stint in England was, we can all agree, a monumental waste of everyone’s time, money and patience. The disdain came at his implied abdication of responsibility – the suggestion that it was the club, not him, that should be held to account for his failure to look anything other than abject in his time there. (Though his heady prediction of a Ballon d’Or for himself “in the next two or three years” – as refreshingly colourful a soundbite as it was – probably didn’t do much to stem the cynicism.)

Leaving aside the significant offence of putting words in someone’s mouth (his actual quotes – “I had two coaches who didn’t make a good impression on me. I didn’t get along with them” – aren’t actually too hard to empathise with, taken from the right angle), the argument that Balotelli needs to accept complete culpability for his failure at Liverpool is more than a touch one-eyed.

Which isn’t to say that Balotelli was any good whatsoever: on a sliding scale of excellence, his input weighs in at somewhere between ‘Voronin’ and ‘Aspas’. But it’s not revisionism to say that he was a chucked into a no-win situation from day one.

Quite how such a famously languid and unhurried player was deemed third in line for Luis Suarez’s throne in summer 2014, after moves for in-your-face pace merchants Alexis Sanchez and Loic Remy had fallen through, is a mystery that the combined minds of Poirot, Holmes and Jonathan Creek would struggle to make a dent in. But if Balotelli’s subsequent failure to replicate the Uruguayan’s full-throttled ferocity came as any great surprise to Anfield’s bigwigs, it says more about their suitability to the job than his.

Then comes the small matter of man-management. “I think he needed different attention, he was a different guy from everyone else. There was something in me that said I need to stand by him because the world is after him.” Not Brendan Rodgers on Balotelli, but noted perch-reclaimer Alex Ferguson on his magic-touch approach to Eric Cantona. Balotelli is no Cantona, not even close, but that’s not to say talent can’t be extracted by the same means, and Rodgers’ description of his man as “a calculated risk” before he’d kicked a ball may not have done much to inspire a player who’s always preferred an arm round the shoulder in private than a boot up the arse in public.

Perception has always been pivotal with Balotelli. One man’s nonchalance is another’s negligence, and when faced with an aloof stroller, we English tend towards the latter reading. But it seems odd that the very qualities that offend so many in him – sauntering insolence, outspoken self-regard – function as a source of fawning cult-heroism in, say, Zlatan Ibrahimovic or Dimitar Berbatov. There’s a difference between those two and the Italian, of course, mainly in the form of medal hauls (though Balotelli is hardly short of trinkets himself). But that’s not their only difference, and it’s hard not to wonder if the Italian often suffers from something more sinister than the odd shoddy performance.

He offered little cause for approval during his handful of outings for Liverpool, but even so, any flaw in performance seemed to be wilfully interpreted through a narrow lens of apathy, laziness and the catch-all diagnosis of ‘bad attitude’. Maybe those things were factors, maybe they weren’t, but to paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a crap game is just a crap game.

Perhaps the most damning indictment of Balotelli’s professional integrity that its most vocal defenders of late have been Mino Raiola and El Hadji Diouf – a bit like going on trial for killing JFK with Lee Harvey Oswald as your attorney – but the Senegalese is a useful yardstick here, not only to illustrate how quickly an exciting talent can become a busted flush but also because his league outings for Liverpool, before he was dispensed with, tallied to 55.

A fair crack of the whip – rather too fair, when you factor in the three (three!) goals Liverpool’s No. 9 delivered in that time – but the same can’t be said for Balotelli’s 16 league outings for the club. Diouf was granted an extended opportunity to prove his worthlessness; Balotelli, you feel, never got a proper chance to disprove it.

His man-of-the-match showing on his Ligue 1 debut can be read two ways: as evidence of a talented player’s dereliction of duty over two years at Liverpool, or as a club’s wretched failure to make use of a very useful footballer. The first of those readings will doubtless be the most popular on Merseyside right now but both surely carry a degree of truth.

In the end, it’s all academic. What’s done is done, Balotelli and Liverpool have parted ways, and everyone’s happier for it. But while there’ll be no tears shed from club or player about a dismal chapter drawing to a close, it’s only fair that the blame for an unmitigated disaster is dished out evenly.