It says something about a club’s desire to get rid of a player that they allow him to leave on loan for free and still pay half of his considerable wages.
When that player was, up to the last World Cup, an international-class striker, aged 25, who, according to a number of coaches once had the potential to be on a par with Ronaldo and Messi, something has gone drastically wrong.
Mario Balotelli’s season at Anfield will be nothing more than an embarrassing footnote in the club’s own rich and varied history but for the Premier League, it is arguably the worst transfer in history.
More bizarre than Marco Boogers, more hopeless than Bosko Balaban, more innocuous than Francis Jeffers and more disastrous than Juan Veron, Andy Carroll or Fernando Torres.
For £16 million (Dh92m) and wages of £80,000 (Dh461,00) a week, Liverpool were treated to 1,352 minutes of football – the equivalent of 15 full games – and four goals, all scored at Anfield.
That’s 338 minutes and £5.04m (Dh31m) (transfer fee plus year’s salary before tax) per goal.
If reports from highly-respected football writers in England’s north west are to be believed, Balotelli was also as much a disaster on the training ground as on the pitch.
Aloof, distant and prone to bizarre private jokes inside Super Mario Land, such as scoring an own goal from the half-way line. Character is one of Brendan Rodgers’ favourite buzz words, but not of this nature.
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Consequently, getting him out of Merseyside this summer has almost become as much a transfer priority as it has spending the Raheem Sterling money more wisely than the Luis Suarez transfer fee was distributed.
But this lack of impact is only half the story of why the Italian’s Merseyside move is the league’s most risible.
It was 12 months ago yesterday when he signed on a three-year contract.
Brought in following the sale of Suarez and with 30 goals in 54 games for Milan and concerns over Daniel Sturridge’s fitness, here was an individual who had Premier and Champions League experience and the requisite skills to lead the line and cement their status as a ‘top-four side’. It was an unmitigated disaster.
Without a regular goalscorer – Balotelli either shirking that responsibility or not deemed up to it by Rodgers – Liverpool’s points total fell by 22, and they went from title and top-four contenders to battling Southampton for Europa League football.
Of course, not all this can be blamed on one man. But Balotelli was a senior professional who was paid handsomely to deliver goals. That role was made even more important with Sturridge’s injuries, yet at no stage was he up to the job.
At least Torres scored some goals of significance and, at no stage, did Chelsea’s overall quality decline to such a great extent as Liverpool’s with Balotelli. The same with Carroll at Liverpool and Veron at United. The team’s ability stayed the same, the individuals simply weren’t fit, couldn’t adapt or weren’t good enough.
Rodgers and the club’s transfer committee must carry the can for such a reckless decision, when they were warned by so many. While they knew full well this was a striker who was unlikely to fit into the manager’s playing style.
Rodgers egotistically thought he could achieve what Roberto Mancini, Cesare Prandelli and Jose Mourinho had failed to do.
It was a £16m mistake, Liverpool are only now recovering from.
