“I have always said it would be a dream for me to play in Napoli,” said Mario Balotelli as he walked off the pitch at the Stadio Teofilo Patini in Castel di Sangro. Balotelli scored the first of Adana Demirspor’s two goals from the penalty spot, 15 days before his 32nd birthday.
Once the most highly rated prospect in Italian football, Super Mario has now played for eight different clubs since winning the treble with Inter in 2009/10. Yet one club – arguably the club that suits Balotelli the most – has always eluded him: SSC Napoli.
Balotelli was born on August 12, 1990, in Palermo, Sicily – the South. His biological parents, Rose and Thomas Barwuah, immigrated from Ghana to Sicily before he was born. The family moved to Lombardy when Balotelli was two years old and a year later he was put into foster care. Balotelli suffered from a life-threatening intestinal disease that required treatment his parents simply could not afford.
Balotelli’s foster mother Silvia Balotelli knew suffering all too well. Though she lived in Brescia with her husband Francesco, Silvia was the Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors. Under the care of his new parents, Balotelli not only overcame his illness, but thrived on the football pitch.
Balotelli’s rise from the youth team of local club Lumanezze to the senior team of Inter was rapid. In 2006, he was promoted to the Lumanezze senior team, making his Serie C1 debut at the tender age of 15. Three years later he was plying his trade in the Champions League.
Balotelli’s talent was undeniable, but like the city of his dreams, for all the good, there was plenty of bad. He offered plenty to be admired, but also plenty to be loathed; a genius on the pitch, a reckless troublemaker on and off of it – something Napoli fans are all too familiar with.
Off the pitch, Balotelli played by his own rules. In 2011, he inadvertently set his own house afire while shooting fireworks through a window with some friends – but one example of his off-the-field antics.
On the pitch he lacked discipline. Former Inter manager Jose Mourinho once recounted an example of Balotelli’s lack of discipline in an interview he gave to CNN.
It’s too easy, lazy even, to attribute all of Balotelli’s antics to a bad attitude. In a 2018 interview with French media outlet So Foot, Balotelli acknowledged he may have the wrong attitude at times, but suggested that he could be treated differently as well.
“I think that if I had been white, I’d have had fewer problems. Perhaps I did cause some of my own problems and had the wrong attitude at times, but would I have been forgiven quicker? Absolutely yes.”
Racism has followed Balotelli throughout his life. Despite being born and raised in Italy, he could not legally become an Italian citizen until he turned 18. For that reason, he was not permitted to play for Italy’s Under-15 and Under-17 squads.
Balotelli was constantly attacked by rival fans throughout his career in Italy, from Inter to Milan to Brescia. “If you jump up and down, Balotelli will die,” chanted Juventus fans in 2009 during a 1-0 victory over Udinese – a match that did not involve Balotelli whatsoever. In 2013, while playing for AC Milan, Balotelli threatened to walk off the pitch after suffering racial abuse from Roma fans.
In 2019, after returning to Italy to play for his hometown club of Brescia, Balotelli followed through on that promise during a match in Verona. The home fans, who once welcomed Diego Armando Maradona with a banner that read, “Welcome to Italy,” made monkey chants every time Balotelli touched the ball. When asked about hi star forward a few weeks later, Brescia president Massimo Cellino replied, “He’s black, what can I say, he’s working on clearing himself but he’s having a lot of difficulty.”
Hate is no stranger to Neapolitans, who are often on the receiving end of chants from rival finals for Mount Vesuvius to wash them with fire, even in matches that don’t involve Napoli. It was therefore surprising when, in 2014, reports surfaced about Balotelli crying in the visitor dugout at the Stadio San Paolo after reportedly suffering racial abuse from Napoli fans.
Those reports proved to be false. Clarence Seedorf, Milan’s coach at the time, said Balotelli’s tears were the “tears of a sportsman,” suggesting Balotelli was simply upset about the 3-1 defeat. Enock Barwuah added that it had been an emotional week for his brother.
Earlier in the week, a positive DNA test confirmed that Balotelli was the father of Pia Fico, daughter of Balotelli’s ex-girlfriend Raffaela Fico. Prior to the test, Balotelli, who once felt abandoned by his biological parents, publicly denied that he was the father – another familiar story in Napoli. But unlike Diego, Super Mario immediately embraced his new responsibilities as a father and the pair have been inseparable ever since.
“I’d be very happy at Napoli, I’m serious. I’d make my daughter an ultras leader, since she supports Napoli,” said Balotelli during a live Instagram Q&A with former teammate Fabio Cannavaro. “I sing ‘Brescia, Brescia’ to her, but she still supports Napoli. She was delighted when I took her to the San Paolo, she was hypnotized.”
It was not the first time Balotelli spoke about playing for the Partenopei. In an interview with La Provence in 2019, Balotelli compared Marseille to Napoli.
“I’ve always felt that I would fit in here and I can’t explain why. The atmosphere is a bit like Naples. I’ve said the only Italian club I could play for would be Napoli. It’s more or less the same thing at Marseille.”
Sadly, some dreams don’t come true. Napoli fans would love to have Balotelli and Balotelli would love to be there, but nothing happens at SSC Napoli without the president’s approval. “I respect De Laurentiis so much but I think he never wanted that and that’s why I never came to Naples.”
