Jurgen Klopp didn’t give Mario Balotelli a fair chance at Liverpool, says Mario Balotelli.
Mario Balotelli’s Liverpool career could be best described as perpetual controversy but he claims that his time on Merseyside was marred more by injury than by being unprofessional.
The Italian joined Nice on deadline day of the Summer transfer window. Since his arrival in France, Balotelli has scored six goals in five games. In his most recent game for Nice, he scored the winner against Lorient and then five minutes later was sent off.
This kind of predictable madness never appealed to Liverpool fans and there was a lot of joy when he packed his bag and headed for France. Balotelli however, has revealed that Jurgen Klopp only spoke to him once before he left the club.
“Klopp doesn’t know me, I spoke to him once, he told me to go somewhere else, work hard and then return,” Balotelli told Sky Italia.
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“So I said goodbye to them, and that we wouldn’t be seeing each other again.”
The common consensus regarding Balotelli’s Liverpool career is that the forward never worked hard enough and his controversial nature was the cause of a two-year nightmare wherein Balotelli only scored four goals for the club.
On the other hand, Balotelli thinks differently. He said, “I didn’t make mistakes in terms of my game or my behaviour, but I did get injured and that’s not something I can control.”
Balotelli claims he never misbehaved but conveniently forgets when he was suspended and fined £25,000 for anti-semitic social media activity in 2014. In all fairness, his loan spell at AC Milan last season was marred by a groin injury which required surgery and saw the Italian miss three months of football.
To say, categorically, that his failure at Liverpool was not a result of his own egotistic nature is to be speaking untruthfully. Balotelli came to the club with a reputation for being a troublemaker and he was far from the model professional in his time on Merseyside.