If Mario Balotelli is called up to be part of the Azzurri, the Italian national team, it won’t be only a personal victory for the talented but wayward Inter Milan striker; it will be a statement to Italy’s leader Silvio Berlusconi, whose party Forza Italia (”Come on Italy!”) is now in coalition with the National Alliance, the heirs to fascist leader Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts.
Balotelli was born in 1990 to Thomas and Rose Barwuah, Ghanaian immigrants living rough in Palermo. The couple put him up for adoption in 1993; the young Mario was adopted by an Italian family, the Balotellis, who raised him as their own.
At 17 Balotelli made his Serie A debut, scoring two goals in his second match, a 4-1 win over Reggina in a cup match. Football pundits have hailed him as a different kind of striker, complete, possessing pace and trickery lacking in Italy’s strike force led by the slow Luca Toni, the ageing Alessandro del Piero, the untested Giuseppe Rossi and the one-dimensional Filippo Inzaghi.
But well before the Italians noticed Balotelli, news about him had reached the football mandarins in Accra. When Balotelli was about to turn 17, Ghana’s then coach Claude le Roy called him up to Ghana’s senior national team, an offer he turned down, insisting that he wants to play for Italy — the land of his birth.
This April, in a league match against Juventus, the country of his birth gave him the rudest indication of how it will treat him.
Juventus fans booed him and chanted: ”A black Italian does not exist.” Balotelli’s riposte was: ”I am more Italian than those Juventus fans in the stands.”
Balotelli’s battle for identity resonates with Guadeloupe-born former France defender Lilian Thuram who had a famous ”off the ball” with Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the right in France.
”What can I say about Monsieur le Pen?” asked Thuram. ”Clearly, he is unaware that there are Frenchmen who are black, Frenchmen who are white, Frenchmen who are brown.”
Balotelli is not as eloquent and disciplined as Thuram was; he has a self-destructive, petulant streak that has not endeared him to his coach, Jose Mourinho, who has slated him for not showing enough effort at training. Pierluigi Casiraghi, his Italy Under-21 coach, also criticised the striker for missing a training camp.
”Seeing a lad of his talent who at 18 behaves this way at both the national team and his club is infuriating,” Casiraghi said.
His problems have not been limited to his professional life. Balotelli has been fighting with his biological parents who now want the rich footballer to be part of their lives.
When his parents gave interviews to Italian newspapers, Balotelli attacked them for ”glory hunting”.
He said: ”If I didn’t become Mario Balotelli then Mr and Mrs Barwuah would not have cared about me for anything. I was adopted by the Balotelli family when I was just two. Why? No one has ever asked the Barwuahs and now they are doing interviews with papers holding my photo in an Inter shirt with sad faces.
”Why did they never ask the courts to take me back once I had recovered from illness? My adopted parents used to take me there to see them but they were never at home. But now I am a Serie A player they want to come and find me.”
Balotelli has something of the prodigal son about him, but Italy would benefit by having him. In a way Balotelli is the most visible face of the migration in rickety boats across the Mediterranean that has taken place over the decades, but, most importantly, he is a talented footballer who scores goals.