SuperMario interviewed by Francesca Fagnani: “Italy-Germany is the only game I would like to relive. I have never felt omnipotent. Transgressions? Sometimes. But drugs never. Now I dream of playing in America”
What beast do you feel? “A man”. Why? “Because it’s the smartest beast.” Mario Balotelli does not like interviews but for one of the most famous questions of television, from a stool on which it is not comfortable at all and does nothing to hide it, he prepared well and Francesca Fagnani gives an answer that in the end reflects him. Reasoned. He is Mario (“I have always been Mario”) and takes away that Super Which has been so long in front of his name.
Who is Mario Balotelli
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“I could do even more but I don’t have nostalgia. I’m happy with what I did.” Too exalted and too criticized: “There has never been a balance with me,” he says to Belve where he really manages to be Mario and talk about Balotelli without filters. But who really is? “Vulnerable somehow yes, insecure no. And it is not true that I laugh little, in private I always laugh”. He is afraid of the spirits (“I happened to warn them … once for this reason I changed the house. Strange facts happened, the sunlights were turned on when I was alone at home”) and cries little. He did it when his father went away (the only person who would bring back to life and to whom he would ask for advice) and “maybe another time again. I would like to cry more but this feeling turns too quickly into anger. I had too much and it was never necessary. But today if I get angry I take a walk”. Shy or bad boy? “Both two”. Some adjective for this much talked about character: “difficult, good, sensitive, protective, pissed off”. A value? “Empathic”.
childhood, racism
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He had to wait for the age of 18 for Italian citizenship: “I don’t think it is normal. From 16 to 18 years old the Ghana insisted. If I had been born there I would have thought about it but since I was born here … I grew up here and gave me citizenship only at 18, a little I suffered”. A childhood with ups and downs for him who lived the custody “as an abandonment”. And then the racism, the episode of the launch of the banana on Ponte Milvio, in Rome: “Those two, that thing, I assure you, do not make it. They do not make it, I think they will remember it. When it takes, it takes. But as a child I asked my elementary school teacher if my heart was also black”.
From Tamarrata against Germany to depression
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From Lumezzane to Inter, up to the first team with Mancini. The first time he understood he was a phenomenon? “Never. I could say that I was strong, but enough. Maybe I could become it (a phenomenon, editor’s note) but I never told me. The phenomena in the history of football are few”. Then the City: “I did something over the lines, yes, but I never felt omnipotent, not even there. My family would never have granted it to me.” Let’s move on to the European, to the second goal with Germany and that unforgettable exultation that Balotelli archives as “tamarrata”. And laughs. But won’t everything arrived too early? “Maybe I had heard some pressure … I feel more here than in situations like that Italy-Germany. I understood only after the importance of that game”. Fast ahead of the 2014 World Cup: “I scapegoat for that failure? It is played in eleven. It always takes one of character that takes responsibility, some big and big hide”. “There are my mistakes in the choices of some teams. In my career I am much more professional today than before. Little psychological estate? Absolutely not”. The depression in Marseille is a abyss that marked it: “I didn’t want to see anyone, I wanted to stay at home. I was isolated. For me it is strange, I have a small circle of people but present around me and I was denying that too. I got followed in a therapeutic path that I finished last year”. And what did you understand from the therapy? “That I had to start it before. And that there were situations in which I exaggerated. I had trauma that gave me an extra sadness. What? Trauma of the past”. He does not deepen.
the beasts that become balottellate
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“Football is a world that as I live life is fake. Very much.” But why isn’t it like Cristiano Ronaldo? “Because he was a professional from the beginning to the end and he massacres training, which I did not do. And in the end he did well he who has even more money, I wasted talent? Exaggerated. I have sinned so much at the level of constancy. I don’t do the locker room? What absolutely not true. I don’t know why they say it”. A grimace comes out when Mancini’s name emerges: “Well … I love him, I also think”. And Mourinho? “We were two cabbage heads, he character is worse than me.” Friends on the pitch? “Boateng, Neymar, Materazzi, who has not beaten me, is a ca …”. And someone with whom he never got along? “Coach Brendan Rodgers. He doesn’t even greet him, he’s too unpleasant to me.” The worst foul ever suffered? A word: “Totti”. “Sometimes I’m a provocateur. Make a tunnel, say ‘you are scarce’. But now you can no longer do anything on the field.” Now it’s time for the beastswhich become for the occasion Balotellate. Mario regrets the red in the Champions League with Inter after a few minutes in Kazan “I was a little chicken, but José makes me angry because he never says that I marked and assisted on the way back”, he claims the one in which a friend of his threw himself into the water with the scooter “but I did not pay him and nobody denounced me, we pulled the scooter immediately out of the water”, he regrets the fireworks. They caused a fire “I was there but it was not me”, he claims the bickering with the English policemen when he replied “because I have all this money? Why am I rich”, and he regrets when he threw the shirt on the ground after the whistles in the semifinal between Inter and Barcelona.
That paternity test …
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“Now I’m in love. Enough. It’s not a simple moment but I hope he will resolve soon. I loved how much he was loved.” The most media story was the one with Raffaella Fico: “A lot of gossip but not because of my fault”. Traitor? “No, I’m not a traitor.” Offender? “Sometimes it happened to drink, to be late. Sex? When I was younger some situation … with more women. With a man I have never gone, the safe one. Drugs? Never. I’m against.” Returning to the family: what father is Mario Balotelli? “Patient, modern, jealosine“A vote?” Seven and a half. Not 8 for the situations I have with mothers. But I have no remorse because in both cases it was not my fault. “And on the paternity test asked to Fico to ascertain that Pia was his daughter …” I would do it again. I loved her a lot and I love her even today but she was so wrong. I discovered it before the Europeans, I was in retreat. My brother turns a photo of her with his belly. We didn’t feel like months, so I would do it again. He said he was fattened but after months that we didn’t see each other I wanted to be sure, I am only sorry for my daughter. “
A future in America
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The best, sporty speaking, is behind or Balotelli can return to important levels? “The experience of this year was a bad luck after the other. The only thing I chose was to go there, another mistake. I am sorry for the fans who love me and thank you, but not for the type of club. They did not know how to treat me but it was not difficult, it was only necessary for a little more heart. It will be difficult to go back to great levels. You have to be in the big championships. Maybe another two or three years will certainly be trauma at the athletic level, without a trauma. Constant training, without a game, without a group. And therefore, Goodbye Mario.
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