King of chaos Mario Balotelli on the move again after joining Swiss side FC Sion

The transfer deadline, set for the local leagues in Switzerland at 6pm on Wednesday, was five minutes away when FC Sion despatched their last paperwork to the authorities.

The name on the documents? “The biggest signing since I took over,” according to a beaming Christian Constantin, for 30 years the president of the club.

The name was Mario Balotelli, who had cut it fine with his timing. But then he is an expert in clambering through transfer windows, at creating cliffhanger dramas.

In joining Sion, the Italy international striker has notched up the 11th different club of a storied career, and changed employer for the seventh time in the space of eight windows.

Switzerland’s top division, which Sion last won in 1997, will be the fifth different league of his senior professional career. Those are the sort of numbers that would normally attach to a veteran journeyman. Balotelli is not that.

He only turned 32 last month, which makes him a year younger than Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, who was animating the last day of the transfer window by swapping one Champions League club, Barcelona, for another in Chelsea.

Robert Lewandowski, current holder of Fifa’s The Best award, and Karim Benzema, a shoo-in for the 2022 Ballon d’Or, are two years older than Balotelli.

Time was that Balotelli was more celebrated, more coveted than either, but the level of competition at which he has been operating in since his late 20s traces a steady decline.

His last outing in any Uefa competition was an early 2018 Europa League knockout tie for Nice, the French club where he had a sustained, mostly happy, spell.