Liverpool: Mario Balotelli's cheeky reaction to Man Utd fans abusing him in 2015

Mario Balotelli endured a year to forget at Liverpool.

Having played for Manchester City between 2010 and 2013 in a spill that mixed moments of individual brilliance with constant tabloid headlines, ‘Super Mario’ returned to the Premier League just one year later in eyebrow-raising circumstances.

In a summer where Liverpool shed a European Golden Shoe-winning Luis Suarez, the only signings they made in the way of replacements were Balotelli, Rickie Lambert and Divock Origi, who was immediately loaned back to Lille.

Now, in order to give credit where credit’s due, it is worth remembering that Balotelli was coming off the back of 18 months at AC Milan where he scored an impressive 30 goals in just 54 matches.

However, even though Liverpool were never truly going to be able to replace Suarez, moving for Balotelli was nevertheless met with grimaces given his disciplinary issues and concerns over his attitude at City.

And despite the Italian forward flying out of the blocks with an impressive debut for the Reds at White Hart Lane, it wasn’t long before everything fell apart and all the prior worries came true.

In the end, Balotelli’s time on Merseyside was even more catastrophic than the low points of his City spell as he sunk to a miserable goalscoring record of four goals in 28 games, including just a single strike in the Premier League.

Balotelli was eventually loaned back to AC Milan the following summer, before being permanently offloaded to Nice as the Jurgen Klopp era started to take shape in the front of the Kop.

And the writing had been on the wall for some time because by the time Liverpool reached the business end of the 2014/15 season, Balotelli really was finding game time difficult to come by.

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