Mario Balotelli: Wild stories about ex-Man City star's fines & parking tickets in England

Mario Balotelli’s time at Manchester City was certainly eventful.

Truth be told, the Golden Boy winner’s career in football has been a rollercoaster ride across the board, but it was his time at the Etihad Stadium that introduced his penchant for the dramatic to a Premier League audience.

From scraps with Roberto Mancini to fireworks in bathrooms and countless rumours that would take us all day to list, Balotelli certainly kept the tabloids busy during his time in sky blue.

However, park the John Lewis trips and bib shenanigans in your mind for a second because today’s Balotelli retrospective centres around the fines that he racked up in the north-west.

With Frank Lampard’s fining system hitting the news again upon his move to Everton, we couldn’t help casting our minds back to the protocol at City, which meant that Balotelli’s bank account took an absolute hammering.

And we know that courtesy of Micah Richards, who has given fascinating insight into the world of professional football since swapping his life on the pitch for a career as one of the best pundits in the business.

During a thoroughly-entertaining chat with BBC Radio 5 Live in 2019, the former City player read through Lampard’s list of fines when it first leaked at Chelsea and duly led on to Balotelli’s own run-ins with penalties.

“£20,000 late for the starting of training – that is a lot,” Richards remarked while trying to compare Lampard’s system to the fines in place at City. “But everything else seems to be in sync.

“But Balotelli was always late. We used to give all of our money to charities so by Christmas time we’d have £100,000 or £150,000 in there just from Balotelli.

“He would be in the building. Say we had a meeting upstairs – he’d just be