Balotelli's Chaotic Training Days at Liverpool

Rickie Lambert went back to Liverpool in 2014 desperate to prove he belonged. Mario Balotelli turned up that same summer seemingly determined to prove that rules did not apply to him.

The contrast was brutal.

Lambert, then 32 and finally returning to his boyhood club after Luis Suarez’s departure to Barcelona, treated every session like an exam he couldn’t afford to fail. Balotelli, eight years younger and already a walking headline from his spells at Manchester City and Inter Milan, treated training like a stage for mischief.

It did not take long for the tension to surface.

Speaking on the Straight From the Off podcast in 2021, Lambert lifted the lid on what it was like sharing a pitch with Balotelli at Melwood.

“He was a good lad, childish but infectious,” Lambert said. “But as soon as he stepped on the training pitch he became a different person.

“I’ve never seen anything like it, to be honest. At first, he gave everything when he played. But in training, I could tell he wasn’t giving his all. He was answering Brendan [Rodgers] back and my head went with that.”

Lambert had come back to Anfield with unfinished business. Released as a schoolboy, he had fought his way up through the lower leagues and finally earned the red shirt he had dreamed of. Watching Balotelli coast through sessions, then start games ahead of him, cut deep.

“The fact that he was playing in front of me didn’t bother me at first, I thought ‘I’ll get myself in’,” Lambert admitted. “But just seeing the way he was in training, and then he was playing, it did affect me a little bit.”

The pressure finally told. Lambert’s frustration boiled over to the point he went straight to his manager.

“My head went with him in training and I had to go in and say to Brendan, ‘Don’t put me on his team again’,” he revealed. “I think Stevie [Gerrard] had said the same.”

Those weren’t isolated grumbles. The mood around Balotelli’s attitude in training had already started to grate on senior players and staff.

One episode, reported by The Standard in August 2015, captured the madness in a single moment. In a 10 vs 10 training game, with Balotelli on the weaker side – a group likely made up of fringe players and substitutes ahead of a league clash with Arsenal – his frustration finally snapped.

The Italian picked up the ball around halfway and unleashed a “jaw-dropping” strike. Technique perfect. Power, dip, accuracy. It flew straight into the top corner.

The problem? It was his own net, past reserve goalkeeper Brad Jones.

It left team-mates and onlookers stunned. For some, it was another darkly comic entry in the Balotelli scrapbook. For others, especially those fighting for minutes, it was infuriating.

That refusal – or inability – to keep his emotions in check became the defining theme of Balotelli’s short and chaotic Liverpool spell. The talent was never in doubt. The application almost always was.

On the pitch, the numbers told their own story. Balotelli scored just four times in 28 appearances for Liverpool before the club cut their losses, sending him to Nice in 2016 after an earlier loan back to AC Milan. A signing that was supposed to help fill the Suarez void instead became another chapter in the long-running saga of a mercurial forward who could never quite align talent with discipline.

Lambert, battling his own form and confidence, simply could not live with the circus.

While he fought to make the most of his second chance at Anfield, Balotelli’s antics in training only underlined how differently the two strikers viewed the game. One man clinging to a dream he had chased for years. The other treating that same environment as a playground.

For Liverpool, it was a brief, unforgettable collision of personalities – and a reminder that raw ability, without the will to graft for it every day, rarely survives long at Anfield.