With the Daily Mirror reporting this morning that Italian bad boy Mario Balotelli is being offered to Arsenal after only joining Serie A giants AC Milan just 18 months ago for £24 million Arsenal needs to ask themselves why would the club want to sell a man who has scored 20 goals in 54 games.
There was talk back in December that suggested club owner Silvio Berlusconi was fed up with Balotelli’s erratic behaviour and that he had ordered the player to be sold for anything over £25 million.
The Rossoneri quickly issued a statement on their website that read: “AC Milan denies absolutely and vehemently the statements that have been attributed to the president of Milan about a possible placement of Mario Balotelli on the market.”
At the time he was linked with a move to Chelsea which was never going to happen as you can see from the video at the end of this post when a reporter from CNN asks Jose Mourinho about his time with Balotelli at Inter Milan, and while it is obvious that the Portuguese manager has a soft spot for Balotelli you could not see him going out of his way to sign the problematic player.
In fact it was while he was at Inter Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger said of him: : “I consider Inter an excellent squad who can do really well in the Champions League.
“In particular I am keeping an eye out for Balotelli, a player I like very much. In my view he can be one of the best.”
Since then of course he went on to join Manchester City where he had problems with Roberto Mancini which led the club to sell him to AC Milan something the Gunners must take into consideration before forking out the money for a player that could make Nicklas Bendtner’s off the field antics look like child’s play.
