Mario Balotelli Deserves the Chance to Prove Himself in Conte's New-Look Italy

For a forward, timing is everything. Fractions of a second can make the difference between meeting a cross or missing it, taking a through-ball in stride or overrunning it, slipping a shot into the bottom corner of the net or watching a goalkeeper push it away with his fingertips. 

Mario Balotelli is familiar with these equations (even if his critics would argue he still has not truly mastered them). His marketing team at Puma, perhaps a little less so. How else to explain the full-page advert that appeared in Gazzetta dello Sport on the day after Antonio Conte’s first competitive game in charge of Italy?

It featured Balotelli, stood with arms apart, wearing his country’s No. 9 shirt. Beside him was the word “THEN,” crossed out with a thick red line. Underneath that, the word “NOW.”

At best this was misleading. At worst, a little humiliating. Readers would only have needed to flip back a couple of pages to find a match report confirming that Balotelli had played no part in Italy’s Euro 2016 qualifying win over Norway—a match for which he was suspended. Most of them will already have known that the player was not even called up to Conte’s first national team squad.

The manager explained his decision at the time, as reported by Sky Sports, suggesting Balotelli had enough on his plate with adapting to life in Liverpool. He stressed that he would continue to keep tabs on the player, adding, “I make selections not exclusions, which is something completely different.”

Even so, Conte’s decision to leave Balotelli out of that first squad, and subsequently also his second one, felt like a statement from the manager. For the last four years, Balotelli had been a fixture of Cesare Prandelli’s starting XI.

Conte was making clear that Balotelli could no longer even take a place in the squad for granted. He might also have been delivering a broader message to a cynical public. Eyebrows had been raised when it emerged that a significant portion of Conte’s reported €4.1 million salary would be paid by Puma, who happen to be the national team’s sponsor.

Would he be under pressure to include Balotelli, as a player who had ties to that brand? Conte dismissed the idea out of hand, as reported by FourFourTwo: 

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"Will PUMA interfere in squad selections? Nothing and nobody can force my decisions. If you know Antonio Conte, you should know that."

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And yet, when Conte finally did call Balotelli up at the third time of asking this week, the same subject was raised. Cynics contended that the manager must finally have succumbed to pressure from his sponsor. After all, how else could you explain calling up a player who had scored just twice in 14 games since moving to Liverpool? 

Conte was barely even prepared to dignify such insinuations with a response, dismissing them as “bar-room talk” (Quotes in Italian, via Gazzetta dello Sport). He was absolutely right to do so.

Because for all that it is true that Balotelli is out of form at present, the notion that a national team manager should simply ignore such a talent is frankly a little ridiculous. The bald facts are that Balotelli was Italy’s leading scorer in World Cup qualifying—grabbing five goals despite missing half of the Azzurri’s 10 games. He was one of just two players to find the net for the Azzurri at the finals in Brazil last summer. 

Nobody is suggesting that those numbers should guarantee Balotelli a place, and his listless performance in Italy’s defeat to Uruguay will linger long in the memory of many fans. So will the remarks of team-mates such as Gigi Buffon and Giorgio Chiellini, who made thinly-veiled criticisms of Balotelli’s approach in the wake of their country’s elimination, per Reuters (h/t SBS). 

But Conte would need to have some exceptional alternatives up front to be able to overlook such a player altogether. Italy, right now, do not.

In four games so far, Conte has used five different forwards—Ciro Immobile, Simone Zaza, Mattia Destro, Sebastian Giovinco and Graziano Pelle. All are talented and hard-working players who have earned their opportunities, but the results, so far, have been mixed. After a positive start, with 2-0 wins over Holland and Norway, Italy made hard work of beating Azerbaijan and Malta by a single goal each. 

In a sense that is par for the course. Italy have a long history of labouring through qualifying for major tournaments, and of playing down to their opposition. But at the very least we can say that Italy are not dominating opponents so emphatically as to presume they have already found the perfect line-up.

The presence of Giovinco, who has a hard time getting a game at Juventus and is yet to score this season, also further undermines the argument that Balotelli should be excluded on the basis of club form. Even Destro, despite a phenomenal touches to goals ratio, finds himself stuck behind Francesco Totti at Roma, while Immobile and Zaza have endured mixed starts to this season.

So why not call Balotelli up for a closer look? Conte has made it very clear that he is offering the player no guarantees. "If you make a mistake, you come once and don't come back," said the manager this week, as reported by ESPN FC.

Balotelli has made plenty of those in his career. But he has also scored plenty of goals. He deserves his chance, just like everyone else, to convince Conte that he is worth having around.