Balotelli paid £150,000-a-season fines at Man City

Mario Balotelli has a reputation for being one of football’s bad boys.
Whether he was letting off fireworks in his own bathroom, throwing darts at youth players or simply ignoring his manager’s instructions, the headlines were never far behind.

As you can probably guess, football clubs don’t normally take kindly to a player flaunting the rules and it seems Manchester City are no exception.
This week, Balotelli’s former teammate Micah Richards revealed that the Italian racked up over £150,000 in team fines during one of the seasons he was at the Etihad.
Richards was in charge of collecting the money, which was usually handed over for being late, messy or generally anti-social inside the dressing room – and he was often chasing Super Mario.
“Everything else seems to be within sync. [But] Balotelli was always late,” the former City defender revealed while speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live.
“We used to give all of our money to charities and by Christmas time we’d have £100,000 or £150,000 in there all from Balotelli being late.
“He would be in the building. Say we had a meeting upstairs – he’d be downstairs just relaxing. He’d come to the meeting but he was just a bit dozy.”
Hilarious, but not that surprising really. Richards even went on to say that he’d often try to let Balotelli off from the fines, but Vincent Kompany made sure the striker paid up.

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“I tried to be friends with everyone. I told [Balotelli], ‘I’m going to let you off today’. With him, it was every other week so I could only do so much!”