Balotelli's Chaotic Liverpool Training Antics

Rickie Lambert returned to Liverpool in 2014 desperate to prove he belonged. Mario Balotelli turned up the same summer and treated training like a game he’d already won.

The clash was inevitable.

Lambert, then 32, had come full circle. Released as a schoolboy, he’d fought his way back to Anfield via the lower leagues and a prolific spell at Southampton. Luis Suárez had just gone to Barcelona, Brendan Rodgers rebuilt his attack, and Lambert was the romantic homecoming story.

Balotelli was the wild card.

Eight years younger, signed from AC Milan with a reputation that followed him from Inter and Manchester City, he arrived as the mercurial talent who might just explode into life. Instead, he simply exploded in other ways.

On the pitch for Liverpool, the numbers tell their own tale: four goals in 28 games before the club sent him to Nice in 2016. But it was what happened at Melwood that really grated on those around him.

Speaking on the Straight From the Off podcast in 2021, Lambert lifted the lid on what life with Balotelli was actually like behind the scenes.

“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 arrived with a point to prove. Balotelli, in his eyes, wasn’t even bothering to hide that he didn’t care enough during the week.

“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 tension boiled over.

“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’,” Lambert revealed. “I think Stevie [Gerrard] had said the same.”

That wasn’t just a senior pro grumbling. It was a dressing room signal that Balotelli’s behaviour had crossed a line.

One incident, reported by The Standard in August 2015, summed up the chaos. In a 10 v 10 training game, Balotelli found himself on the weaker side – the usual mix of substitutes and fringe players ahead of a league clash with Arsenal.

Frustration took over.

From halfway, Balotelli unleashed a “jaw-dropping” strike. The technique was outrageous, the power pure theatre. The problem? He smashed it into his own net, past reserve goalkeeper Brad Jones.

It left team-mates and staff stunned. This wasn’t a mis-hit clearance. It was deliberate. A statement, of sorts, but the kind that infuriates professionals fighting for minutes and careers.

That refusal – or inability – to control his emotions became the defining thread of Balotelli’s Liverpool spell. Moments of outrageous talent, overshadowed by an attitude that constantly dragged him back.

For Lambert, the timing could not have been worse. Here was a boyhood Red, battling his own form and confidence, watching a fellow striker – one he felt wasn’t fully committed in training – still getting the nod.

He couldn’t live with it. And he didn’t have to. Liverpool moved Balotelli on, first back to AC Milan on loan, then on to Nice, his Anfield chapter closed as quickly and chaotically as it had begun.

Lambert’s dream return never truly caught fire either, but his story from those sessions at Melwood leaves a sharp question hanging over that entire era: in a squad chasing fine margins, how much did one man’s refusal to fall in line really cost?