Balotelli's Chaotic Training Ground Antics at Liverpool

Rickie Lambert arrived at Liverpool in 2014 desperate to prove he belonged. Mario Balotelli turned up the same summer and treated training like a game he could take or leave.

The clash was inevitable.

Lambert, then 32, had come full circle, returning to his boyhood club after Luis Suárez’s departure to Barcelona. Brendan Rodgers rebuilt his forward line with two very different characters: the relentless, late-blooming Lambert and the wildly unpredictable Balotelli, eight years his junior and already infamous from his spells at Manchester City and Inter Milan.

On matchdays, Balotelli could still flick the switch. In training, Lambert says, he often didn’t bother.

Speaking on the Straight From the Off podcast in 2021, Lambert lifted the lid on what life alongside Balotelli at Melwood was really like.

“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 fought his way up from the lower leagues. He had no time for a striker who, in his eyes, coasted through sessions and still got the nod.

“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 grew. Eventually, Lambert snapped.

“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.”

Balotelli’s attitude didn’t just grate. At times, it stunned those around him.

A report in The Standard in August 2015, just before Balotelli left on loan to AC Milan, described one of the most notorious examples. During a 10-v-10 training game, with Balotelli on the weaker side – largely made up of substitutes ahead of a league fixture against Arsenal – frustration boiled over.

From halfway, he unleashed what was described as a “jaw-dropping” strike. It flew straight into the net.

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

What looked like a moment of outrageous technique doubled as an act of pure rebellion. Team-mates and staff were left astonished. Some laughed. Others didn’t see the funny side at all.

That streak – the refusal, or perhaps the inability, to rein in his emotions – came to define Balotelli’s short, stuttering spell at Anfield. He scored just four goals in 28 appearances for Liverpool before being moved on to Nice in 2016, another big club left wondering what might have been.

Lambert, meanwhile, never truly settled either. The fairytale return to Liverpool became a grind, his own form dipping as he tried to navigate the circus around him and the pressure of making it work at the club he loved.

Two strikers, one summer, one dressing room. One fighting to belong. One seemingly determined to do things entirely on his own terms.

Liverpool moved on. Balotelli did too. But those training-ground stories still hang in the air, a reminder of a chaotic chapter when talent, temperament and expectation collided in the most combustible way.