Mario Balotelli couldn’t be bothered at Liverpool, that’s why Rodgers will be glad to see him leave

That whooshing noise billowing out of Liverpool’s training centre at Melwood this week has just been identified. It is the collective sigh of relief that finally they are seeing the back of one of the biggest wastes of time, money and effort in the club’s history. On Monday, Mario Balotelli headed through the gates for the last time as he disappeared off to Milan. As he went, the sense of good cheer settling round the club was palpable. As the Italian sportswriter Mario Sconcerti once put it, this is a player who possesses “an unusual talent for making people happy when he arrives and even happier when he leaves”. And no-one will be more pleased to see him off the premises than Liverpool’s manager, Brendan Rodgers.

If you want to get to the heart of what makes Balotelli such a dispiriting, infuriating, ultimately debilitating presence in any football club, the best place to start is not in the legend. Those stories – largely apocryphal – of his spendthrift way, his generosity in handing over his casino winnings to a tramp, his fondness for bathroom pyrotechnics, have little effect in forming his reputation among his peers. Nor do they have any concern for the paintwork on his Bentley or the look-at-me styling of his favoured headgear (that chicken hat of his is one of the few legacies of his time in Manchester, now on display in the city’s excellent Football Museum).

No, if you want to know why they will have been so happy to see him leave Melwood, take a look at a YouTube video of him participating in a training session when he was at Milan. Though participating is a generous term.

The video features one of those warm up routines that every club uses. We see a number of players negotiating a series of little hurdles. Each of them skips over the obstacles as quickly as they can, their legs a blur of industry, all of them giving off the impression that that, good as they are, they still need to condition, to prepare, to improve. Except for Balotelli. When it is his turn, he simply by-passes the hurdles, walking round them in a slow, unengaged, uninterested trudge. His attitude is clear in the curl of his lip as he looks down at the hurdles: I’m too good for this. And there is nothing more likely to anger a team-mate than one of his number flagrantly demonstrating that he cannot be arsed, that he thinks he is better than the rest.

At Liverpool, they soon discovered the Balotelli way. When he arrived from Milan last summer, all the right noises were made on his behalf. His agent Mino Raiola said this: “At his age, if Balotelli fails at Liverpool, his career at an elite level is over. It is all or nothing. There cannot be any excuses.”

Raiola let it be known that his client was wearing a pendant engraved with the word “professionalism”. And that was what he would now show. Rodgers greeted the player with a tantalising vision of how he could become a Liverpool legend. In the dressing room, the captain Steven Gerrard was equally welcoming.

And how did the man himself respond? By not bothering in training. It quickly became clear to the other members of the Liverpool squad that when it came to the five-a-side games which generally concluded sessions, if Balotelli was on their team they were effectively a man short. He wouldn’t run, he wouldn’t tackle, he wouldn’t even break into a jog. Instead, he would absent himself as quickly as possible from the action and go and sit on a step, talking to the club cat.

It was not as if, in his performances on the pitch, he was demonstrating that he didn’t need to exert himself in training. One league goal was hardly the return of a player who didn’t have to bother. This, after all, was a club where he was replacing Luis Suarez, someone whose approach to training was so intense and determined it was sometimes frightening to observe. Though, like much of Balotelli’s career, describing him as “replacing” Suarez was something of a euphemism. After the glory, came the grief.

It is easy to mock Liverpool for their decision to sign Balotelli in the first place. It was not, after all, as if he did not come with reputation. At Inter he had shown his contempt for his team-mates by developing a habit of playing computer games during half-time team talks, at Manchester City he had driven his manager to the point of physical assault. This was not a man who enhanced morale. Spending £16million on a player who was known as a drain – to use the terminology of sports coaching – someone who sucked positivity out of any team, seemed reckless.

Yet anyone who saw him in the European Championship semi-final in 2012 can only have concluded that buried deep in his being was the most outstanding talent. For a while at City, Roberto Mancini nurtured it to significant effect. Rodgers cannot be dismissed as merely egocentric for thinking it worth his while to try and rekindle that ability, even if he was clearly not the manager’s first choice of recruit.

Watching Liverpool play at the Emirates on Monday, with Christian Benteke – a player with half of Balotelli’s innate ability but ten times his application – tearing a hole in the Arsenal back line, was to get a glimpse of how Rodgers saw the Italian being used. That Balotelli could not share that vision is not the manager’s fault. His abject failure on Merseyside was entirely caused by his own shortcomings.

And so the pattern begins again. He returns to Milan, not so much a conquering hero as a liability, half his wages being paid by Liverpool who would prefer to fork out £40,000 a week just to have him off the premises. Typically, he is surrounded once more by talk of his need to buckle down, to work, to appreciate that the proper application of ability can only come through sweat.

“I just have to work and not speak,” he said after his medical. That he was wearing at the time a pair of vast red boots with a complicated dual fastening arrangement of zip and laces, neither of which he could be bothered to apply, did not exude an overwhelming sense of professionalism. But maybe looks are deceptive. Maybe this time he really will do his best to realise the genius within him. Maybe at 25 he has finally appreciated he hasn’t got many chances left. Maybe this time he will go over the hurdles, rather than avoid them. Just don’t hold your breath.