All the monetary rewards do not insulate him from the black and white cruelty in society.

A.C. Milan is a divided club. One vice president, Adriano Galliani, feels the club should hold onto Balotelli and build around him; another vice president, Barbara Berlusconi, the daughter of the owner, triggered fresh transfer rumors last month by describing the striker as “replaceable.”

All the alerts have come to nothing. Arsenal and Liverpool have denied being in the market for Balotelli, not because he in any way lacks the ability to be a match winner but because of what Prandelli and previous coaches have said about him.

José Mourinho went so far as to ban Balotelli from the practice field at Inter Milan when the player, then 18, was already a sensation, and already temperamentally unreliable. “Balotelli,” Mourinho said dismissively, “is unmanageable.”

Prandelli, a kinder man, thinks that Balotelli will grow wiser as he gets older. But what is the age of manageability in sports?

Naismith can be explosive, too. He puts so much into his game, runs so passionately for whatever cause he represents, that sometimes he has been yellow- and red-carded. At 27, and still as likely to be named on the substitutes’ bench as in the starting lineup, he epitomizes above all else the spirit, the gratitude, to run for his life once he gets on the playing field.

Naismith knows exactly his background and his great fortune to be a soccer professional. His father is a social worker, his mother worked in a supermarket, and he, from the time he can remember, wanted to be a professional soccer player.

Early on, he found out why he struggled in the classroom. He has dyslexia, and he remains to this day an ambassador for the charity Dyslexia Scotland in his native country.