Eventually, the time comes when Mario Balotelli has spent so long living in his own private universe we have probably reached the stage where it is pointless wondering when, or if, he will be ready to fit into a reasonably hinged working environment.

It isn’t going to happen, plainly. Nobody is waiting any longer and though there is always something profoundly sad and unsatisfactory about the misuse of talent the disappointment in this case is tempered by the fact we have had a decent amount of time to get used to the idea.

Balotelli has kept all that ability hidden away for so long it isn’t easy to be sure even he knows where it is stored these days. He has been guiding us to this point for years and nobody should be too surprised it is ending so badly at Liverpool or that, yet again, he is demonstrating why Mario Sconcerti in Corriere della Sera once described him as a player with “an unusual talent for making people happy when he arrives and even happier when he leaves”.

The big clubs have stopped ringing and Liverpool must realise how misguided they were given they were specifically warned off Balotelli when they spoke to their counterparts at Manchester City this time a year ago. Nobody listened. Liverpool have lost a small fortune in the process and the most jarring thing about Balotelli’s time at Anfield – the relevant chapter in Luca Caioli’s new biography of the player is simply and accurately called “Flop” – is that it has all been so utterly predictable. Everyone could have seen this coming a mile off, and it does make me wonder whether Brendan Rodgers, at the time the newly crowned manager of the year, was feeling a little too pleased with himself and over-egging his own abilities to imagine he could do something that was beyond José Mourinho, Cesare Prandelli and Roberto Mancini, namely turning Balotelli into a fully functional professional, capable of grown-up football and joined-up thinking.

It has certainly been no surprise for those of us who remember the way Balotelli drove Mancini to the point of distraction at City and the often ungovernable mindset of the man who wore a gold medallion inscribed with the words “Professionalism, Endeavour, Humility” yet frequently lived his life in precisely the opposite way.

Balotelli was never an outcast at City where his regular routine after training was to perch himself on a concrete step, still in his kit, and spark up a cigarette with a ginger cat called Wimbleydon on his knee, chatting to his favourite feline about how he had played. Wimbleydon was an old stray that had been adopted by City in the Kevin Keegan era and was named after the way the Colombian fitness coach, Juan Carlos Osorio, pronounced Wimbledon. Nobody spent more time with it than Balotelli, to the point that when it disappeared one evening the initial suspicion was that he had taken it back to his apartment in Deansgate, smuggled in the back of his army-camouflage Bentley.

He had endearing qualities – in an industry, let’s remember, where we often complain there aren’t enough personalities – and was popular enough for the National Football Museum to put his most unusual hat on display. You might remember the one: styled like a chicken’s comb, or the rubber glove worn by the penguin in Wallace and Gromit, and bringing back memories of the sartorial advice in the autobiography of another leading fashionista. “What a lovely hat,” Miss Piggy writes. “But may I make one teensy suggestion? If it blows off, don’t chase it.”

But then there were the less appealing stories of his professional standards, or lack of them, and after all this time it is slightly wearing, to say the least, that he has still not grown out of that period of adult adolescence and finds himself so unwanted at Liverpool he has been banished to a separate training pitch.

Mancini tells one story about bringing on Balotelli for one match with specific instructions about where to play, drumming it into him that there would be space to exploit if he listened to the tactical advice, only for the player to take up a different position and dismissively wave his hand, completely avoiding eye contact, when he heard his manager shouting.

The same has happened with Rodgers on at least one occasion and it is slightly unnerving to hear that a supposedly professional footballer hadn’t learned the name of some team-mates, established Liverpool players, in the Christmas of his first season or that in one training session he took it upon himself to turn towards his own goal and lash a shot towards Brad Jones from close to the halfway line. Nobody can be sure why – boredom, possibly, or a sense of indignity that he was in a scratch team of reserves – but it is vaguely amusing, in keeping with the whole tragicomedy, that it flew into the top corner from 40 yards. It is just a pity he has stopped showing those flashes of excellence in a more orthodox way.

Liverpool will move on and, eventually, so will Balotelli and the strangely ubiquitous Desmond N’Ze, the old friend from Internazionale who now apparently acts as his gopher and has been seen sleeping in the passenger seat of his Ferrari at the club’s training ground.

But what do the transfer fees say of Balotelli’s career? He cost City £22.5m when he signed from Internazionale in 2010. He was sold to Milan for £19m. Liverpool paid £16m and now they would accept £8m. Balotelli – the player Mancini said could be as good as Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi – is available for the same amount West Brom have just spent on James Chester of Hull City, and Bournemouth for Ipswich’s Tyrone Mings. And nobody is coming up with the money.

The alternative is a loan deal but that would require Liverpool to pay a significant chunk of his wages, possibly as much as 60%. Sampdoria have tentatively been in touch but that, too, is another sign of how far he has fallen. The blucerchiati have had one top-four finish in Serie A in the past 20 years. They had an average crowd of 22,000 at Stadio Luigi Ferraris last season and the information from Balotelli’s camp is that he may yet hang around for at least one more transfer window to see if something better comes along. Liverpool could be stuck with him for some time yet and, to put it bluntly, more fool them.

In the meantime, Balotelli will have to understand why Caioli sums it up as “a great player drowned in nothingness … a talented boy called to be a star of world football who got lost en route”. Balotelli is a wealthy man, with all the footballer’s accessories: the fast cars, the designer labels and the string of glitterati girlfriends. He was once among the world’s most influential 100 people, according to Time magazine, in between Pope Francis and Michelle Obama and was the youngest on the list other than Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist who survived being shot by the Taliban and went on to win the Nobel Prize. Yet, football-wise, there should have been so much more. Balotelli is the hero for the LOL generation, the Jackass viewers and the banter crowd, but he is not a great footballer or the player he should have been. He is merely a good player, if the mood suits, and sometimes not even that when his mind is elsewhere. He is, as Luigi Garlando wrote in Gazzetta dello Sport, “condemned to chase a rainbow he will never reach”. The saddest thing, perhaps, is that he just doesn’t get it.

He never has, going all the way back to his early days with Inter and the little scene that unfolded at half-time of one match. Santiago Solari, the team’s Argentinian midfielder, tells the story in Caioli’s book and it is a piece of classic Balotelli. “It must have been his first or second match with us,” Solari says. “We were waiting for Mancini to come in for his half-time talk and Mario was playing with a PSP, a portable PlayStation. I told him to put it away immediately. He looked at me and replied incredulously: ‘Why?’”

United over-relying on Rooney

Two games into the new season is no time to be making snap judgments but there does seem something dangerously presumptuous about the way Louis van Gaal is relying on Wayne Rooney to have a blistering season for Manchester United.

That might jar with the fact Van Gaal’s team have won their two opening fixtures but Rooney’s performances in the games against Tottenham and Aston Villa have been a reminder of his diminished ability and it is certainly a risky strategy not to have brought in another high-notch centre-forward after the departure of Robin van Persie and, to a lesser extent, Radamel Falcao.

Javier Hernández has returned from his loan arrangement with Real Madrid but the fact Van Gaal let him play in Spain last season has to be viewed as a clear indication that United’s manager is not an ardent admirer. James Wilson, the talented but raw 19-year-old, is next in line but that, really, is that as far as centre-forwards go at Old Trafford, and it all feels a long cry from the best days of Sir Alex Ferguson when United always liked to have four out-and-out strikers competing against one another.

Van Gaal plays with a different formation where only one can play so, realistically, three would be enough but Rooney turns 30 in two months and no longer has the dynamism of old. His mobility is leaving him and, while he can still be expected to finish the season with a reasonable total, he doesn’t menace defences in the way he used to.

That has left United’s frontline looking remarkably bland for a club that prides itself on a bold, attacking philosophy and it goes against what might have been expected when they finished Van Gaal’s first campaign with 62 goals – two fewer than in the David Moyes season — and their second lowest total of the Premier League years.

United should have a more penetrative edge once Memphis Depay settles down and they would certainly carry more of a threat if they could persuade Pedro to sever his ties with Barcelona. There is still, however, an over-reliance on a player who is showing gradual signs of decline and a legitimate question about what happens if Rooney is injured for any substantial period of time.