On Saturday AC Milan’s Mario Balotelli sat on the sideline, his coat hiding his face. The camera lingered on the striker, who had recently been substituted following a particularly lackadaisical performance against Rafael Benitez’s energetic Napoli side.

The coat dropped from Mario’s face and revealed tears streaming down the the 23-year-old’s cheek, eyes glistening in the Neopolitan air. Stills of the image instantly went viral, flying around social media and accompanying tweets from exposure hungry accounts falsely attributing Balotelli’s emotion to racial abuse.

It is a fact that Italy struggles with an issue on racism, territorial and otherwise, and the instant assumption that the only reason Balotelli would be upset in a football game is because of racism is a particularly worrying insight into Serie A’s reputation around the world. However, in this instance it wasn’t the case.

“It has been a tough week,” Balotelli’s brother Enoch tweeted following the internet explosion.

Balotelli had recently found out he was a father; a DNA test confirming that the daughter of ex-girlfriend Raffaella Fico is in fact his after a year since the child’s birth. The relationship between the two has been uneasy and the discovery that Mario, along with leading Milan from the front, deal with near-unbearable media scrutiny and expectation from fans, pundits and media has now been joined by that most primal, instinctive male responsibility of all: fatherhood.

Balotelli, while rarely discussing his own upbringing came from a difficult background, dealing with the abandonment issues that came with the strikers adopted upbringing while also enduring racist abuse from his fellow countrymen. needing support but never feeling that there is any.

“I am ready to take my responsibility,” Mario wrote in an open letter.

“Writing ‘Dad’ gave me an explosion of emotion, but now I want to keep this joy for myself. I hope my silence can help to avoid any further controversy on TV or in the papers.

“I hope my silence can help people understand there is a child here who doesn’t know how the media or television worlds work. I hope my few words can help to definitively put an end to this affair. With affection, Mario, who today waits for his daughter far away from the media spotlight and hopefully one day on the touchline to cheer on Milan and her daddy.”

It has quite clearly been a monumental week for the striker, who was notably off-pace during Milan’s match against Napoli. This is the same man who was seen crying following Italy’s loss to Spain in the Euro 2012 final, as well as the moment as he hugged his mother following his two goal outing against Germany.

Perhaps then, the disappointment of his performance married with his new, additional, life-altering responsibility was perhaps too much for a guy who is almost always toeing the line between serenity and stress.

It has been a criticism of Balotelli’s in the past that his emotional state has often got in the way of the more (seemingly) cerebral task of being a striker for one of the most visible clubs in football world, but in this case it can be seen a positive.

Rather than the common stereotype that Mario Balotelli’s only priority is Mario Balotelli, every tear that fell from the strikers face is Exhibit A, B and C of why that isn’t the case. Mario Balotelli’s performances matter to Mario Balotelli, as does his team, his career and the new addition to his family.

” I’d say it was actually beautiful, but I’d prefer to talk about the game,” coach Clarence Seedorf told media after the match.

Perhaps he’s right.