



The Californian sports website Bleachreport.com dared to publish an article with 25 bold predictions for the 2015 January transfer window. No1 of the list was an imminent move of Mario Balotelli from Liverpool to Olympiakos.

Mario Balotelli’s last performance of great value was against Germany for the Euro 2012 semi-final when he scored two goals to lead Italy to the final against Spain. Since then, the 24 year old’s career has fizzled out. He jumped from Manchester City to AC Milan and then to Liverpool unable to make a decent impression in either club.

Brendan Rogers has used him a total of 16 times this season though he’s only managed to score twice and neither of them was for the Premier League. Liverpool’s atrocious run in the English league sees them in eighth place, 17 points behind first placed Chelsea and Manchester city. Consequently, people are brought up to target and the easiest one to blame is usually the team’s bad boy, which at this case is Super Mario.

The €20 million fee paid to bring the young Italian striker to the British port has yet to be depreciated as he has made no eminent impact in the team’s performance and so, tales of his departure are slowly arising.

One of them, has Balotelli moving to Olympiakos. Greece, a paradise for talented players who can still be paid well but also vamp around on the field, has always been the welcome area for cases like Balotelli. Eric Abidal and Javier Saviola to name a few recent ones, or Giovanni Dos Santos and Ze Elias to mention some past ones.

After all, and this is where the article bases its whole theory, Mario Balotelli’s manager is the well known Mino Raiola (also represents Zlatan Ibrahimovic) who has three Olympiakos’ players under his belt, Gevorg Ghazaryan, Pajtim Kasami and Ibrahim Afellay and another, Vladimir Weiss who recently was sold off. Vaggelis Marinakis’ and Mino Raiola’s relationship is strengthened after their recent deals and as a result a forthcoming transaction between the two of them cannot be omitted.



