Mario Balotelli has left our hearts to join Serie A giants AC Milan, it has been confirmationed.
The Italian, loopy, signed for Manchester City in a £20m deal from Milan’s city rivals Inter during the summer of 2010, and subsequently joined all of our hearts after being sort-of-frozen-out by despairing compatriot Roberto Mancini.
A series of whacky antics mostly involving nuns and spud guns saw him take up a special place in everyone’s aorta, while the T-shirt he revealed after scoring that one time will forever be tattooed on the nation’s left ventricle.
Speaking exclusively to Football Burp, your heart sang a song of regret with lyrics about how Balotelli will forever live on in the laughter of children, no matter how squawky, snotty or squealy those laughs may be.
It crooned: “That’s actually kind of gross, but I’m sure Mario would have wanted it that way.
“He famously asked of us ‘why always me’? I couldn’t tell him why, but it will always be Mario for me.”
Here are some of Football Burp’s favourite Mario Balotelli moments (at least those in which no distress was caused and/or or harm visited upon any sisters of the cloth):
* That time he gatecrashed a bowling lane party and hit three successive strikes with a pumpkin
* That time he beat up the staff of a McDonalds drive-thru, locked them in a cupboard and spent the rest of the week handing out free Big Macs while singing “Born to Be Wild” on loop
* That time he got sent off for something or other – you know, when he was playing
* That time he retrieved a cat from a tree by using a pizza as a makeshift frisbee-cum-flying-carpet
* That time he…oh wait, a few nuns were harmed in that one – it was a good one, though
* That time he literally broke all of our hearts, literally, by ditching them for a return to his native Italy
* The bib thing, in which a few nuns were harmed but only by secondary or tertiary consequences
What will be your abiding memory of Mario Balotelli in the Premier League? Have your say in the comments section below…