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Serie A

Light is shed on why Inter Milan starlet Mario Balotelli could not gain Italian citizenship until he had turned 18.

Balotelli is of Ghanaian descent, having lived together with his foster family in Brescia since he was two years old. He does not communicate with his biological parents, and only considers them as mere relatives.

The talented youngster only received his citizenship in August, as the adoption by his foster parents was not official.

But in an interview with the Corriere della Sera, his birth mother, Rose Barwuah, revealed more about Balotelli’s past.

She said: “We arrived in Italy in 1988. We lived with another African family in a one-bedroom apartment full of damp. I went to the social services and pointed out I had a sick child.

“There were no houses for us, so they told me it would be better to hand Mario to a local family for a while.”

Balotelli was born in Palermo on August 12, 1990, and has always insisted he is Italian. Therefore, the striker chose to drop the ‘Barwuah’ from his surname.

“The social services put us in contact with the Balotelli family. I spoke to Mario often and took him home at the weekends so he could stay with his brothers,” added his father Thomas Barwuah.

“However, things changed as the years wore on. We do not care that he is now famous and we’re not after money. Thankfully, we have enough.

“All we want is that he remembers we are his parents, too. Tell the Inter Coach, Jose Mourinho, to look after Mario like a son. It’s what he needs.

“We would like to tell Mario that we have always loved him and are enormously grateful to the Balotelli family for raising him.

“But we’d also want an emotional connection with our son. Above all, we wish to state that we didn’t ‘give away’ our child. Things happened in a way that probably even Mario doesn’t know about.”