IT'S BECOMING increasingly difficult not to love Mario Balotelli, especially after one Sun story last week.

His mother, apparently, sent him shopping for a bunch of household products after the woman they hired to keep his Manchester home shipshape pointed out that it didn't contain a single item she could actually use.

So, Mario set off with a list, that including an iron, ironing board and a string of cleaning products, and according to a tweet from an "insider": "Mario returns 5 hrs later empty-handed.

Cleaner: "Er, where's the iron, iron-board etc?"

Then a big John Lewis van arrives. Contains nothing from the list but the following "practical" items: Giant trampoline, Scalextric, two Vespas, table tennis set."

The boy might be a genius, but his house is still a mess.

SCALEXTRIC ON THE LIST