Mario Balotelli Is Back, Baby!

The shirt colors look familiar but the team is different, and so are the country and the pressure and the expectations, and maybe even the player, too. Mario Balotelli is back on the soccer field for the first time in a long time, and he’s doing good things for the first time in even longer.

Granted, Balotelli has only just made his debut for Ligue 1 club Nice this weekend, so it’s still way too early to make any definitive statements about anything. After all, his beginnings with new clubs almost always start well.

But he did play a full 90 minutes in Nice’s comeback 3-2 win over Marseille and scored two goals—as many in one game as he’s scored over his last two league seasons—while showing off his nearly unlimited array of skills, so it’s worth checking out this highlight reel and enjoying the good parts of Mario being Mario. After all, judging by how tumultuous his career has been so far, who knows how many performances like this we have left.