Kofi Mole wrote a song about Mario Balotelli. Now one of Balotelli’s old clubs has turned it into a highlight reel, and the man himself has answered with a single word: “LISTEN”.
Olympique de Marseille posted a clip of Balotelli’s goals on its official TikTok account on Friday morning, set to the Ghanaian rapper’s “Balotelli (Supa)”. The caption was simply “Mario Balotelli.”, and the French club tagged both Kofi Mole and Balotelli in the post.
Within nine hours the Balotelli Kofi Mole video had passed 385,000 views and 133,000 likes, with more than 1,200 comments, many of them from Ghana.
Balotelli reacts to Kofi Mole’s song
Kofi Mole was among the first to see it. “THIS IS CRAZY!!!” he wrote under the post, followed by a crying face, a heart and three flames. Fans liked his comment almost 16,000 times.
Two hours later the striker’s verified account replied. Balotelli did not type anything. He posted a sticker of a bald head with a hand cupped to its ear and one word written across the top: “LISTEN”. It drew nearly 4,000 likes of its own.
It is not the first time he has acknowledged the song. In October he reacted to it on Instagram with fire emojis and a Ghana flag, according to the news site KAKNEWS. This time the nod came in front of a club with 6.7 million TikTok followers.
Why Marseille, and why Ghana cares
Balotelli joined Marseille in January 2019 and spent the rest of that season at the Vélodrome, and seven years on the club’s post brought those goals back. The comments filled up with Ghana flags.
The Ghana connection runs deeper than the song. Balotelli was born in Palermo in 1990 to Ghanaian parents, Thomas and Rose Barwuah, before he was raised by a foster family in Italy. Ghanaians have long claimed him as one of their own, and Kofi Mole’s song does the same.
When one commenter credited Nigerian music, a Ghanaian fan replied: “This from Ghana please”. Others joked about which Ghanaian rapper would be the next to name a song after a footballer.
The song behind the moment
“Balotelli (Supa)” opens 4 DA POPPIN’, the EP Kofi Mole released on 4 September. It started slowly, then climbed. By late October it had reached number four on the Apple Music Ghana chart, the only song in the top nine not by Kweku Smoke, as we reported in From Outside the Top 30 to No. 4.
The Kumasi-born rapper, real name Edward Kofi Agyemang Amoah, has been one of the steadiest names in Ghanaian hip-hop since “Mensah” with Kwesi Arthur in 2018. A song named after a footballer has now carried him further than most: from the Ghana charts to the feed of a French Ligue 1 club, and back to the footballer himself.
