Kevin-Prince Boateng's one perfect season

The season that announced him

Boateng arrived at Milan on loan in the summer of 2010 after a difficult campaign at Portsmouth, who were relegated with him in their ranks. At San Siro everything clicked. In 2010-11 he helped Milan win the Serie A title and the Supercoppa Italiana, and was named to the Serie A Team of the Year and the CAF Team of the Year. The following season he produced the signature moment of his career: brought on at half-time against Lecce with Milan 3-0 down, he scored three goals in fourteen minutes to help turn the game into a 4-3 win, becoming only the second player in Serie A history to score a hat-trick as a substitute. He would later score against Barcelona in the Champions League and reinvent himself from a defensive midfielder into a trequartista, the attacking, free-roaming role that suited his flair best.

Off the pitch that period also defined him in a different way. In January 2013, during a friendly against lower-league Pro Patria, Boateng was racially abused by sections of the crowd. He kicked the ball into the stands and walked off, taking his teammates with him and forcing the match to be abandoned, a moment that made him, within weeks, FIFA's first global anti-discrimination ambassador and a United Nations anti-racism envoy.

What came after

Milan sold him to Schalke 04 in 2013, and from there his career became a tour of Europe rather than a continuation of that peak. He returned to Milan for six months in 2016, moved to Las Palmas, then cancelled his own contract there by mutual consent, before going home to Germany for a third stint, this time at Eintracht Frankfurt, where he won the DFB-Pokal. A move to Sassuolo followed, then a loan to Barcelona as backup to Luis Suárez, brief and squad-role only, but enough to add a La Liga winner's medal to his collection as the first Ghanaian ever to play for the club. Fiorentina, a loan to Beşiktaş in Turkey, and finally Monza rounded out a career that, after 2010-11, never again produced a title-winning campaign built around him rather than alongside others.

Life after football

He also carried his career into two international tournaments with Ghana, scoring the goal that sent the Black Stars to the 2014 World Cup, where he was sent home mid-tournament for a reported dispute with the national coach. Since retiring, Boateng has settled in Australia, where he met his current wife, and has spoken about becoming a devout Christian whose faith helped him through trauma and addiction. The player who once lit up San Siro with a Michael Jackson routine after a title win now lives a long way from the clubs that once chased him.