Kevin-Prince Boateng: one golden Milan season, then the long road

The season that announced him

Boateng had already been a Premier League relegation footnote at Portsmouth and an FA Cup final villain, of sorts, after his tackle on Michael Ballack ruled the German out of the 2010 World Cup. But at AC Milan in 2010-11, everything clicked. He won the Serie A title and the Supercoppa Italiana in his first season at the club, and was named in the Serie A Team of the Year, an honour backed up by a place on the CAF Team of the Year too. The following autumn he produced the signature moment of his career: coming on at half-time against Lecce with Milan 3-0 down, he scored three goals in fourteen minutes to turn the game into a 4-3 win, becoming only the second player in Serie A history to score a hat-trick after being introduced as a substitute.

He was more than just a goalscorer in that window. In January 2013, Boateng walked off the pitch during a Milan friendly against Pro Patria after racist chanting from the crowd, a gesture that was backed across the game and led to him being made FIFA's first global ambassador for its anti-discrimination taskforce and a United Nations ambassador for anti-racism. For a short stretch, Boateng was Milan's main man and football's conscience at once.

What came after

Milan sold him to Schalke 04 in 2013, and from there his career became a tour rather than a story. He returned to Milan for six months in 2016, then went to Las Palmas, where he left by mutual consent citing "irreversible personal reasons." He moved back to Germany for a third spell, at Eintracht Frankfurt, winning a DFB-Pokal, then to Sassuolo, then on loan to Barcelona, where he won a La Liga title as back-up to Luis Suárez and became the first Ghanaian to play for the club. Fiorentina followed, then a loan to Beşiktaş in Turkey, then Monza. Nine clubs, five countries, in the decade after the title he'd won at 24.

His international career carried its own turbulence. Capped by Ghana rather than Germany, he scored the goal that sent the Black Stars to the 2014 World Cup, then was sent home from that same tournament mid-group-stage over a reported dispute with the manager, calling the Ghana Football Association's organisation "amateurish" on his way out.

Life after the game

Boateng has been living in Australia since retiring from playing, having met his fourth wife there. He has said he became a devout Christian in retirement, and that his faith helped him recover from trauma and addiction. The player who once moonwalked for 88,000 people at the San Siro after a Scudetto win, who released rap singles under the alias PRIN$$ Boateng, and who split from his brother Jérôme to the point of estrangement, now lives a long way from the game that made him briefly, unmistakably excellent.