Raheem Sterling… fight or flight?

For a sense of how Raheem Sterling might be feeling right now, consider that this is a player who felt affronted from the moment his starting place at Manchester City began to come under threat.

In The Pep Revolution, a book in which journalist Marti Perarnau reports from behind the scenes of Pep Guardiola’s City, there are eyewitness reports of “furious exchanges” between Sterling and the manager in the final months of the 2020-21 season.

Things weren’t ever the same again for Sterling at City. To considerable shock, he asked to be allowed to join Barcelona on loan later that year and though he returned to Guardiola’s favour for a time the following season, the relationship never recovered. With little inclination to sign a new contract in Manchester, Sterling preferred to pursue a fresh challenge elsewhere.

He admitted as much when he joined Chelsea in a £47.5million ($61.5m at current rates) deal in July 2022. He left City, he said, because he felt he was being “treated in a certain way” that left him “fuming, raging, all of that”. But he told reporters it was a “blessing in disguise”, because Chelsea represented, “a challenge I know I’ll look back on (…) and say, ‘Yeah, I stepped up to the plate again’.”

The problem, two years later, is that Sterling has not stepped up to the plate at Chelsea. Instead, he has become a symbol — one of many, it must be said — of the club’s erratic, bewildering recruitment record under the co-ownership of Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital.

When Chelsea began their Premier League season at home to City yesterday (Sunday), Sterling was left out of the 20-man matchday squad. New head coach Enzo Maresca said afterwards that he hoped to keep the 29-year-old but, due to the surplus of players on the books, “some of them, they have to leave”.

Few people would take issue with the idea that Chelsea might wish to move Sterling on. The high-level output he reached between 2017-18 and 2019-20 (55 Premier League goals and 21 assists in 100 appearances) fell markedly in his final two seasons at City. In a Chelsea shirt, he has 14 goals and seven assists in 59 Premier League games.

That is still some advance on Mykhailo Mudryk’s record for Chelsea (five goals and four assists in 46 Premier League outings), but the Ukrainian winger is a) six years younger, and b) synonymous with the current recruitment strategy at the club, rather than the ill-fated first transfer window under this ownership. Back then, coach Thomas Tuchel was calling the shots and Boehly, as interim sporting director, was so desperate to show the football world the colour of Chelsea’s new money.

Two years, countless new signings and four managerial changes later, it says so much about Boehly/Clearlake-era Chelsea that the club’s greatest immediate need is to streamline a terribly bloated squad before the transfer window closes on August 30.

But offloading unwanted players is easier said than done.

Chelsea have been trying to find a buyer for their £97.5million record acquisition Romelu Lukaku since the start of the summer — indeed, since the summer of 2022 — but there is still work to do and financial concessions to make. Likewise with Trevoh Chalobah, Conor Gallagher, Armando Broja and various others whose status was spelled out weeks ago, as well as Ben Chilwell, who did not appear in Chelsea’s final three pre-season matches, never mind the City game.

Sterling is a different case, having appeared in all of Chelsea’s warm-up friendlies and been described by Maresca as “one of our important players” during the recent pre-season tour in the United States. As recently as Saturday, a pre-recorded interview with Sterling was published on Chelsea’s official website. On Monday, less than 24 hours after he was left out of the City game, one of the club’s commercial partners launched a campaign featuring Sterling along with Enzo Fernandez and women’s team captain Millie Bright.

The reality might be rather more nuanced — that the club were open to the possibility of selling him, depending on how other incomings and outgoings developed and whether he made a strong impression on Maresca in pre-season — but Sterling had reason to feel he was in contention to play against City until the coach clarified the situation after training on Friday.

Much of the fall-out from Sunday has centred on the statement released by Sterling’s PR team, but this was merely a response to media enquiries about his omission from the matchday 20. An unusual move, perhaps, but its tone was largely cordial rather than inflammatory. It was a long, long way from the interview he gave when he was trying to secure a move from Liverpool to City in 2015 — or, for a less historic example, from Manchester United winger Jadon Sancho taking to Instagram last season to accuse their manager Erik ten Hag of untruths and to complain of being a “scapegoat for a long time”.

Sterling is said to have appreciated Maresca’s honesty, but any sense of clarity is overshadowed by difficulties when the transfer window closes in a week and a half, when his club will want to recoup a chunk of their £47.5million outlay and when, to be blunt, there might be a limited market for a big-earning player who will turn 30 in early December and who, after losing form and favour at City, has never come close to recapturing that status at Chelsea.

Sterling has always attracted scepticism in some quarters: even when he was being described by Brendan Rodgers at Liverpool as “the best young player in Europe”; even when he was excelling in City’s all-conquering team under Guardiola; even when he was scoring crucial goals for England in their run to the Euro 2020 final. He has always carried a heavy burden, not just as an outstanding footballer but as someone who was unfairly characterised by sections of the media, suffered vile abuse from the terraces and became the face of the game’s anti-racism movement in England.

He has also played a huge amount of football since becoming a first-team regular at Liverpool shortly after his 17th birthday: 549 appearances at club level, plus another 82 for England. That is an awful lot of miles on the clock. He had looked a certainty to win 100 caps but has not won his place back since their elimination from the 2022 World Cup. He would not be the first early-starter to find his career in decline in his late twenties.

Equally, there is a danger in judging a player — and it applies to Enzo Fernandez, Mudryk, Sterling and so many others — on his struggles in what has been a dysfunctional environment at Chelsea of late. In a little over two years at Stamford Bridge, Sterling has played for five different managers/head coaches and in a variety of roles, in a variety of systems, with a wide variety of team-mates. It is hardly surprising that, like so many others, he has struggled.

It is easy to imagine how he might benefit from a fresh start elsewhere. It is less easy to imagine where that fresh start might be.

None of the leading Premier League teams have an obvious Sterling-shaped vacancy in their forward line. Beyond the seven or eight biggest clubs, it is hard to think of one that could afford him, unless Chelsea were to subsidise a huge portion of his reported £300,000-a-week wages.

(Dan Mullan/Getty Images)

The more the financial divide in European football has grown over recent years, the harder it has become for clubs outside the elite to afford established talent. Among the upwardly mobile sides in France, Germany, Italy and Spain, there is an overwhelming emphasis on signing younger players rather than big names cast aside by the wealthier teams. It is why, for example, Napoli appear to have the field to themselves in their bid to sign Lukaku. It is why David de Gea, having left Manchester United, found himself without a club for a year before joining Fiorentina.

Juventus have been cited as a potential destination for Sterling, but his plan to this point has been to stay at Chelsea. A change in status can force a player to reappraise everything in his life, but what if having returned to his hometown of London two years ago, he prefers to stay to fight for his place? What if rather than rush to the exit and accept a move to whichever Italian, Turkish or Saudi Arabian club might meet Chelsea’s demands, he backs himself to force his way into Maresca’s plans ahead of Mudryk, Noni Madueke and others?

In one sense, it would be typical of Sterling to dig his heels in, knuckle down and win back his place. Fight or flight? He has spent his life fighting his way up. He is renowned as a fighter.

All of which makes it a little surprising, looking back, that he preferred to take flight from City two years ago. It would be natural to feel frustrated after starting only 23 Premier League games in his final season in Manchester, but he still made more appearances in all competitions (47) than any player in their squad except Joao Cancelo, Bernardo Silva and Ederson. He still weighed in with 17 goals (13 in the Premier League) and played an important role on the title run-in. Even if his relationship with Guardiola had become strained, it did not seem irreparable. The City manager and the club’s hierarchy still hoped he would extend his contract, which by the summer of 2022 had only a year to run.

Fuelled by a sense of injustice and a desire to prove Guardiola and City wrong, Sterling imagined he was signing up for a starring role in a Chelsea team who would challenge for the Premier League and Champions League titles under Tuchel. He said at the time it was a challenge he knew he would look back on with satisfaction. That satisfaction didn’t seem to last long before Tuchel was sacked that September and the struggles began.

Sterling’s need for a new slate and a new start is obvious. He hoped Maresca’s arrival would offer that.

If he had hit the ground running in pre-season, which was his intention after cutting short his summer break, perhaps it would have done.

Instead, the opening weekend of the new Premier League campaign brought rejection, discord and a growing sense of uncertainty about what fight-or-flight means for him now, as his options diminish along with his on-pitch returns.

(Top photo: Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images)