Well, he is noted for his speed. The echoes of Steven Gerrard's requiem mass were still echoing around the country, and the tears had barely dried on Merseyside, but Raheem Sterling had been on to his agent. Who'd been on to the papers. Who, in turn, had gleefully been on to the rest of the country. The lad wants out.
Liverpool need to prove to Raheem Sterling that they’re worth his time
Liverpool can probably guarantee Raheem Sterling more football than any Champions League club. But that doesn’t automatically make them the best club for his development.
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As expected, plenty of voices have lined up to tell him not to go anywhere. Let us leave aside those poor souls who find themselves positively bilious at the notion of a young, working class man earning huge piles of money; they are peculiar creatures. Let us also leave aside those who still believe to the notion that Liverpool, by simple virtue of being Liverpool, is a better football club than all those other football clubs who suffer with the indignity of being Somebody Else. They can’t be helped either. Let’s talk about development. Here’s his manager, Brendan Rodgers, talking in April.
[F]or a young player there is no better place to develop. We want that youthfulness. You do not want another team to come and take it. My focus is to keep this group together and compete for trophies ... What is key for him - and I am sure he understands this - is that he is getting the opportunity to play. If you look through this league and the top leagues in Europe, there are not many playing at 17, 18, 19 or 20.
The generally accepted rule of thumb when it comes to development, at least as it applies to young players and the transfer market, is that all must beware reaching too high, too soon. Recall the fate of Icarus, who flew too close to the Champions League, couldn’t cope with the heat and only played three League Cup games all season. Roughly speaking, so conventional wisdom has it, a player should attempt to be at a club of a level where he stands a fair-to-good chance of playing most weeks. Football begets footballers, after all.
The actual process of development is, of course, massively more complicated than that, and depends on other factors both uncountable and perhaps even unknowable. On coaching staff, on psychology, on personal happiness ... the list goes on as long as you like. Nevertheless, the broad sense is that when all other things are equal, it’s better to play as much as possible is accepted throughout the world of footballing opinion. If nothing else, it has a strong intuitive appeal.
But at the heart of the Sterling situation — it’s not a saga yet, though give it a month or two — is an odd inversion of the way this argument traditionally runs. Looking at his season, it’s impossible not to wonder if, perhaps, he’s played too much football. Or, more precisely, if he’s played too much of the wrong sort of football.
So far, Sterling's played 59 games for club and country, and he'll probably make a round 60 on Sunday. But in those games he's had to reconcile the massively pressured and fundamentally contradictory jobs of covering multiple positions and spearheading the attack. On the one hand, he's popped up at No.10, at right wingback, wide on the flanks, and up front as a lone striker, as his manager has switched tactical plans with abandon. On the other, the extremely patchy nature of Liverpool's attacking signings mean he's had to shoulder much of the work of both the permacrocked Daniel Sturridge and the dearly departed Luis Suárez.
And over that season, over all that football in all those positions with all that responsibility, he’s regressed. Clearly the departure of Suárez and disintegration of Sturridge has played a huge part, along with the inadequacy of their replacements: it’s easier to play brilliant football next to brilliant footballers. But the end of the season has seen a clatter of missed chances that the same player, last season, would have tucked away with his hand over his face. Perhaps it’s a confidence issue; perhaps his wanderlust is taking his mind off things.
Either way, Sterling is entitled to look at the season he's had and think, "well, that didn't do me much good." And he's perfectly entitled to look at the next one, look at the transfer rumours, look at the squad around him and think 'what are the odds that this one will?' That's before he starts thinking about the speed and peculiar glee with which sections of the Liverpool support, even some within Anfield, have turned on him.
For Liverpool to be able to justifiably claim to be the best place for Sterling to develop, they have to be able to show it. Brendan Rodgers seems to have the knack of improving players, but there's more in play here: they have to be able to surround him with colleagues good enough to match and stretch him and they have to be able to find his best position, then play him there. They have to be able to recognise that he's still 20 years old, and as such he can't be an auxiliary wingback and an effective winger and an explosive No.10 and a line-leading frontman and the most dangerous player on the pitch. No wonder he was too tired to play for England by October.
Because if they can’t, then there’s a third path between playing every game for Liverpool and hardly playing at all for somebody else. If another club can offer to surround him with better players and assure him that he won’t be asked to play square peg in whatever round holes his manager has dreamed up this week, might that not be worth giving up the security (but also the burden, mental and physical) of a guaranteed place in the team? After all, he’s 20. The point of the game at the moment is to make sure that he’s a better player at 21. Six games a season might not do that, but nor, on the evidence of this season, will 60.
Sterling’s agent has since rowed back a touch on Monday morning’s stories, and given that there are two years left on his contract, Liverpool can afford to be obdurate. If they’re top by Christmas, and Sterling’s scored 15 goals playing behind a striker who’s scored 20, then this will all be forgotten in a flurry of new contracts and photographs. For now, this just heaps yet more pressure on an already groaning summer.
Liverpool can promise him games, but they have to be able to demonstrate that those will be the best games, and that he’ll playing them for the right reasons. Not just that he has to play every week because there isn’t anybody better.
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