Raheem Sterling…fight or flight?

To get an idea of how Raheem Sterling might be feeling right now, consider that this player has felt under attack from the moment his place at Manchester City was in jeopardy.

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

Sterling's time at City was never the same. Much to his shock, he asked to move to Barcelona on loan that same year and, although he was back in Guardiola's good graces for a while the following season, relations never recovered. Unwilling to sign a new contract in Manchester, Sterling preferred to seek a new challenge elsewhere.

He admitted as much when he joined Chelsea in July 2022 for £47.5 million ($61.5 million at current rates). He left City, he said, because he felt he was being “treated in a certain way” which made him “pissed off, angry and so on”. But he told reporters it was a “blessing in disguise” because Chelsea had been “a challenge that I will look back on (…) and say, 'Yes, I have risen to the challenge again.'”

The problem, two years later, is that Sterling has not performed as well as he should have at Chelsea. Instead, he has become a symbol – one of many, it must be said – of the club's checkered, confusing recruitment record under the joint ownership of Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital.

When Chelsea started their Premier League season at home to City yesterday (Sunday), Sterling was missing from the 20-man squad. New head coach Enzo Maresca said afterwards that he had hoped to keep the 29-year-old, but due to the oversupply of players, “some will have to go”.

Few people would object to Chelsea wanting to offload Sterling. The high output he achieved between 2017-18 and 2019-20 (55 Premier League goals and 21 assists in 100 appearances) dropped off significantly in his final two seasons at City. In a Chelsea shirt, he scored 14 goals and provided seven assists in 59 Premier League games.

Sterling against Inter Milan during pre-season training (James Gill/Danehouse/Getty Images)

While that's still a bit better than Mykhailo Mudryk's record for Chelsea (five goals and four assists in 46 Premier League games), the Ukrainian winger is a) six years younger and b) synonymous with the club's current recruitment strategy rather than the ill-fated first transfer window under this ownership. Back then, manager Thomas Tuchel was in charge and Boehly, as interim sporting director, was so desperate to show the football world the colour of Chelsea's new money.

Two years, countless signings and four coaching changes later, it says so much about Chelsea in the Boehly/Clearlake era that the club's biggest immediate need is to tighten up its terribly bloated roster before the transfer window closes on August 30.

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But getting rid of unwanted players is easier said than done.

Chelsea have been trying to find a buyer for their £97.5million record signing Romelu Lukaku since the start of the summer – since summer 2022, in fact – but there is still a lot of work to be done and financial concessions to be made. The same goes for Trevoh Chalobah, Conor Gallagher, Armando Broja and several others whose status was clarified weeks ago, as well as Ben Chilwell, who did not play in Chelsea's last three pre-season games, not to mention the City game.

Sterling is a different case. He has played in all of Chelsea's friendlies and was described by Maresca as “one of our most important players” during the recent pre-season tour of the USA. As recently as Saturday, a recorded interview with Sterling was published on Chelsea's official website. On Monday, less than 24 hours after he was unused for the City game, one of the club's commercial partners launched a campaign featuring Sterling alongside Enzo Fernandez and women's team captain Millie Bright.

The reality may be a little more nuanced – the club might not be averse to a sale depending on how the other arrivals and departures go and whether he made a good impression on Maresca in pre-season. However, Sterling had reason to believe a start against City was possible until the manager had clarified the situation after training on Friday.

Much of Sunday's episode centred on the statement from Sterling's PR team, which was, however, simply a response to media queries about his non-participation in Matchday 20. An unusual move, perhaps, but the tone was 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, to take a less historic example, from Manchester United winger Jadon Sancho taking to Instagram last season to accuse their manager Erik ten Hag of falsehoods and complaining he had been “a scapegoat for a long time”.

Sterling is said to have appreciated Maresca's honesty, but any clarity will be overshadowed by difficulties with the transfer window closing in a week and a half, his club looking to recoup some of their £47.5million outlay and the market potentially limited for a high-earning player who turns 30 in early December and, having lost form and favour at City, has never come anywhere close to replicating that form at Chelsea.

Sterling has always aroused scepticism in some circles: even when he was described as “the best young player in Europe” by Brendan Rodgers at Liverpool; even when he shone in City's winning team under Guardiola; even when he scored crucial goals on England's path 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, endured vicious abuse from the stands and became the face of football's anti-racism movement in England.

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Since becoming a regular for Liverpool shortly after his 17th birthday, he has also played a lot of football: 549 appearances at club level and a further 82 for England. That's a lot of miles under his belt. It looked like he was bound to make 100 international appearances, but he has not regained his starting place since the club's exit from the 2022 World Cup. He would not be the first early starter whose career has started to decline by his late twenties.

It is equally dangerous to judge a player – and that goes for Enzo Fernandez, Mudryk, Sterling and so many others – by his struggles in the recently dysfunctional environment at Chelsea. In just over two years at Stamford Bridge, Sterling has played for five different managers/head coaches and in different roles, in different systems and with a wide range of teammates. It is hardly surprising that, like so many others, he has struggled.

It is easy to imagine that a fresh start somewhere else could benefit him. It is less easy to imagine where this fresh start could take place.

None of the leading Premier League teams have an obvious gap in the attacking line that Sterling makes up and, apart from the seven or eight biggest clubs, it is hard to imagine any club that could afford him, unless Chelsea were subsidising a large part of his reported £300,000-a-week salary.

(Dan Mullan/Getty Images)

As the financial divide in European football has widened in recent years, it has become harder for clubs outside the elite to afford established talent. The up-and-coming teams in France, Germany, Italy and Spain place a high value on signing younger players rather than big names who are brushed aside by the richer teams. It is why Napoli, for example, seem to have the field to themselves in their attempt to sign Lukaku. It is why David de Gea, after leaving Manchester United, was without a club for a year before joining Fiorentina.

Juventus have been mentioned as a possible destination for Sterling, but his plan so far has been to stay at Chelsea. A change in status can force a player to re-evaluate everything in his life, but what if, having returned to his native London two years ago, he would rather stay to fight for his place? What if, rather than rushing out and accepting a move to any Italian, Turkish or Saudi Arabian club that might meet Chelsea's demands, he wants to force himself into Maresca's plans before Mudryk, Noni Madueke and others get in?

In some ways, it would be typical of Sterling to fight back, to push hard and to reclaim his place. Fight or flight? He has spent his life fighting his way to the top. He is known as a fighter.

All of this makes it a little surprising, looking back, that he chose to leave City two years ago. It would be natural to be frustrated after starting just 23 Premier League games in his final season in Manchester, but he still made more appearances in all competitions (47) than any other player in the squad except Joao Cancelo, Bernardo Silva and Ederson. He still scored 17 goals (13 in the Premier League) and played a key role in the final sprint for the title. Even though his relationship with Guardiola was strained, it did not seem irreparable. The City manager and club management still hoped he would extend his contract, which had just one year left to run in the summer of 2022.

Driven by a sense of injustice and a desire to prove Guardiola and City wrong, Sterling imagined himself taking a starring role in a Chelsea team that would challenge for Premier League and Champions League titles under Tuchel. He said at the time that it was a challenge he would look back on with satisfaction. That satisfaction seemed short-lived, however, as in September Tuchel was sacked and the troubles began.

Sterling's need for a new team and a fresh start is obvious and he hoped that Maresca's arrival would allow him to do just that.

If he had started right away in the preseason – as was his intention after the shortened summer break – it might have been successful.

Instead, the opening weekend of the new Premier League season brought denial, discord and a growing sense of uncertainty about what fight or flight means for him now, as his options dwindle in parallel with his returns to the pitch.