Little sums up the state of modern football, and the manipulation of it by clubs like Chelsea, better than the fate of Raheem Sterling, a 30-year-old footballer with more than 80 caps for England put beyond use by a club that has no need of him.
Links to Fulham and Crystal Palace, which would have allowed him to stay in London, did not develop, leaving him to tread water in a Cobham silo on £300k a week.
Not bad if all you care about is online shopping and lowering your golf handicap, but an appalling waste of a front-rank player with gas in the tank.
Sterling’s salary, a legacy of the club’s transfer policy before the stockpiling of incentivised kids on much lower basics became a thing, is thought to be the highest at the club.
In August, therefore, he banked £1.2m whilst waiting for a club to bite. During the months of September, October, November and December he will add a further £5m to the vault before the process begins again in January.
Since he is training away from the main group in exile, let’s be generous and say Sterling devotes three hours a day to maintain condition. There would seem little point at this juncture in his coming back in the afternoons.
Without any match involvements that adds up to 15 hours a week, or a £20k hourly rate. Except, for players like Sterling, earnings have long since stopped floating boats. He wants to play and, however deluded it sounds, talks of adding to his 82 England caps.
This is where the embrace of free market forces has left the beautiful game, peak talent dumped on the sidelines by big clubs who would rather see them rot that moved on at a loss. It is the football equivalent of food surplus destruction, farms ploughing crops, pouring unsold milk into manure pits and burying vegetables.
Though enriched by the process, Sterling is also a victim of the commodification of the game, players traded by owners eyeing a profit. The clue is in the Chelsea ownership model: private equity firm Clearlake Capital the majority shareholder of BlueCo, the investment vehicle that controls the club.
Other members of the ownership group include Todd Boehly and Mark Walter, co-owners of the American baseball “franchise” Los Angeles Dodgers, and Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss, none of whom could distinguish The Shed from a shed when they bought the club from Roman Abramovich.
It is hard to feel sorry for multi-millionaire footballers effectively on paid leave, nevertheless, it is fair to acknowledge the appalling waste when clubs at the other end of the food chain are struggling to survive.
Sterling had already had two careers before he landed at Stamford Bridge three years ago. He spent five years at Liverpool. In seven years at Manchester City, who paid a record £44m fee, he won four Premier League titles and the domestic treble in 2019.
During this period he was arguably England’s most important player, helping steer the national team to the World Cup semi-finals in 2018 and three years later to their first major final in more than half a century at the Euros at Wembley. He scored the only goals in group wins against Croatia and the Czech Republic, and the opener in a 2-0 win against Germany in the last 16.
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The move to Chelsea coincided with a period of management upheaval, Thomas Tuchel giving way to Graham Potter, to Frank Lampard and to Mauricio Pochettino.
Sterling’s form suffered in the chaos to such a degree that Enzo Maresca deemed him surplus when he took over last season. The loan to Arsenal proved unproductive, the minutes he imagined never materialised.
At £300k a week, Sterling became a gamble London’s lesser beasts were not prepared to take.
So a player who once hammered 30 goals in a season at City and cracked 20 goals for England – more than Marcus Rashford, Roger Hunt or David Beckham – is left playing virtual football with his mates on Fifa instead of the real thing.
from Football - The i Paper https://ift.tt/XCaTtiY
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