Sterling swapping treble-chasing Man City for Chelsea must rank among worst decisions ever

Dave Tickner 19 Aug 2024 3:19 PM

It’s not entirely his fault. In fact it’s very possibly not even mainly his fault. But Raheem Sterling’s move from Manchester City to Chelsea must now be considered among the worst footballing decisions made by a player in the modern era.

There’s not really a compelling body of evidence to suggest Sterling really needed to leave City at all.

Sure, he was likely to feature slightly less prominently but he wasn’t exactly a cast-off. He’d still played 30 Premier League games in his final City season, representing a sixth consecutive season in which he’d played more than 2000 minutes of Premier League football – more than he’s managed in either of his Chelsea campaigns.

He couldn’t have known City would go and win the treble in their first season without him, but the idea that they might go very close in all competitions wasn’t a fanciful one. There was always likely to be plenty of football to go around.

And the horrendous timing of leaving City at the worst possible moment, leaving just before the Champions League glory that had been the club’s open ambition for so long, was compounded by joining Chelsea at the worst possible moment.

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Again, Sterling can’t be expected to have predicted the club becoming quite such a basket-case, but their current trajectory wasn’t entirely unforeseeable either.

His first Chelsea season saw his Premier League goal and assist numbers essentially halve before he emerged as a legitimate source of comfort for fans during last season’s traumatic moments.

But still he produced numbers way below his City pomp and worst of all wasn’t even getting greater prominence than he was granted in a far better and more successful City side.

Chelsea’s struggles more than his own were perhaps responsible for Sterling losing his England place, but it’s still something that happened with both remarkable speed and relatively little fuss given we’re talking about an 80-cap Gareth Southgate favourite who went from integral squad member to outsider overnight.

Again and again the Chelsea move falls down even on the most basic of targets. Sterling must surely have accepted that swapping City for Chelsea was going to reduce the amount of silverware he’d go on to claim, but he cannot possibly have foreseen playing less and losing his England spot as a result.

The wrong move at the worst possible time for both the club he left and the one he joined.

And now here he is, the latest man outside the tent p*ssing in at the world’s least serious football club. His frustration is pretty understandable, not least because he had played a full part in pre-season with no specific indication he was about to join the ranks of persona non grata.

We say ‘specific indication’ because obviously this is Clearlake Chelsea and no player is entirely safe from finding themselves a sadly unavoidable sacrifice to the gods of endless player churn, eight-year contracts and amortisation. Those are some vengeful and dare we say it quite needy gods, and they require near-constant sating.

He was pretty high on our list of potential Chelsea banishments last week, but we certainly didn’t expect it to happen quite this fast if at all.

There was an interesting tweet from Fabrizio Romano on Monday morning claiming that the board at Chelsea have backed Enzo Maresca’s decision to leave Sterling out in the cold and support the manager 100 per cent.

Interesting because the most obvious conclusion to draw from the relevant known facts is that this is all arse backwards, isn’t it?

Is it really more likely that Maresca, ahead of his first game as a top-flight manager, decided to ostracise and make available for sale an experienced and highly decorated Premier League star having leant on him significantly during pre-season than word came down from on high? Word that an inexperienced manager felt unable to resist.

We can all speculate as to the reasons why Chelsea found themselves in need of another new manager this season after the distinctly less malleable and more assertive Mauricio Pochettino engineered a really quite startlingly good end to the last campaign.

But whatever the reasons for any of it, we land unavoidably in a place where it doesn’t look good for anyone. If Maresca is being steered a certain why by non-football people at the club, then that’s bad for everyone for reasons that barely need explaining.

It’s not really any better, though, if Maresca has indeed made this fairly dramatic and apparently irreversible decision himself after including the player throughout pre-season. That reflects poorly on the manager and those who hired him.

So, yeah. Chelsea are a mess. This much we know.

But now chewed up and spat out by it is a player who has missed out on the most glorious moment in the history of a club he gave so much, lost his England place and now sits uncomfortably at a career crossroads he didn’t see coming. And he’s still only 29.

Chelsea, frankly, must be stopped. They’re a danger to themselves and others.

F365 Says Raheem Sterling

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