What The Sterling Transfer Says About The Premier League
By Ryan Wrenn
News broke this weekend that Liverpool had finally agreed to terms for the sale of Raheem Sterling to Manchester City to the tune of £49 million. It is a saga that says more about the current state of both clubs, and indeed the Premier League as a whole, than we can hope to find this summer.
The move comes after months of speculation about the young English forward. After refusing to sign a new contract with Liverpool in the spring, the club and the English press have been treated to all manner of histrionics about the seemingly inevitable transfer. Outspoken agents, missed training days, wild rumors about the eventual fee; it was a story that has all the hallmarks of a Premier League summer transfer window.
But why did it happen at all? Why did Liverpool agree to sell arguably their best youth academy product since Steven Gerrard?
The easy answer, of course, is that Sterling didn’t want to stay. He wanted Champions League football. He wanted glory that Liverpool, in its current state, could not provide him. He wanted – though he’d likely never admit this – the wages that a club like City could offer.
The most telling answer to those questions though can be found in the answer to another question: why on earth is Manchester City paying £49 million for Raheem Sterling?
It’s not that the young English winger-cum-forward is lacking in quality; he is at least promising of excellence if not yet actually in possession of it. It’s that such a fee makes Sterling the most expensive English player of all time, besting Liverpool’s Andy Carroll acquisition from 2011 by £14 million.
As it happens, Carroll provides a great illustration of the wider point here. He was admittedly wonderful for Newcastle, contributing 33 goals and 21 assists over his 90 appearances for the northeast club. Such a performance warrants a big club transfer, though the £35 million Liverpool paid for him even at the time seemed excessive at best, wasteful at worst. His status today as third-choice striker for West Ham shows you on which end of that spectrum he currently resides.
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Like Carroll, Sterling has turned in performances thus far that belie his youth. He often stood out in a team that featured both Daniel Sturridge and Luis Suarez, and was quickly proving himself to be among the more versatile and reliable players in Brendan Rodgers’ squad. Sterling’s most important similarity with Carroll, though, might be his nationality.
Manuel Pellegrini’s squad is bloated with talent. Due to the vagaries of the transfer market and England’s terrible recent record of producing quality players, it has become dominated by foreign players. Those players have featured in two Premier League title-winning campaigns, of course, but City has continually run the risk of not qualifying for the competition at all.
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Both the Premier League and UEFA have strict quotas for the amount of homegrown players a team must name in their squad in order to be eligible for the competitions. Each team must include in their overall squad – not necessarily their matchday squad – at least eight players who have played no less than three seasons in England before the age of 21. With the the departure of England internationals Frank Lampard and James Milner this summer, City are suddenly very short in homegrown talent.
This isn’t a new problem for City. In recent seasons they’ve have addressed this issue by bringing in a small handful of good-if-not-great English players that seem to be on the squad more for their homegrown status than what they actually contribute to the team. Thus these players have been confined to bit parts and eventually sold off, their prime playing years mostly wasted on City’s bench. The list of these players so far include Micah Richards, Scott Sinclair, Jack Rodwell, and would have featured Aston Villa’s Fabian Delph as well this weekend had City’s reputation not preceded them.
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