Raheem Sterling joined City the year before Pep Guardiola left Bayern Munich, in July 2015, for a record £50m – at that time the highest fee paid for an English player. After a lacklustre first season, he joined England for their disastrous 2016 Euro campaign which saw them knocked out by Iceland in the last 16.
A disappointing first year followed by a disastrous summer. Enter Pep. City’s football director, Txiki Begiristain, had signed Sterling specifically in anticipation of Pep taking over.
“He had a spark, a capacity to shake off markers. He’s explosive and above all he’s got that burst of pace which takes effective wide players to the goalline. Even then, it was also clear that he was a guy who loved to cut in, too.”
Begiristain’s football instincts were correct. Under the guidance of Pep and his team, Sterling has become a truly world-class player. In his first season under Manuel Pellegrini, Sterling managed only six league goals and by the second half of the campaign had lost his place as a regular starter.
“The huge transfer fee was actually pretty detrimental in terms of his self-confidence, which is so important for any player. As things didn’t come off for him you could almost see Raz fading away,” explains Mikel Arteta, who was still playing for Arsenal at the time. The following year, Arteta joined Pep and Domènec Torrent at City and he began to work closely with Sterling.
“We wanted him much closer to the penalty area. It was like he was a bit scared of the goal. We wanted him to become the kind of player who would get us a goal every game, or even just missing two or three big chances. We wanted him constantly generating goal threat. And we wanted him to lose the fear. He needed to believe in himself, to believe that he could be the best.”
The new regime had an almost immediate impact. Suddenly his head was up, he was running more than ever and, by Pep’s second season, had formed one of the most lethal attacking forces in the history of the Premier League with Leroy Sané and Sergio Agüero, between them scoring 67 of the team’s total of 140 goals.
First, however, the coaching team had to realign Sterling for his role on the right of Guardiola’s trident. Mikel Arteta: “He’d picked up a few bad habits along the way. He’d played on the inside a lot or out on the left wing. When you move to the right wing, the direction and angle of possession coming to you is very different. When the ball reached him he really had his gaze fixed on it – rather than half-touch instinctive control and the vision of what’s around him.”
Sterling was static when he got the ball. Guardiola’s solution was to try to turn him into City’s version of Romário, the coach’s old Barcelona teammate and a World Cup winner with Brazil in 1994.
Pep Guardiola: “In that Dream Team era, whenever I saw Romário with his back to the centre-halves I’d never give him the ball. But the instant I saw him on the half-turn with his shoulder dipping as if he wanted the ball fed into his right or left foot, I knew he thought he could explode away from his marker. In that instance I always hit the pass immediately. Every time. I’d learned that his vision meant he’d had one eye on the distance between him and the opposition goal and the other eye on where the ball was. If he opened up his body shape like that and I fed him the ball, the defender was automatically done for.”
The key to this strategy was Sterling’s acceleration. Guardiola’s analysis staff compare their forward’s explosive first steps to those of Leo Messi. While the Barcelona player doesn’t possess a sprinter’s speed over distance, his acceleration – combined with an intuitive sense of when to make his move – leaves defenders in his wake. Thus began the Romário-fication of Raheem.
The plan was that Sterling should make a habit of dropping slightly further away from his marker, or nearest opponent, when looking to receive possession, his body turned towards the goal. In that position, if he then gunned his extraordinary accelerator, the sprint was always to the danger area. Arteta: “If he’s found a space about three metres off his defender but he’s half-turned towards the goal then his sprint takes him much more quickly to a space where he can shoot and that’s going to cause the rival much more damage. It’s also a tactic, dropping off a little, so that your defender gets drawn into a position he mightn’t want to be in. It leaves space behind him and Raheem can attack that space. If it’s close to, or in the penalty area, they also have to hesitate before putting in a challenge.”
Arteta is drawing on facts with his assessment. For example, in the 1-0 Champions League victory over Feyenoord in November 2017, Sterling pulled all of this together. He dropped off at the edge of the box, drawing his defender, Renato Tapia, with him and, with his back to goal, shunted a quick pass backwards to Gundogan. The instant he released the ball, he swivelled and burst into one of his 0-60 sprints, into the space where Tapia had been. Gundogan read the move, slid the one-two pass into that space. One-v-one with the keeper, Sterling lofted it over Brad Jones for City’s winning goal.
Sterling played increasingly on the left wing in season 2018-19, although Guardiola continued to move him around a lot. His partnership with Bernardo Silva went from strength to strength, meaning that Sané figured much less in the starting XI. The PFA Young Player of the Year won by Sané in 2018 went to Sterling in 2019, after he finished the season with a personal best of 25 goals and 18 assists from 51 games. By November 2018 City had seen enough to extend Sterling’s contract through season 2022-23.
Yet Guardiola continues to see room for improvement. Take the coach’s critique of him after the home game against Watford on 9 March 2019, in which he had scored a hat-trick by the 64th minute. “Sterling could do better. He didn’t follow his full-back two times. He lost two, three or four balls which he has to avoid because he conceded counterattacks. Of course, I am so glad in terms of what he has done, scoring three goals. The first half was not the best Raheem has done this season and we will work on that.”
Pep’s City: The Making of a Superteam is out on October 24, in paperback and ebook