When you think of the defining Pep Guardiola players, it obviously starts with Lionel Messi.
In four years together with Barcelona, they won three LaLiga titles and two Champions League trophies. Messi was the individual genius who took Guardiola’s ultra-organized collective to never-before-seen heights. During their time together, there was no question over who was the best player in the world. While they slipped up in LaLiga once and in Europe twice, Messi won the Ballon d’Or in each of the four years he worked with Guardiola.
Who would be next, though? There’s Sergio Busquets, a Guardiola-esque avatar at the base of midfield for those great Barca sides. Maybe Xavi or Andres Iniesta, but they both existed in outsized form before and after Guardiola arrived. At Bayern, same goes for the likes of Philipp Lahm, Arjen Robben and Franck Ribery, who all hit new levels under their new manager but also won the Champions League the year before he came to Germany. Manuel Neuer, perhaps, was the most symbolic Guardiola figure at Bayern, a goalkeeper known and beloved for all of the things other than saving shots.
However, Guardiola has now coached Manchester City for longer than he has either of those clubs, which brings us to this: after Messi, Raheem Sterling has been involved in more goals in all competitions (scored and assisted) under Guardiola than any other player. And that number will remain stuck at 186 for the foreseeable future, as City are set to let Sterling move to Chelsea for a £47.5 million transfer fee any day now.
Yet, Sterling as a defining Guardiola player doesn’t feel right, does it? After all, if it were true, would City be willing to let him leave? Still, nothing about Sterling’s career really feels right because we’d never really seen anything like him before.
Leaving Liverpool
The first thing that Sterling did that he wasn’t supposed to: demand that he be paid, age be damned.
Sterling became a full-time starter for Liverpool at the age of 17 and then turned into a full-on star in 2013-14. Frequently deployed in the No. 10 role — behind Luis Suarez and Daniel Sturridge, ahead of Philippe Coutinho, Jordan Henderson and Steven Gerrard — Sterling scored nine goals and added five assists in the Premier League as Liverpool finished second and nearly won the whole thing.
The following year, after Suarez left for Barcelona, Sturridge went down injured, and new arrivals Mario Balotelli and Rickie Lambert just didn’t cut it, Sterling almost single-handedly salvaged Liverpool’s season when Brendan Rodgers decided to play him as a standalone striker. A late-season surge toward the top four fell short, but he ended the year with the same number of goal involvements as the previous one (seven goals, seven assists).
He wasn’t yet 20, and Sterling was already both a consistent goal provider and a tactical Swiss Army knife. He played as a No. 10, as a striker, as a false No. 9, out on the wing, and even as a wing-back. Counting only minutes played as a teenager since 2009, Sterling leads all Premier League players in the following:
– Goal contributions: 25
– Take-ons: 186 (97 more than second place)
– Passes into the penalty area: 351 (57 more than second place)
– Touches in the penalty area: 293 (60 more than second place)
Players who are that good at that age tend to become great. And Sterling knew it. Rather than looking himself into a contract based purely off his current on-field value, he and his advisers decided that he wanted to be paid what he would likely soon be worth in the future. Within the traditions of club wage structures back in 2015, this just wasn’t done. Young players were paid less than veterans because, well, because that’s how it had always been done.
Negotiations with Liverpool broke down and Sterling moved to Manchester City for £49 million (making him the most expensive British transfer of all time) in the summer of 2015, just a few months before Jurgen Klopp arrived at Anfield.
A new archetype
The second thing that Sterling did that he wasn’t supposed to do: become a goal-scoring winger who couldn’t shoot.
Since joining Manchester City in 2015, he has scored 88 non-penalty goals in the Premier League. The only players with more:
– Harry Kane: 133
– Jamie Vardy: 102
– Sadio Mane: 101
– Mohamed Salah: 100
– Son Heung-Min: 92
– Sergio Aguero: 89
He has also assisted 42 goals. The only players with more:
– Kevin De Bruyne: 85
– Christian Eriksen: 56
– Riyad Mahrez: 48
– David Silva: 47
– Andy Robertson: 47
– Son Heung-Min: 46
– Mohamed Salah: 46
– Trent Alexander-Arnold: 46
– Roberto Firmino: 46
All in all, it adds up to 130 non-penalty goal involvements, behind only:
– Harry Kane: 172
– Mohamed Salah: 146
– Kevin De Bruyne: 138
– Son Heung-Min: 138
– Sadio Mane: 136
– Jamie Vardy: 134
Since Sterling joined City, he has been one of the most prolific players in the Premier League — all while the club reestablished itself as the dominant side in England, winning the title in four of his eight seasons with the club. He has also added 24 non-penalty goals and 17 assists in 68 Champions League matches. Over the past five years, City have been the most consistent club in the world, and with Sterling playing some 70% of the minutes, he has been a massive part of making that happen.
But even though that’s true, it’s not necessarily obvious. Picture the prototypical goal-scoring winger in your head, and it’s someone like Robben or Ribery — impossible to ignore, piecing together highlight goal after highlight goal as they cut in from the sideline, turn defenders into traffic cones, and rocket the ball in at the far post.
Sterling, though, has rarely done that. Take a look at all of his goals for City in the league:
Despite playing most of his minutes on either the left or right wing, almost all of his goals have come from within the center of the goal frame, and almost none of them from that classic inverted-winger hotspot on the edge of the penalty area. In fact, since Guardiola took over at City in 2016, Sterling has scored 27 goals from inside the 6-yard box, five more than any other player. Remember: This is a winger we’re talking about.
Thanks to that distribution of shots, Sterling has developed a reputation as a bad finisher, but I’d argue that’s only because we haven’t seen many players like him before: non-strikers who get all their goals from high-value areas. Since he’s rarely taking low probability shots, he’s rarely finishing the kinds of low-probability shots we tend to associate with good finishing.
Instead, he’s constantly getting on the end of, say, 60% chances, which don’t look impressive when you score them and look pretty bad when you miss. And you’re going to miss a lot of 60% chances when you get a lot of 60% chances. That’s not to say that Sterling is a particularly good finisher — the six goal-scorers ahead of him have all scored at least 10 more goals than their expected goals (xG) totals — but he’s not a particularly bad one, either, with 88 goals from 83.46 xG since joining City.
So why let him go?
The third thing that Sterling wasn’t supposed to do: become a devastating attacking winger who didn’t need to touch the ball.
With Liverpool, Sterling would dribble by defenders left and right, breaking through the opposition midfield to unlock the next phase of build-up play or find a way to fly past a full-back and create a goal. He was everywhere, an ever-present blur, moving at a faster frame-rate than everyone else on the field.
At City, he has dribbled the ball way less often and been way less involved in working the ball up the field. His shot profile suggests an elite understanding of how to occupy valuable space — and that’s true of the rest of his game, too.
Per the site FBref, Sterling rates in the 95th percentile for wingers in the Big Five leagues for progressive passes received per 90 minutes. Rather than moving the ball up the field himself, he’s now finding the space further up the field so a teammate can move the ball up to him. And then he rates in the 98th percentile among all wingers for touches inside the penalty area. He still carries the ball and takes defenders on — 79th percentile and 80th percentile respectively — but they’re smaller, not-as-breathtaking movements. He either receives a forward pass in the final third and then drives it into the box on his own, or finds premium space inside the box to become a passing option.
Since 2015, Sterling has taken 1,681 touches in the opposition penalty area. The only players with more? Just kidding, there aren’t any …
As these radars from the tracking data collected by Twelve show, Sterling does plenty of damage once he gets the ball, but particularly without it.
Target runs are runs in which you receive a pass, disruptive and space-creation runs are runs in which a pass is played elsewhere, and potential runs are runs when the pass isn’t completed — all adjusted for the potential value of the run based on a number of factors including field and defender positioning. This past season, Sterling ranked in the 80th percentile or above (mostly above) among players at his position for almost every kind of run tracked by Twelve.
What makes Sterling a harder player to appreciate is also what makes him such a valuable player to people who are in the business of winning games: he doesn’t need the ball. On top of that, his ability off the ball should create space for everyone else. While Chelsea had a hard time fitting striker Romelu Lukaku into their already-established mode of play, that shouldn’t be an issue with Sterling. His skills today mean that he can fit with just about anyone. Every top team needs an attacking outlet and a guy who can navigate the penalty area.
Why would City let him go? It’s not like he hasn’t been tempted by a move before. Remember when in February 2020 he appeared on the cover of Spanish newspaper Diario AS with a Real Madrid jersey draped over his shoulder … right before City were about to play Real Madrid?
Plus, City did just sign Erling Haaland, another mostly off-ball player who, if everything goes according to plan, will lead the Premier League in goals scored inside the 6-yard box over the next five years. On top of that, they got seven great years from Sterling and are getting a large fee in return for a player who turns 28 in December.
Since 2009, Sterling has played the most Premier League minutes of any player before his 28th birthday (24,173). Maybe the age cliff will come for him sooner than others, or maybe not; second on the list of outfield players is Liverpool’s Henderson, who’s still going strong at an elite level at 32, while third is ex-Stoke defender Ryan Shawcross, whose career basically ended at 30 due to injury.
Although Chelsea already do seem to have enough attackers and really could use reinforcements in the midfield and in defence before adding another goal-scoring winger, they’re instead banking on one of the simple rules that has defined the past decade of the Premier League: add Sterling to your team, and your team will immediately get better.
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