DON’T LOOK BACK IN ANGER
“Oh my gosh!”
FourFourTwo are deep within Manchester City’s incredible Etihad Campus training facility, and an eight-year-old’s jaw has just dropped.
This early autumn evening, we are inside a vast indoor hall, and on one side of a dividing curtain, a training session for one of the club’s junior squads is taking place. On the other side of the curtain, Raheem Sterling is posing for a photo shoot with FFT.
The youngsters are oblivious that Sterling is just yards away – that is, until a stray football finds its way around the curtain. A kid arrives to retrieve it, and suddenly he finds himself staring straight at an England superstar. Not only does his jaw hit the floor, he nearly faints with excitement. ‘Oh my gosh’ indeed.
Mysteriously, a number of stray footballs then start to arrive in the next few minutes. Every time the ball somehow finds its way around the curtain – completely accidentally, of course – another child appears to catch a glimpse of their hero. The man himself just smiles modestly. Adoration hasn’t always come Sterling’s way, but things have started to change over the past year or two.
Sterling has been helping to write history at Manchester City, bagging an unprecedented domestic treble last season, and we asked him to don a couple of historic kits today: a classic 1989 home strip, and the famous fluorescent shirt that Paul Dickov & Co. wore in the 1999 play-off final, when City overcame Tony Pulis’ Gillingham at the old Wembley to claw their way out of the third tier.
FFT last met Sterling three years ago. Back then, he was noticeably quiet at first, before gradually becoming more comfortable and talkative as time went on. Today’s interview is following a similar pattern. Sterling is 24 now, but there’s not a lot of small talk as he poses for photos. He’s being perfectly polite, but he is sussing us out. He has been burned so often by the media in the past that it’s completely understandable. Sterling needs to establish some trust, rather than open up immediately.
As we sit down to talk, he begins to relax. This, after all, is a man who has started to find his voice in recent times, both on and off the field. This is a man increasingly willing to stand up against injustice, while developing into one of the finest footballers on the planet.
FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF CRISTIANO RONALDO
It’s the latter point that we want to explore first, and much of it revolves around one thing: goals. For four seasons between 2013 and 2017, Sterling’s goalscoring for club and country flatlined: 10 goals, 12 goals, 12 goals, 10 goals. While it was a perfectly respectable set of returns for a player who has never been an out-and-out forward, those tallies didn’t do full justice to the talent he possessed.
Then came the 2017-18 season: 23 goals. And in the 2018-19 campaign: 31. When we meet in mid-September, he has eight goals from his first seven appearances of 2019-20. Has it been the best form of his career to date?
“Yeah, I’d say so,” Sterling tells , adding, “Especially because it’s not been for a month or two months
