What Happens if Raheem Sterling Never Leaves Liverpool?
Do City win as many titles? Does Mohamed Salah ever arrive at Anfield? Does Jurgen Klopp?
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Another donation request today, and this one is a combo. Alex asked for a piece about Raheem Sterling, while Josh asked me to write about what would’ve happened if Raheem Sterling never left Liverpool. Alex and Josh, consider your assignments fulfilled.
Five years to tomorrow, Manchester City signed Raheem Sterling from Liverpool for a fee that has since risen to £57.33 million, according to Transfermarkt. While the move was hard to swallow for Liverpool fans -- selling your star 20-year-old to the team that barely beat you to the title just a year prior -- it represented a new reality. Liverpool had been surpassed by the new money at Chelsea and Manchester City, and the dominant teams of the early aughts, Manchester United and Arsenal, were still humming along at a much higher revenue clip thanks to a pair of massive stadiums, commercial cash, and constant continental-competition qualification. The Reds were the fifth-richest team in England, and they lost a star to the second-richest team in England. Despite Liverpool’s historical might, this same thing happens in every other league in Europe all the time.
What happened next, well, that part was not supposed to happen. Sterling quickly became a superstar at Manchester City. He’s the best English soccer player in the world, and he’s been an ever-present attacking force for the team that produced the two highest point totals in Premier League history. And yet despite losing a player of Sterling’s caliber for what today looks like a relatively small sum, Liverpool have still managed to build a team capable of not only challenging Sterling’s City, but ultimately beating them.
It’s the ultimate win-win transfer: Sterling got to leave, got paid, and got plenty of trophies, while Liverpool gradually revamped the team and rose up to a similar level. But what would’ve happened if he never left?
First, though, let’s look at what actually happened.
At the time of the transfer, the story was that Sterling wanted a raise, and Liverpool didn’t want to give him what he wanted. Since he was only 20 and was still on his first pro contract, Sterling was reportedly making £35,000 a week. He asked for £150,000, but LFC wouldn’t budge beyond £100,000. With Sterling’s contract up at the end of the season, Liverpool decided to sell, City eventually met their asking price, and Sterling signed a deal worth £200,000 a week. For reference, according to the site Spotrac, Sterling is currently on a £300,000 a week deal, and Mohamed Salah, Virgil van Dijk, and Roberto Firmino are the only Liverpool players currently making what Sterling asked for five years ago. All in all, this is the takeaway: Sterling asked to be paid market value, Liverpool could have afforded to pay him, they decided not to, and now Sterling plays for Manchester City.
At City, he’s become one of the best players in the world. Among players classified as wide players by Stats Perform with at least 5,000 minutes of game time since the start of the 2017-18 season, Sterling is tied for fourth with Bayern Munich’s Serge Gnabry in non-penalty goals plus assists per 90 minutes (0.84). He’s only behind PSG’s Angel Di Maria (0.85), Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah (0.91), and Borussia Dortmund’s Jadon Sancho (1.06).
Simply put, Sterling has become an absolutely world-class goal-scoring wide attacker. Only Salah has averaged more expected goals per 90 minutes over that stretch. Sterling is also 11th in expected assists, and none of the guys above him come close to his shooting numbers.
Here’s how his production has progressed since his first full season at Liverpool:
The obvious: He exploded in Pep Guardiola’s second season with City. He turned 23 that December, so it’s roughly right around where you might expect a player to make the leap. What’s also interesting, though, is that his performance remained roughly the same in the first two years after he left Liverpool, one of which was under Pep. That’s especially weird because he frequently played as a de facto center forward in 2014-15, but never reprised that role at the Etihad. You’d think that might shape his production; it didn’t. Anyway, I’ve been told that in his contract negotiations with Liverpool, Sterling’s representatives pushed for him to be valued more as an attacker than a traditional wide player. They were absolutely right.
While his dribbling ability may have been his standout quality while he was at Liverpool, the frequency of take-ons has declined since he arrived at the Etihad. He peaked at 3.73 successful dribbles per 90 in 2013-14, and this year he's down at a career low 1.94. However, the efficiency of his touches have gone through the roof. The number of touches in the box have went up and up and up:
Good things happen when you get on the ball in the box. First off, it’s simply just closer to the goal -- easier to score, more likely for a deflection to lead to a goal in one way or another. On top of that, defenders have to defend differently; they can’t be as aggressive, lest they give up a penalty. And if you do draw a penalty, you’re essentially creating the highest value chance possible for your team. Sterling is a genius at receiving the ball into the box, but one of his signature moves is that kind of choppy, straight-up, slow dribble that forces the defender backward until all of sudden they’re both in the penalty area and the situation has totally changed. Since 2017, Sterling has taken more touches in the box per 90 minutes than any other wide player. In fact, among all players, only Kylian Mbappe has been more present in the penalty area.
According to Transfermarkt, Mbappe is the most valuable player in the world. Sterling, meanwhile, is no. 2.
It seems absurd to say it, but the question of “What If?” is a lot less interesting from the City perspective. Where would they be without the second-most valuable player in the world and one of the handful of presumptive Ballon d’Or favorites for whenever Lionel Messi finally realizes he’s deep into his 30’s? Probably right around the same spot.
We’ve already been given a case-study in City’s dependence on attacking players. Kevin De Bruyne, who is -- for my money -- the best player in the Premier League right now, played 975 minutes last season. He’s arguably harder to replace than Sterling, too. While it’s tough to find someone who’s as adept on both the left and right wings as Sterling, it’s not hard for a team as wealthy as City to field separate, worthy replacements on both sides of the field. KDB, though, plays a tougher-to-fill midfielder-as-attacker slot. However, without a guy who had eight goals and 16 assists the year before and 11 goals and 19 assists (and counting) the year after, City still won the second-most points in Premier League history and did it with slightly better underlying numbers than the team that hit 100.
If they faded a KDB injury, I think they could’ve faded the nonexistence of Sterling. While City’s recruitment behind the attack has been spotty recently, they’ve nailed most of their attacking signings over the past few years. Maybe it’s because these players are a little easier to evaluate. You, uh, typically want attackers who are creating a lot of great shots for their teammates and getting on the end of them for themselves; you can find that data pretty quickly. Whatever the reason, City haven’t had an attacker flop since Sterling arrived. They nabbed him and KDB the same summer, which, woof. Then it was Leroy Sane and Gabriel Jesus the next year, followed by Bernardo Silva the next year, and Riyad Mahrez a season after that. If City don’t sign Sterling, then it seems like they still sign someone within this general quality-tier of player and he gets coached up by Guardiola into something better than when he arrived. Who knows, maybe if Sterling never leaves Liverpool then Salah ends up at City.
Speaking of! While their styles aren’t the same, Salah and Sterling do roughly the same thing: a ton of great shots, a healthy diet of chances created for teammates, and a crazy amount of possession in the penalty area. Second on that list of most touches in the box among wide players -- and third among all players -- is Salah, at 9.14. He, Sterling, and Mbappe are the only players in the Big Five leagues to average more than nine. It’s actually kind of eerie how similarly Salah and Sterling rate out in the model used as the site Smarterscout. All numbers are out of 100 and compared to players at the listed positions:
Sterling is a little more involved in settled possession and takes defenders on more frequently, while Salah helps progress the ball up the field and shoots more frequently. But otherwise their offensive and defensive values this year are pretty similar, their ability in 1v1’s don’t look much different, and their finishing prowess is almost exactly the same.
So, does Salah end up on Liverpool if Raheem Sterling is already there? And does he even need to? Given how Sterling’s performance didn’t truly take off until 2017-18, I don’t think his presence on Liverpool materially changes how the team performs in 2015-16. I had this quarter-baked theory that maybe Liverpool never hire Jurgen Klopp if Raheem Sterling stays because then they never get rid of Brendan Rodgers, but that didn’t stand up to even the tiniest bit of scrutiny.
However, Sterling’s presence may change how the team approaches the transfer market in the summer of 2015. They signed both Christian Benteke and Roberto Firmino that offseason. The story goes that Benteke was a Rodgers buy, while Firmino came from Michael Edwards and the front-office. It seems unlikely that they sign both of them if Sterling stays, and if they only move for one, then is it Rodgers’s guy or the more data-based target of Firmino?
If they move for Firmino, then maybe Salah never comes. With Firmino and Sterling, then they already have two pieces of the front three. The next summer, they buy Sadio Mane, and they’re set with a Sterling-Mane-Firmino front three. Given that Coutinho would also be on the team in this fictional world, then it seems unlikely that they’d also buy Salah in the summer of 2017. Again, I don’t think that necessarily accelerates the team’s timeline, either, as Sterling didn’t explode until 17-18, which was Salah’s star turn as well.
If Rodgers gets his way and the move is Benteke rather than Firmino, then maybe it plays out like this: They never double-back to acquire Firmino even after Klopp is hired. Instead, Klopp turns Sterling into the center forward/false nine that Rodgers experimented with while Mane slides in on the right wing. Then, the next summer they sign Salah and either he becomes the central striker, like they’ve successfully experimented with in the past, or Sterling plays there, or there’s a more fluid positional delineation among the three.
Of course, it’s impossible to say if Liverpool or Manchester City would’ve been as successful -- or even more successful -- in these alternate worlds. A butterfly flaps its wings and etc. But it does seem like both teams would at least still be approximately as good as they are now. How well have these two clubs performed over the past few years? Somehow, City wouldn’t necessarily be worse off without the second-most valuable player in the world, while Liverpool wouldn’t necessarily be any better.