At 9.13 on a glorious May morning, by the side of the A327, sitting in the passenger seat of a wrecked Lamborghini, feverishly stashing canisters of nitrous oxide into the back, having to recite one’s name from scratch. A police officer asks him who was driving the car at the time it smashed into a metal pole on a country road in Hampshire. There’s nobody sitting in the driver’s seat.
As it transpired in court in Basingstoke this week, Sterling had been up driving all night by the time police started getting calls from members of the public concerned that someone was bobbing and weaving up the M3 in an unpredictable, uncontrollable manner. And of course there is an acrid and tasteless irony in the fact that this was exactly what Sterling was known for on the pitch: weaving in and out of traffic, no order or reason to it, following a logic that existed only in his own head. We can, and we should, and the district judge did, take an extremely dim view of the serious and life-threatening crime to which Sterling has admitted.
We can also acknowledge that football is the one and only reason any of this remotely registered on our radar. You are not angry at the other dangerous drivers, whose names you do not know and will never look up. You are angry at this one in particular, a £50m footballer four years ago, now facing the possibility of prison and a sporting career that may just have come to a hard stop at the age of 31.
Yep: younger than Kepa Arrizabalaga, younger than Solly March, younger than Ariana Grande. And let’s be real, the end of Sterling as a going concern really happened much earlier, about the time his Arsenal loan deal ended and Enzo Maresca made clear he had no further use for him at Chelsea and he was made to train on his own after 8pm despite having young children, and Maresca said this was no big deal, because people in the fishing industry also work hard hours. In a way, Sterling became a victim of the cycle he helped to catalyse.
At the age of 15, he became one of the first big-money academy transfers when he moved from Queens Park Rangers to Liverpool for a fee of up to £2m. More than a decade on, the increasing emphasis on one‑on‑one duels, on straight-line speed and dynamic dribbling, on unpredictable and unmapped movement, has generated a kind of fetish for unscarred teenage footballers, a self-perpetuating market in child labour that nobody has ever really begun to question, much less challenge. The Premier League’s centre of gravity has been shifting younger for years, to the point where last season half its players were 25 or younger.
The three youngest Premier League debuts (Jeremy Monga, Max Dowman, Ethan Nwaneri) have taken place since 2022. Farther afield players such as Lamine Yamal (La Liga debut at 15) and Cavan Sullivan (Major League Soccer debut at 14) have begun to normalise the trope of the child footballer, the athlete propelled to global superstardom before they can legally buy a vape. This week it has been widely reported that JJ Gabriel, a talented and highly coveted 15-year-old attacking midfielder, has demanded to leave the Manchester United academy.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
