It is the training exercise that has helped transform Raheem Sterling from a speedy winger who barely reached double figures every season to a back-post killer who was among the most lethal goalscoring wingers in Europe.
The change took place in the 2017/18 season, Pep Guardiola’s second captain of Manchester City, the club Sterling returns this Sunday as an Arsenal player.
It is Sterling’s current manager, Mikel Arteta, Guardiola’s assistant from 2016 to 2019 when he left for the Emirates, who played a key role in achieving that dazzling efficiency in front of goal.
Guardiola had assistants senior to Arteta, who was in his first coaching role, so he had the bandwidth to focus on specialties and learn from as many departments as possible.
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He always found himself drawn to analysis, with his curiosity leading many a rabbit hole. His desire to understand specific moments in the game at a detailed level helped focus the work of Arteta and the analyst team, but also ensured that their research became part of the first team’s decision-making process.
There were several projects they worked on that yielded dramatic improvements: the goalkeeper’s penalty tactics, the diagonal pass from full back to winger that Ben White and Bukayo Saka perfected, and quantifying what a predator made in the penalty area.
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Arteta started looking at wingers around the world, looking for the sweet spot using data. He and the team of analysts broke down which area these wingers scored most often, how many touches they took and how quickly a shot should be taken.
The higher the level, the less time and space players have to shoot. Zones where the most goals are assisted and scored have also been identified.
This led to an exercise in the academy that Arteta adapted and introduced into the first-team environment for Sterling to work on.
Arteta has adapted a City training exercise to help Sterling improve as a winger (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Guardiola’s fitness coach Lorenzo Buenaventura is credited with ensuring City train like they play by making sessions game-realistic. Once again, the club’s research informed their thinking, as they found that fast breaks required much longer sprints than would normally be associated with counter-attack training, so Buenaventura implemented a 60-meter sprint at the start of the exercise.
Sterling then had to shoot inside a marked square under pressure from the defenders, but the sprint left them with a lack of oxygen to the brain by the time they got there, making decision-making more difficult.
Arteta had a stopwatch with him during the drill and if the shot wasn’t made within the allotted time, he called it dead and they started again. The emphasis was on the need to act decisively, rather than overcomplicate things, which, according to those privy to Sterling’s evolution at City, was the most important lesson he learned.
With little time to train due to the brutal schedule, these post-training sessions were important to get the message across. Video work also helped: clips of wingers like Arjen Robben and Franck Ribery, who Guardiola worked with at Bayern Munich, used in combination with the 16 cameras on the training ground to show exactly what they were looking for.
Clips of Ribery and Robben, who were at Bayern with Guardiola, helped explain what they wanted from Sterling (JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images)
Sterling arrived in 2015 as a 20-year-old who had electrified Anfield with his dribbling as part of the Brendan Rodgers team that came agonizingly close to winning the Premier League in 2013/14. Manuel Pellegrini was the manager, but when Guardiola arrived a year later, something had to change in his game or he wouldn’t fit into his system.
As the change in Jack Grealish’s game since joining from Aston Villa in 2021 has shown, Guardiola is asking his wide players to be more subservient to the team structure than some other managers.
One of the principles Guardiola introduced to City was the need to always look for the free man in possession. To do that, a player had to understand when he was in a clear one-on-one situation. If that was the case, they were encouraged to be aggressive and take on their man, but if they were doubled, logic dictated that a teammate had to be free elsewhere.
Sterling scored 10 goals and 15 assists in all competitions in 2016/17. It was a healthy return for a young player. He had 11 and nine in 2014-15, and 11 and eight in 2015-16.
But it wasn’t elite level and neither was Leroy Sane’s tally of nine goals and five assists in his debut season after joining from Schalke. When Arteta started working more with the forwards in that second season, it unlocked numbers that had until now remained out of reach for players who were excited but often flattered to deceive.
Success, however, reinforces habits, which is why Sterling has been so susceptible to diluting some of his natural game in his quest to be a difference-maker.
It became almost comical how many of his goals were scored from the same location. But this was no coincidence, it was Guardiola’s design.
The most powerful auxiliary zone was identified as the name area within the penalty area. City worked tirelessly to find wingers in that position, and if one was there, the other would have to be on the other side, ready to cut back or tap the square ball across goal.
In 2017/18, Sterling scored 23 goals and 14 assists. His strike rate almost doubled from 10.9 percent to 20.7 percent as City won the league by 100 points – a total no other team has achieved.
The following season he scored 25 goals and 14 assists, with Arteta’s final season at City (he left for Arsenal in December 2019) seeing Sterling record his highest goal tally of 31.
Sterling record with Arteta
His numbers dipped slightly over the next two seasons, although he still scored in double figures, before moving to Chelsea. His struggles are no surprise when you consider the stability and structure of Guardiola’s football.
It had been the perfect platform, while Chelsea had adopted so many different identities and such an aggressive recruitment strategy that continuity and consistency were hard to find.
After being booted out of the Chelsea squad this summer, with manager Enzo Maresca backtracking on previous comments about his importance, Sterling still had tens of millions he could have collected.
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When Arsenal’s sporting director Edu Gaspar offered the chance to reunite Arteta with his former winger, he understandably had questions. Now 29, Sterling has achieved almost everything there is to achieve.
“The first phone call I had with him, I knew in the first ten seconds that we had to bring him,” Arteta said earlier this month.
“That was my only question mark: what stage is he at in his career? After 10 seconds I already knew, before the next questions, that we needed him here.
“He looks great. He has a lot of energy, a smile on his face and he is busy. He wants to prove something and when someone has that in his gut, you immediately feel it. Obviously, I don’t need to know anything else about his quality and what he can do for the team.”
The timing of Sterling’s arrival couldn’t have been better. He had two weeks during the international break with just a handful of senior players to refresh his muscle memory on Arteta’s methods and the principles that took his game to another level.
It’s been five years since they last worked together, and in that time both have evolved. Sterling has delved into fatherhood and his religion, while Arteta is a different animal to the coach he has worked with one-on-one as he has seen him manage an entire squad. They hope that shared maturity can make a difference against City on Sunday.
Sterling has performed well individually against his former club, scoring in both of Chelsea’s meetings against them last season. He has proven he knows how to hurt them and gave Kyle Walker a very difficult night in the 4-4 draw last November.
Arteta has previously found a way to access Sterling’s untapped reserves. He’ll hope he can do it again.
(Top photo: Arteta and Sterling at City in 2019; Marc Atkins/Getty Images)