This training regimen has helped transform Raheem Sterling from a nimble winger who barely managed double figures for goals every season into a back-post assassin who is one of the most lethal goal-scoring wingers in Europe.
The change came in Pep Guardiola’s second season in charge of Manchester City in 2017-18, and Sterling will be back in action against City as an Arsenal player this Sunday.
Sterling’s current manager, Mikel Arteta, was Guardiola’s assistant between 2016 and 2019 before his move to the Emirates and has been instrumental in bringing out his incredible effectiveness in front of goal.
Guardiola had more experienced assistant coaches than Arteta, his first coach, so he had the freedom to focus on his area of expertise and learn from as many departments as possible.
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He was continually drawn to analytics, and his curiosity led him down many rabbit holes. His thirst for understanding specific moments in a game in detail helped Arteta and his team of analysts focus their work, but also saw their research become part of the first-team decision-making process.
Some of the projects they have worked on have led to dramatic improvements: goalkeeper penalty tactics, the diagonal fullback-to-winger pass perfected by Ben White and Bukayo Saka, and quantifying what makes a penalty box predator.
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As Arteta began looking at wingers around the world, he used data to find the sweet spot. He and a team of analysts broke down the areas where wingers most often score, how many touches they have and how quickly they need to shoot.
As the level increases, players have less time and space to shoot. The zones where most goals are assisted and scored have also been identified.
This was the basis for a training method developed at the academy, which Arteta then adapted and implemented into the first-team environment where Sterling could train.
Arteta has tweaked City’s training drills to improve Sterling’s ability as a winger (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Guardiola’s fitness coach Lorenzo Buenaventura is credited with making the sessions match-like and ensuring City train the way they play. Again, the club’s research influenced their thinking as it found that fast breaks require much longer sprints than are typically associated with counter-attacking drills, so Buenaventura implemented a 60-yard sprint at the start of the workout.
Sterling had to shoot from inside the marked square under pressure from defenders, but he ran so fast that by the time he got there his brain was starved of oxygen, making decision-making more difficult.
Arteta carried a stopwatch in training and if a shot didn’t go in the allotted time, he would call it dead and start over. The emphasis was on being decisive and not overly complicated, which those who know Sterling’s evolution at City believe was the key lesson he took away.
With a hectic schedule that left little time for training, these post-training sessions were crucial to drive home the message. Video work also helped, with Guardiola using clips of wingers he worked with at Bayern Munich, such as Arjen Robben and Franck Ribery, along with 16 cameras on the training pitch to show exactly what they were looking for.
Clips of Ribery and Robben at Bayern alongside Guardiola helped explain what they wanted from Sterling (JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images)
Sterling electrified Anfield with his dribbling as part of Brendan Rodgers’ side in 2015 at the age of 20, and came close to winning the Premier League title in 2013-14. The manager at the time was Manuel Pellegrini, but when Guardiola arrived a year later, there had to be a change in his style or he would not have fit into his system.
Guardiola demands more obedience from his wide players to the team structure than other managers, as evidenced by the way Jack Grealish played following his move from Aston Villa in 2021.
One of the principles Guardiola introduced at City was that they should always have a free player. To do this, a player had to understand when he was in a clear 1v1 situation. In that case, he was encouraged to attack and take on the player, but when two overlapped, logically, a teammate had to be free elsewhere.
Sterling scored 10 goals and provided 15 assists in all competitions in the 2016-17 season. It was a healthy return for the young player. He scored 11 goals and nine assists in the 2014-15 season, and 11 goals and eight assists in the 2015-16 season.
But it wasn’t elite level, and neither was Leroy Sane, who had nine goals and five assists in his debut season after joining from Schalke. As Arteta began to work more with his forwards in his second season, numbers that had hitherto been out of reach for the thrilling but often deceptive players began to unravel.
Success reinforces habits, but that’s why Sterling seeks change, even at the expense of some of his natural abilities.
It was almost comical that so many of his goals came from the same spot. But that was no coincidence, it was Guardiola’s design.
The strongest assist zone was identified as the byline area inside the penalty box. City were constantly trying to find wingers in that position, and if one was there, another was on the other side, ready to cut back or tap a square ball over the goal.
In the 2017-18 season, Sterling scored 23 goals and provided 14 assists. His conversion rate almost doubled from 10.9% to 20.7%, and City won the league with 100 points, a total no other team has achieved.
The following season, he scored 25 goals and provided 14 assists, and in Arteta’s final season at Manchester City (he moved to Arsenal in December 2019), Sterling set a new career-high for goals in a single season with 31.
Sterling’s record with Arteta
His numbers dropped slightly over the next two seasons, but he still managed double-figure goals before moving to Chelsea, where his struggles were unsurprising given the stability and structure of Guardiola’s football.
While this is a perfect platform, Chelsea have adopted so many different identities and aggressive recruitment strategies that it has been difficult to find continuity and consistency.
Despite manager Enzo Maresca backtracking on previous comments about his importance to Chelsea after his squad was bombed this summer, Sterling could still be worth tens of millions of pounds.
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When Arsenal sporting director Edu Gaspar offered Arteta the chance to reunite with his former winger, he naturally had his doubts. Sterling is now 29 and has achieved just about everything there is to achieve.
“When I first spoke to him, I knew within the first 10 seconds that I had to bring him in,” Arteta said earlier this month.
“That was my only question. Where is he in his career? Ten seconds later, I already knew I needed him here before the next question.
“He looks great. He’s got energy, he’s got a smile on his face, he’s got it. He wants to prove a point, and when someone’s got that in their belly, you can feel it right away. Obviously, I don’t need to know any more about his qualities and what he can bring to the team.”
The timing of Sterling’s arrival could not have been better. He has had two weeks with a few senior players during the international break to refresh his muscle memory of Arteta’s methods and the principles that have taken his game to another level.
It’s been five years since they last worked together and both have evolved in that time. Sterling has leaned into his life as a father and his religion, while Arteta is a different beast than the coaches he’s worked with one-on-one, seeing him take charge of a whole squad. They’ll be hoping that shared maturity can make the difference against City on Sunday.
Sterling has been good against his former club, scoring in both games against Chelsea last season. He has proven he knows how to hurt teams, and gave Kyle Walker a very difficult night in the 4-4 draw in November.
Arteta has previously found ways to tap into Sterling’s unused reserves and he will be hoping to do so again.
(Pictured above: Arteta and Sterling at City in 2019; Marc Atkins/Getty Images)
