The Athletic’s Transfer DealSheet is always full of interesting snippets picked up by their writers, and today is no different.
Chelsea have so many sales and purchases going on simultaneously that it often ends up out of date pretty fast, but catch it on a Tuesday afternoon and there’s always fresh stuff in there.
Today we’re particularly interested in what it has to say about Raheem Sterling, given that’s one of the biggest transfer stories at Chelsea right now. The winger has been ruthlessly eliminated from first team training following preseason, and according to this piece he’s gone one further even than that.
Sterling fights fire with fire
While other frozen out players like Ben Chilwell and Romelu Lukaku have been training with the “bomb squad” at Cobham, separate from the main group, Sterling has taken another option.
According to this piece, Sterling has been “keeping fit at home rather than going to Cobham.”
We’re not sure whether Chelsea would see this as a positive or not. Would they prefer if all of the outcasts did the same thing, avoiding some of the toxicity of having them at the training ground? Very possibly.
On the other hand, the idea of having a separate group in training is in part of embarrass those players into pushing harder for a move on their part. If Sterling is just going to run laps of his garden and then collect his £325k a week salary, the club may worry he’s getting a little too comfortable.
As always, they’re relying on the professional pride of these players to eventually push them into making a move. We’re sure Sterling has feelers out – it’s just a question of who might be receptive to them given his wages.
