Pep Guardiola: New Manchester City manager retains confidence in value of Raheem Sterling

What Pep Guardiola enjoys most about management, more than the fame or the glamour or the medals, is coaching footballers. He was presented to the media at the City Football Academy on Friday afternoon, and he performed well, but he spoke like a man who knows that his real work will be with the City players as they filter back to their futuristic training base from their summer holidays.

None of those will be more important to Guardiola or to City than Raheem Sterling. He is the second-most expensive signing in City’s history at £49million. But while Kevin de Bruyne, who cost £55m, arrived last summer fully-formed as a world-class player, Sterling was still a work in progress. The failure of Manuel Pellegrini to get much out of him last year was an indictment of his hands-off management style.

Guardiola spoke with real enthusiasm on Friday about Sterling, about his hopes for the 21-year-old and what they can achieve together. “I love working with young players,” he said, and he meant it. What Guardiola needs in return is players who want to learn from him, and that is what he will find in the much-maligned young forward.

It is no secret that Sterling struggled last year to justify the money that City spent on him. The £49m was paid to Liverpool with the knowledge and approval of Guardiola, then still at Bayern Munich, but Pellegrini could only coax flickers of consistently dangerous play from Sterling. There was a hat-trick against Bournemouth, and a crucial late double against Borussia Monchengladbach, but never a run of good performances.

Sterling himself had hoped for more detailed coaching and instruction from Pellegrini. While the Chilean#s light touch had initially helped to pick up the confidence of players like Edin Dzeko and James Milner, which had been diminished under Roberto Mancini, a more proactive approach is required for young players still learning the game.

It was under the hands-on instruction of Brendan Rodgers at Liverpool that Sterling played his best football but at City last year he did not get that. By the time of the European Championship this summer his confidence was through the floor, and it showed.

What Guardiola offers is precisely what Sterling is looking for. He is a coach with a very clear idea about how football should be be played, who will work tirelessly to teach players his footballing language. At Barcelona this was easier, because the players there instinctively understood his concepts, as most of them were brought up in La Masia, their famous academy. They only needed to be fine-tuned.

When Guardiola arrived at Bayern three years ago he immediately set about teaching the players in precise detail how he wanted them to play. In his first days at Bayern’s Sabener Strasse facility, he worked with Toni Kroos, changing his body positions when he received the ball to make sure that he could always see and play the next pass with one fluid movement.

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Guardiola worked tirelessly with Jerome Boateng, revelling in the fact of how little coaching he had received before, so he could teach him from scratch how to play in an organised defensive line. Every day he focused on his principles of defensive organisation until he was convinced Boateng understood.

If Boateng was a blank canvas then Javi Martinez was the opposite, a player who arrived with Marcelo Bielsa’s man-marking instructions hard-wired in him. Guardiola seized the chance to fully re-wire him as a footballer, and did so in the first few weeks at Bayern.

When Guardiola arrived in Germany, Boateng and Martinez were 24 years old, Kroos 23. Sterling is still just 21 and as long as he is genuinely committed to learning from Guardiola, his new manager will give every available minute to help improve him.

That is what Guardiola meant when he called Sterling last month, before England’s turgid 0-0 draw with Slovakia, and told him that “as long as you work for me I will fight for you”. Guardiola knows how important Sterling is to his plans at City, and he told him that.

At his press conference this week Guardiola reiterated his faith in Sterling’s ability, saying that as long as he applied himself then he would flourish under his management.

“The problem is recovering confidence when a player has no quality, that is a big problem,” Guardiola explained. “Then I cannot help him. But Sterling has the quality. He just has to focus on his life, his profession and I’m pretty sure he will play good.”

Guardiola knows how much criticism Sterling and Joe Hart received over the summer but did not want to dwell on a tournament in which almost every English player struggled. “I don’t worry about the performances in the Euros,” he said. “I am encouraged, and I am looking forward to working with Sterling and showing him how good a player he is. And with Joe Hart too.”

Guardiola could have been more enthusiastic about the future of the England’s number one, given his own known preference for a footballing goalkeeper. “At the moment there is no doubt that Hart is number one,” Guardiola said. “We are always looking for the best option to create a better team.”

But as long as Sterling shows a willingness to learn from Guardiola, to speak his football language, to follow his precise instructions, then his new manager will leave no stone unturned in showing him how to play. “We can talk here in the office, out on the grass, anywhere,” Guardiola said. “If he’s open to try, we will be brothers.”