Watch the tape from the summer of 2024. A four-time Premier League champion, a man with 82 England caps, is told he will not be given a squad number at Chelsea. Not sold. Not loaned with a fee. Just... parked. Then he's photographed arriving at the training ground at a different time than the first team, working out alone, waiting for a phone that doesn't ring until the final hours of deadline day, when he's shipped to Arsenal on loan.
In American sports, that's a storyline. In England, it was an erasure.
Here's the question nobody in the British press wanted to ask out loud. Raheem Sterling is 29 years old, four