Why It’s Vital Pep Guardiola Repairs Raheem Sterling’s Shattered Confidence

Confidence is vital to every athlete. It’s perhaps the single most important factor in sports performance.

An athlete must believe they can achieve their goals for them to reach their optimum level. Without that, they are inferior and less likely to perform to their maximum. Having the necessary physical capability is one thing, but without belief, an athlete simply cannot produce their best.

Look at Raheem Sterling during his debut season for Manchester City. In his first few months at the club, he played well and showed moments of excellence. He wasn’t a consistent force, but given his age (he was 20 when he signed for City) that was understandable.

He played on the left and sometimes centrally, and he scored 10 goals before the turn of the year, including a superb hat-trick against Bournemouth and a double against Borussia Monchengladbach that secured City top spot in their Champions League group.

His pace brought a new dynamism to City’s attack, and with width on both sides of the pitch, they were stretching teams in a way they hadn’t the previous season. Sterling had work to do, such as improving his finishing and learning how to make better runs, but his first half of the season had been solid and, at times, spectacular.

However, a severe downturn in form followed and by the end of the season, with his confidence seemingly in pieces, he was barely part of the side. He played only one full 90 minutes in the last 10 weeks of Manuel Pellegrini’s tenure, which tells its own story.

Sterling was nervous, inhibited by his own lack of belief and unable to assert himself as he would at his best and struggling to do even the simplest things on the pitch.

Of course, he had good reason to have suffered a crisis of confidence. His move from Liverpool to City had caused consternation on Merseyside.

Liverpool remain one of England’s biggest football institutions, with influential voices littered across the media. The fact Sterling, who had been one of their most exciting players during the previous two seasons, had chosen to leave a club with such a rich history of success upset their army of former players, many of whom weighed in and publicly denounced the youngster.

It was a smear campaign that transmitted to the wider public. Sterling was cast as a mercenary, a player only in it for the money. He was booed at almost every away ground he visited last season in a strange, vitriolic and coordinated attack that was both unfair and damaging to young talent.

And it continued during the summer with England. His performances at the 2016 UEFA …

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