Liverpool will make City sweat over Raheem Sterling - and rightly so

A warning to Liverpool supporters: this one is going to run all summer. A source at the club suggested this week that while everything about the Raheem Sterling deal might make you think it could be easily and speedily sorted - the player wants to leave, there is a credible buyer (though perhaps not the long list of potential suitors that both agent and club hoped for), the club has been offered a reasonable fee – it is unlikely to be finalised for a while. Just get on with it, you might have thought. Take the money and dispatch him elsewhere might seem the sensible thing. But it won’t happen.

It won’t happen because Liverpool’s owners have absolutely no incentive to facilitate a quick transfer. They know the money is coming, so they can hang on and stall for as long as they like to ensure they get the best possible deal. The fans in the stands might be encouraging the club to bite off the hand of anyone offering £40 million for a player who remains a work in progress. But the club is prepared to drag its financial heels right until the closure of the transfer window if necessary, to squeeze out the last few pennies. After all, they don’t want Sterling to leave, so why should they facilitate his departure? Why make it easier?

What the source did admit, however, is that Sterling is going. It doesn’t matter how many pleading articles appear in the press written by club legends telling him he would be mad to leave Liverpool, that it is by far the best place for him to stay and nurture his talent, that only Anfield can give him the platform to express himself fully.

[BLOG: What will it cost to sign Raheem Sterling this summer?]

All that may be true, but for reasons best known to himself, Sterling is now determined to leave. And Liverpool are resigned to letting him go. He has one foot out of the door. And the toes of the other are on the threshold.

But that does not mean it is a simple process. Until pen hits dotted line, a lot can happen. And in the modern football world at the top end of elite player recruitment, the competition is almost as fierce as out on the pitch. All sorts of tactics are used in the attempt to snarl up other people’s simple processes.

We assume from a distance that the logical destination for Sterling is Manchester City. They are a club in need of recruiting more Englishmen, they have the money and from the player’s perspective, they are more likely to fulfil his ambition to accumulate some sort of silverware. Easy then: sit down, work out a price and sign a cheque. Twelve hours work at maximum.

Except others might wish to intervene simply to cause mischief, to push the price up, to seek to embarrass City into paying rather more than they intend. Manchester United, for instance, made a bid for Sterling when they must have known that the cultural distance between the two clubs made direct transfers unlikely, never mind making them the least comfortable of alternative employment destinations for the player himself. But their rather public intervention will only have increased his eventual cost. Which they knew full well it would.

Chelsea too, might like to see the other English club most embroiled in the battle against Financial Fair Play regulations obliged to pay way over the odds and so could slip in a tactical bid. And Arsenal, well they might actually like to buy a player who would fit neatly into their system. But any genuine interest might be tempered by the prospect of what his wage demands would do to dressing room harmony. No harm, though, letting it be known they are interested with crafty hints of an imminent intervention.

City are hardly ignorant of such shenanigans. They don’t employ a dozen strong recruitment department in order to be out flanked. They know the procedures, are more than aware that their position as the world’s most generously underwritten club makes them liable to inflationary practices whenever they register an interest in a player. So they have issued an insistence that the bid they offered this week that Liverpool turned down was their penultimate. They are not going to go much higher than this, they say. They have to act tough. What they cannot be seen to be is an easy touch.

The one man who could do without all this is Brendan Rodgers. For the Liverpool manager the macho game of who blinks first being conducted over his prize asset is a total pain. Once reconciled to losing Sterling, what he wants is a large amount of money quickly to spend in the transfer market this summer. And this time do it properly. Not squander it like the Suarez cash was on mediocre recruits identified by the Moneyball-obsessed stat nerds in the back office. He wants decent first team alternatives, not value-for-money squad fodder. He wants Nathaniel Clyne, not some bloke in Slovakia who might be able to be sold for more money in five years' time.

And of course Southampton are aware of his requirements. So have placed a premium price on Clyne, a price which is more than Liverpool wish to spend. And Manchester United know Liverpool want him and might be inclined to make a bid themselves just to stall the process. So it goes on.

As it does so, the headlines become ever more fraught. Such is the consequence of a transfer system that has become a competition itself, the summer game conducted in the boardroom and on the agent’s phone.