An underwhelming first season with Manchester City turned into a nightmare over the summer of 2016 for Raheem Sterling as a player already disliked by much of the country used him as the figurehead of their anger at a disastrous Euro 2016 for the England team.
Sterling's decision to leave Liverpool - one of the powerhouses of English football - a year earlier for the upstarts to the top table saw him wrongly painted as a misguided moneygrabber, and all sorts of claims and predictions were made (Jordan Ibe, anyone?) that those who spouted them should be embarrassed by. City thought £49m was a bargain for the forward back then, and so it has proven.
Nevertheless, it wasn't clear that that would be the case after his first year came under Manuel Pellegrini's final season at the club where the sense of drift was overwhelming as everybody prepared for the arrival of Guardiola that summer. Not that the City manager promised good news for all.
