Did Chelsea really expect Raheem Sterling to go quietly? It’s so naive but they will continue to spend cash like Monopoly money regardless, writes GRAEME SOUNESS

The conversation in which Enzo Maresca told Raheem Sterling he wasn’t in his plans should have happened long before the first game of the season. It shouldn’t have happened two days before Chelsea’s opening game against Premier League champions Manchester City.

Seriously, what reaction did Chelsea expect? ‘Thank you very much Mr Manager, of course I’ll go quietly.’ Really!?

From that moment on, Raheem Sterling only thinks about one thing: what is best for Raheem?

Young footballers these days have huge egos, so they should perform in the Premier League. Sterling has taken that message personally. He has been in the pre-season friendlies and has taken from that that the manager likes me and that I will be involved this year.

Maresca knows Sterling and from day one his new employers are said to have given him their thoughts on who should stay at Chelsea and who should go.

At that point, Sterling, who earns three times as much as many of their recent signings, would be among the first to leave.

Shortly after, Sterling should have heard the good news… You don’t wait until 48 hours before the season starts, you’re asking for trouble.

It is also of greater benefit to Chelsea to buy more time in trying to find him a new club. Timing it the way they have done has only added more column inches to their mishandling of another situation.

Sterling’s PR people were subsequently criticised for issuing a statement on the day of the match asking for ‘clarity’. At that point he is an angry young man. He has little interest in what Chelsea are doing on the pitch.

His thoughts are on where he goes next, where he will be wanted? Unfortunately there is little to no market for him here unless Chelsea take a massive hit, not just on the fee but also by covering some of his salary to get him out the door. You would think Saudi Arabia would be his best option but is he up for it? The early buzz is that he wants to stay in Europe and regain his place in England. Either way Chelsea will not be happy financially with the outcome.

The current owners are the ones who bought Sterling. He was their first signing. At the age of 27, they paid £47.5 million and signed him on a five-year contract worth around £320,000 a week.

Last week we talked about Chelsea’s business plan. How does this fit into the picture?

Their strategy is to recruit young players, not for an outrageous amount of money, but on average a basic wage of just under £80,000 a week – still an outrageous amount for the average man on the street. They sign them on long contracts and then, within three years, you have a winning team.

Football isn’t that simple, however, and Raheem Sterling doesn’t fit into that business plan. Nor did Kalidou Koulibaly when they signed him for £33m at the age of 31, a few weeks after Sterling, or Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang at the age of 33 for £10.3m from Barcelona.

Does this business plan change from week to week, month to month, or season to season?

Spending Monopoly money, collecting players, wasting billions, it makes no economic sense to me and it must be incredibly difficult to manage.

This is BlueCo’s third season as owners of Chelsea Football Club, and the shotgun approach shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. It may ultimately yield success, but if they had had much smarter football advisors from the start, it could have been achieved in a shorter time frame and for a lot less money.

Maresca says there are now more than 15 players training outside his first team and it is not chaos.

As a manager we have all had situations where five or six players have been injured and maybe another five or six have been unhappy with you because they haven’t been in the starting line-up every week. But this is a different scale and these 15 outsiders are a huge problem for Chelsea and the manager.

You have a lot of unhappy rabbits there who want to share a complaint. I can imagine that their paths don’t cross with the first team group because they train at a different time, that is something the manager can control, but what he can’t control is mixing and socializing outside of work hours.

I actually liked a lot of what I saw from Maresca’s team last Sunday. If, after spending over £1.2 billion, they had had a striker who could finish their chances, they might even have won the game. But City simply had too much ringcraft, they went with the pressure and finished Chelsea off on the counter.

Maybe instead of paying the small fee of £45m for Joao Felix, who looks the part but scores you one goal in four, they should have kept their powder dry and saved up for a man who scores 25 goals a season. But surely money isn’t an issue for Chelsea? They want Victor Osimhen, who costs around £100m to buy. And of course he’ll accept the average wage of £80,000 a week like the rest of them…

Let’s give red cards for hysteria

Look up the definition of simulation and you will see the word ‘deception’. An act of deception is cheating. And that is exactly what Southampton’s Ben Brereton-Diaz did last week to get Newcastle United’s Fabian Schar sent off. The way he went so theatrically, I would have given him a red card and Schar a yellow. The rule needs to change.

In any other aspect of life that would be considered cheating and we wouldn’t tolerate it, so why do we accept it in football? I wrote a chapter in my autobiography a few years ago about what I would like to see changed in the game. If you asked the average fan on the street they would say improve VAR and eliminate cheating.

Schar moved his head forward aggressively but he didn’t head Brereton-Diaz. These theatrics irritate supporters and it’s embarrassing for our game. Start giving red cards for diving and that kind of action and in a few months it will stop quickly and we will have a much fairer spectacle.

A fair reward for Foden and Palmer

Two England players deservedly won the PFA Player of the Year and Young Player of the Year awards this week. The way Phil Foden and Cole Palmer were used by England certainly wasn’t the best choice at Euro 2016 this summer, but they were the standouts of last season and I hope they retain their hunger to continue learning and improving.

Foden will only benefit from the return of Ilkay Gundogan to Manchester City. There is no desperate need for him from the outside, but Pep Guardiola will know he is a gem for his dressing room. A fantastic player, never a hint of a problem, with a great attitude that rubs off on those around him.

Carlo Ancelotti, the master of people management

Real Madrid’s draw with Real Mallorca last weekend underscored that names on the fixture lists don’t translate into matches.

A 1-1 draw against a yo-yo team like Mallorca was not the start Madrid had in mind with Kylian Mbappe, Vinicius Jr, Jude Bellingham and Rodrygo in their line-up. After one game, their media were asking: is Madrid in crisis? Don’t laugh too hard at that, because that kind of nonsense is also on the way to our game.

More Galacticos means even bigger egos for Carlo Ancelotti.

The Spanish press has already referred to Mbappe, Vinicius Jr and Bellingham by the acronym ‘MVB’, which led to a charged reaction on social media from Rodrygo after the match, even though he was the one who scored and spared them the blushes. The post was subsequently deleted. And what does Ancelotti do? He gives them two days off and Mbappe, Vinicius Jr and Rodrygo take a trip together on a luxury yacht to Marbella to get to know each other better.

It’s a great talent that Ancelotti has to manage these personalities. Considering the players he’s dealt with. He doesn’t say much and I’m sure with some of those clashing egos, the best way to keep a happy dressing room is with a simple nod of the head and an arch of that famous left eyebrow. There’s an art to his man-management and few do it better.