Time to cash Sterling in?

SO, farewell, then, Raheem Sterling?

The saga concerning Liverpool's talented young attacker appears to be approaching an endgame that many Reds supporters had foreseen months ago.

With the news breaking yesterday that the 20-year-old had reportedly told his agent he would not be putting pen to paper on a contract extension - he had already agreed one tying him to the club until the summer of 2017 - it has led to more than one or two comments on social media.

So, what the hell, I'll have my two pennyworth too.

Or should that be my one hundred thousand worth?

For that is the sum of money - in pounds sterling, naturally - that the player is believed to have rejected as a weekly wage at Liverpool Football Club.

That's £595.23 per hour, every single day of the year,

By anybody's standards, even players with more experience in the game than Sterling, a salary of £5,200,000 doesn't appear to show the club were being cheapskates.

In my lifetime watching football, I have become more and more disillusioned with the way the game is at its highest level.

Yes, there are some fabulous players who would be stars in any era of the game - obviously Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo head that list - but in so many ways, money is ruining the sport.

In years past, a talented 20-year-old player having already signed his decent contract would have just got on with his game, developed and improved it so by the time came for him to renew his deal he could quite rightly suggest he was worth more than the club were currently paying him and sign a more lucrative one.

Nowadays, though, it seems the contracts players put their names to mean less than zero.

When Luis Suarez signed that big contract in December 2014 - to stay at Anfield for another four-and-a-half seasons - my immediate thought was he was going to be sold before that deal expired.

As it turned out, he was off before the ink had barely had time to dry when he went to Barcelona last July. Clearly, the infamous biting incident with Giorgio Chiellini at the World Cup played its part in that story, but it only reinforced my belief about the worthlessness of contracts.

So now we come to Sterling. It's a sorry mess, if truth be told, with faults on both sides.

But my belief is the greater blame lies with the player - and his agent.

When Reds manager Brendan Rodgers hailed Sterling as "...the best young player in European football at the moment..." following the victory over Norwich City on Easter Sunday last year, in some ways the boss - and by definition the club - were almost making a rod for their own back.

And Sterling's agent, Aidy Ward, must have taken this on board.

For before the year was out, there were rumours of the player being unsettled with his current contract, despite talk of his present deal being upped from £35,000 per week to £100,000.

This came to a head when Sterling, without the club's knowledge, went to the BBC to give his side of the story - on, of all days, April Fool's Day.

It's worth pointing out that Rodgers gave Sterling a chance to recharge his batteries over the festive period and after netting the only goal of the match against Burnley, he went back to his native Jamaica for a few days over the New Year.

That was man-management at its finest.

And what happens next? The player decides he's worth more than the club are offering and believes his chances at winning trophies will be better elsewhere.

Well, it might have escaped his memory, but he is already at a club that came mightily close to lifting silverware this season. Reaching the semi-finals of both domestic cup competitions - the only side to do so and a first for Rodgers as Reds boss - was a decent enough achievement by a team desperately lacking a recognised strike force this season.

And to be fair to Sterling, his high point of the campaign came in the first-leg of the Capital One Cup semi-final with a fantastic leveller against Chelsea.

But moments like that have been too few and far between, and for a good number of Liverpool fans the sight of him spurning several chances in front of goal - many laid on a plate - have hardly endeared him.

I don't even think he's got his own chant on The Kop.

So now the ball is likely to be in the court of the club's owners Fenway Sports Group.

It will be interesting to see how John W Henry, Tom Werner and co play this one.

It's a scenario they are unlikely to have come across often, if at all, at the Boston Red Sox. Don't get me wrong; sports agents in the United States are just as ruthless - arguably more so than they are here - but I cannot for the life of me imagine a 20-year-old 'phenom' , as Sterling might be called across the Pond, holding a ballclub, almost to ransom.

So the way things are, it seems obvious that Sterling has had enough. Maybe he craves a return to his spiritual home in London and maybe we'll hear Mr Henry once again enquire what they are smoking down the Emirates way when a bid for £20m emerges from there in the next few weeks.

I'm sure Messrs Henry and Werner would prefer not to sell him to a perceived rival team in the Premier League, but the way things are just now I cannot see the four big hitters on the continent - Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Real Madrid and PSG - racing out with their chequebooks.

Of course, all this could change markedly, especially if David De Gea moves to the Spanish capital and Gareth Bale ups sticks from there for Salford.

If we were to sell Sterling, I think a base figure of £40m-£45m for a 20-year-old established England international is a decent ask by today's over-inflated standards.

And if we were to invest that wisely in a striker who won't spend most of the season on the treatment table while guaranteeing 15-20 goals, I'd be more than happy with that.

It's a real shame it has come to this for Raheem Sterling, but sadly it just symptomatic of modern football.

Players come and players go - more often than when I was a kid, I reckon - but us supporters always stay loyal to our team.

Unless your name is David Mellor...