Nedum Onuoha played 14 seasons in the Premier League with Manchester City, Sunderland, and Queens Park Rangers before finishing his career with MLS side Real Salt Lake. He joined ESPN in 2020, appearing on ESPN FC, and has since featured as ESPN’s lead studio pundit in England. He’ll also write columns periodically throughout the season, offering his perspective on the big issues of the day.
If I had to use one word to sum up the practice of separating players from the first team by forcing them to train at different times, often with just one or two others, simply because their club no longer wants them, it would be “spiteful.”
If spiteful seems strong, I think it’s worth asking yourself: Why does a player need to train alone if the club wants to get rid of them? Especially when there’s no disciplinary issue?
Is this how all transfers work? Of course not, which makes it really difficult to just accept it and not hold resentment toward the people that decided this is what you deserve.
Five Manchester United players — Alejandro Garnacho, Jadon Sancho, Marcus Rashford, Antony and Tyrell Malacia — were given that treatment this summer as the club attempted to move them on. Raheem Sterling and Axel Disasi are the latest to find themselves in that situation with their club Chelsea. After Sterling posted a picture on social media that showed him at training at 8:21 p.m. last week, ESPN reported that the Professional Footballers’ Association had intervened to discuss Sterling’s and Disasi’s treatment and that efforts were being made to provide a more suitable training program for the pair.
But when Chelsea coach Enzo Maresca was asked about Sterling and Disasi at a news conference ahead of their game against United over the weekend, he made it clear he had no sympathy for the two players, pointing out that his father spent 50 years getting up at 2 a.m. in his job as a fisherman.
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Maresca’s comments reminded me of the experience I had at Manchester City under Roberto Mancini when I was put in a group of first-team players who were, without explanation, told to train on our own. When managers talk and act like that, you feel you lose the human side and that is the key to this tactic of pushing players aside.
When you hear that there’s someone like Sterling training at 8 p.m., people will say, “Well I would train at eight o’clock for this amount of money and so on and so forth.” In reality, you get the most joy as a professional when you’re doing your job, playing for your team. The best-case scenario is when you’re training with your peers. These are your friends, you’re playing games of football, you’re playing well, you’re winning games and so on.
But Sterling and Disasi are now in a position where they know they’re training at a time that’s almost designed to inconvenience you and to force you to make a decision, which you shouldn’t necessarily have to do. I don’t really like that.
You also can’t waste a year in football because you never know how many you’re going to have. That’s why the talk of money and vast player wages really is a secondary issue. But this trend of players having to train away from the first team is also a reminder that players don’t really have as much leverage as people believe they do.
Clubs hold the power in all but a very small number of cases, and they are also able to control the narrative. How many times in these situations have supporters taken the side of the player over the club? I can’t think of any, and this is why I believe it is a spiteful tactic for clubs to use against players. I lived through it, and it really was a horrible experience.
Obviously, clubs can’t have too many players, but it also doesn’t mean that you have to separate them in a manner whereby the players don’t even see each other. That’s something that gets done, which, again, doesn’t really get spoken about.
Sometimes the players who are outside of the main group are told they can’t come into the training ground until the other group is finished. That happened to me at Man City.
I was told two days before preseason started that I would not be with the first team — not by the manager, but in a message from the club secretary. That became a constant: the manager leaving the secretary to deliver bad news. It was me, Craig Bellamy, Emmanuel Adebayor, Roque Santa Cruz and Wayne Bridge.
Initially, we had to train with the youth team. The level wasn’t challenging enough for us, and it also didn’t help the kids. One of them, a highly rated defender, had his confidence shattered after four weeks of trying to mark Adebayor — a former Arsenal and Real Madrid forward — in training. So it wasn’t just destructive for us as senior players, but it also had a negative impact on somebody who should have been part of the club’s future.
One afternoon, Bellamy and I sat on some spare footballs at the side of the pitch to watch the first team finish its session, and it was probably the worst decision of my career because, hours later, we all received a message — again, from the secretary — telling us that from now on, we would be training alone from 3 p.m., after everyone else had gone home. Mancini basically didn’t want us anywhere near the first team, and that was his way of making that clear.
So a little like Sterling and Disasi, we had the small crumb of contact with our friends and teammates taken away. However, I didn’t have kids at the time, so I was fortunate in a way because that training routine was timed to coincide with school home time and family time. It is a club tactic designed to break you and to force you to leave, and it’s a reminder of the business of football.
When you get your day-to-day taken away — the professional challenge, the contact with teammates and friends — it only breeds resentment.
Once the season started, most of the unwanted players had managed to get a move, but Wayne and I were still at the club. We were eventually allowed to train with the first team again, but the psychological warfare continued.
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Steve Nicol lays into Maresca over Sterling and Disasi treatment
Steve Nicol lays into Enzo Maresca over his treatment of Raheem Sterling and Axel Disasi.
Mancini was a big advocate of players taking time off during an international break if they weren’t representing their countries. He liked players to recharge and go away, so he told us all ahead of one break that we could be off for the entirety of the break. I booked a trip with my wife and prepared to take a week off, but as soon as City’s game had finished on the Saturday, Wayne and I received another message — yes, from the secretary — telling us that we would be expected to train Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. And Saturday.
On Saturday it was just me and Wayne, doing a weights session on our own, and it was the most spiteful session I had ever had in my career. It was soul-destroying.
I had tried to discuss that week with Mancini. I called him on his phone, it rang out and I called him again, only for it to go straight to his voicemail. He had turned his phone off to avoid the conversation.
I don’t know if Sterling or Disasi are able to have a direct conversation with Enzo Maresca, but when you have your coach in front of you, you can at least try to sway them a little bit and draw some sense of humanity from them. If you don’t have access to the manager, I promise you that type of thing breeds huge resentment.
My situation at Man City ended in the January transfer window when Mark Hughes, who had been my manager at City before Mancini, took me to Queens Park Rangers. As a kid growing up in Manchester, a City fan who had come through their academy, all I ever wanted to do was play for the club. Leaving wasn’t necessarily a move I wanted to make, but you end up with little choice.
Clubs can make your life a living hell if you don’t leave on their terms, but ultimately, they are the ones who hand out the contracts and salary packages. Why should a player just sacrifice everything they are entitled to simply because the club no longer wants them?
There should be a better way for all parties when it reaches this point.
