Raheem Sterling faces prison after admitting nitrous oxide offence in Hampshire Lamborghini crash

A star stripped bare on a Hampshire country road

The story ends, in a sense, at 9.13am on a glorious May morning, by the side of the A327. Raheem Sterling sat in the passenger seat of a wrecked Lamborghini, feverishly stashing canisters of nitrous oxide into the back, having to recite his name from scratch when a police officer arrived.

"What's your name?" "Raheem." "What's your surname?" "Sterling."

As it transpired in court in Basingstoke this week, Sterling had been driving all night by the time police began receiving calls from members of the public concerned that someone was bobbing and weaving up the M3 in an unpredictable, uncontrollable manner. When the car eventually smashed into a metal pole on a country road in Hampshire, there was nobody sitting in the driver's seat, and Sterling said nothing when asked who had been at the wheel.

The district judge took "an extremely dim view of the serious and life-threatening crime to which Sterling has admitted," the Guardian's Jonathan Liew writes. The 31-year-old, a £50m footballer as recently as four years ago, now faces the possibility of prison and a sporting career that may have come to a hard stop.

A career that unravelled long before the crash

For all the shock of the incident, Liew argues that Sterling as a "going concern" had already ended much earlier — around the time his Arsenal loan deal finished and Enzo Maresca made clear he had no further use for him at Chelsea. Maresca made the forward train on his own after 8pm despite his having young children, and shrugged off the arrangement by noting that people in the fishing industry also work hard hours.

Sterling, the piece notes, is "younger than Kepa Arrizabalaga, younger than Solly March, younger than Ariana Grande" — and yet his top-level career appears over at the age of 31.

The empty driver's seat

And yet, as Liew concludes, Sterling remains "one of the lucky ones" — the teenager who made it, who won 82 international caps and four league titles and worked under one of the greatest managers of all time. The real lesson, he suggests, is in the structure of the life itself:

"Gaze at any footballing prodigy from afar and you'll see a seductive blur of gift and privilege. But look closely enough and you'll notice that the driver's seat is empty."