How the Raheem Sterling transfer explains the Premier League

The biggest transfer of the summer, to many, was for one of the littlest players. Manchester City dropped some $76 million on Liverpool's tiny, 5-foot-7, striker-winger tweener Raheem Sterling, whose middle name ironically is Shaquille.

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Following a World Cup summer in which three of the five most expensive transfers ever were consummated – and four of the top 10 – it made sense for the market to cool off some. But if Sterling's move didn't seem to promise the kind of tectonic plate-shifting implications of last year's Luis Suarez-to-Barcelona, Angel Di Maria-to-Manchester United and James Rodriguez-to-Real Madrid blockbusters, it nevertheless holds major significance.

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While the Sterling transaction (which induced the expected puns about all the British pounds sterling shelled out on him) doesn't instantly make City a lock for the title, or render Liverpool all that much worse given the cash it got to spend, the Sterling transfer is a metaphor for the Premier League today. In a lot of ways, it's a microcosm for the English club game – the entirety of its recent evolution writ small.

Because it neatly encapsulates just about every noteworthy trend in the Premier League player market in recent years.

For one, it reflects the shift in the balance of power from England's old money clubs – Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool – to the nouveaux riches propped up by huge foreign investment, like City and Chelsea.

It underscores, too, the erosion of the league's meritocracy. Players used to have to put in a certain amount of time and deliver to some unwritten benchmarks to become eligible for salaries in a slowly ascending series of income classes. Sterling, at 20 years old, was offered a contract extension for some $150,000 a week and refused it, reportedly demanding at least 50 percent more. Liverpool's offer would have made him one of the highest-paid players in the Premier League, but it wasn't enough for him. Instead, he got his money at City – almost double what Liverpool offered, and much more than what he had counter-offered his old club with.

When Sterling demurred on extending his contract, the Reds knew that, with just one year left on his contract, he could and quite possibly would walk out for free in 2016. As such, they had no choice but to sell him. This, in a nutshell, is how the Bosman Arrest, granting soccer players their free agency in just about every country, gave the players total power.

So, sensing its opportunity, City whipped out a check book and offered Sterling the contract he coveted and gave Liverpool a transfer valuation it couldn't possibly refuse. There was nothing the 18-time English and five-time European champions could do to keep the four-time top-flight champions from taking its player – losing him to the club that snuck by them late to win the 2014 title, no less.

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But there's more about Sterling that makes his move so symbolic. The primary reason he caught the eye of so many so early on, and why his Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers at one point described him as the best young player in Europe, is his pace. If that sounds simplistic, the lithe speed merchant is so zippy that he's hard to miss out on the field.

The Premier League, in some remnant of its Route One roots, fetishizes speed. If such a speedster happens to be a forward and English, then there really isn't any kind of money the big club won't pay. See, for instance, the examples of Theo Walcott and Wilfried Zaha, who made major, big-money moves to top clubs before they had shown much of anything. There are many such cases.

Premier League teams are all too happy to be overcharged for even marginal English talent. That strange and utterly conscious willingness to be fleeced seems to be underpinned by a kind of existential angst in English soccer. The country considers itself the home of the sport – the merits of which you can debate – but struggles badly to produce talent good enough to play in its league. Thanks to the Premier League's expert commercialization, revenue streams have long since ballooned to the point where no player is really too expensive for its clubs to afford. So the competition for domestic talent is, well, everybody else in the world.

When English talent does emerge, it immediately fetches a premium. This phenomenon, in turn, conspires with an eternal hunger for new players. Fans want to see fresh faces upon which to project their hopes and dreams for the clubs. Managers and technical directors or transfer committees – where they exist – are judged by the record of the players they bring in, not the ones they inherit. That leads to strange decision-making.

James Milner, by most measures, is one of the best wingers in the league and versatile in other positions. He's English and City paid some $50 million for him in 2010. And he is, at 29, in his prime. Yet this summer, the club decided to let him walk out for free – to Liverpool, incidentally – for no conceivable reason at all. You could well argue that, given the same kind of playing time and service, Milner is about equivalent to Sterling. At zero dollars to $76 million plus an enormous compensation package, he's certainly much better value for money.

But then Milner is almost nine years older than Sterling. And in today's Premier League, age is everything. The younger you are, the better you are deemed to be. But then this, too, is a counterintuitive bias because playing in England is famously difficult. The helter-skelter nature of the league takes young players years to adjust – Sterling's ease in adapting, of course, was part of his quick appeal – and consequently makes veterans who can still handle the speed of play all the more valuable.

All of these trends help to explain how Raheem Sterling came to be the sixth-most expensive player of all time at 20 and with just 18 league goals to his name, wedged between all-timers Zinedine Zidane and Zlatan Ibrahimovic. And he, in turn, helps to explain today's Premier League.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.