Raheem Sterling's contract standoff with Liverpool is none of your business

The coverage has been as breathless as it has been befuddling. For weeks, England's soccer scene has been in the thrall of whether a 20-year-old player will sign a new contract that will pay him $152,000 a week, one worth $227,000 a week or one for something in the middle.

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Certainly, Raheem Sterling is the most exciting prospect England has produced since Wayne Rooney. And his ascent at Liverpool has been meteoric – after a breakout season last year, he leads the team in scoring this season, albeit with just 11 goals. And, yes, this is an awful lot of money we're talking about.

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But the fixation on his standoff with Liverpool over a new contract – his current, $53,000-per-week deal has two seasons left on it – is getting creepy. Or maybe it has long since moved past that point.

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Sterling has allegedly refused several offers of a new contract in recent months, reportedly pushing as high as $152,000 a week, and refused them all. Sterling is a fleet- and feather-footed winger whom his manager Brendan Rodgers called "the best young player in Europe" a year ago – which was a silly thing to do on an awful lot of levels. (1. He probably isn't. 2. It artificially built up the hype and pressure further. 3. It robbed the club of its last morsels of leverage. 4. Sterling's apparent self-regard didn't need encouragement. 5. It painted an even larger target on a frail young player's back.)

England is aghast that Sterling should turn down that kind of money. He has said that he won't resume talks until the summer, no matter the offer that is forthcoming in the last month or so of the season.

Rodgers, unsurprisingly, urged Sterling to take the offer on the table. "The club has offered an incredible deal for a young player," the manager said recently.

He also argued that too much money at this stage would be counterproductive. "If they get too much, too young, then it really sabotages their development. It is very important for young players, not just Raheem, that they have something to strive for. If they are given sound advice they will see that. It is about mapping out the career of a player. It is not just about this deal."

Utter nonsense, of course.

Because $227,000 a week is no more likely to corrupt someone as $152,000. At those stratospheric figures, the difference in salary will make very little difference in his lifestyle. If he loses focus and his game falls off, it isn't because he's got that extra $75,000 to play with every week. It's because he has any kind of towering sum at all – if the cause of his loss of productivity is indeed money.

This, to Liverpool, is about cost control and about setting itself up well for the hoped-for contract extension to the contract extension. If Sterling gets what he wants now and sticks around, he'll want even more the next time.

This contract controversy has fascinated soccer fans and media. There's been the predictable flood of columns (sorry for contributing to that noise, by the way) and of former players chiming in. And much of it has not been favorable to Sterling. A parody Twitter account @GreedySterling has amassed 32,500 followers in just three weeks. In a poll on Metro.co.uk, 78 percent of respondents clicked "Absolutely!" on the question whether Sterling was a "money grabber."

Rather than focusing on soccer – which, ironically, is what his many critics keep telling him to do, rather than go haggling for more money – Sterling has had to defend himself. He argues it's all a timing issue and has put off further talks, a move that seems to further ramp up the pressure on the club to retain its young star.

"It's not about money at all," Sterling told the BBC. "I don't want to be perceived as a money-grabbing 20-year-old. I've never ever wanted to demand anything off no-one [sic], I'm just trying to demand the best of myself."

Sterling isn't doing the best job of verbalizing his argument – nor did it help that a picture of him huffing nitrous oxide recently turned up – but he's hardly in the wrong. He plainly wants to feel out in which direction Liverpool goes after it backslid significantly this season, following last year's title challenge. It might well have a new manager next season and needs significant strengthening to compete again.

Pushing off negotiations to the summer will force the club's hand in strengthening the squad. Sterling says, after all, that he just wants to win trophies. Certainly, there's a measure of self-interest involved. Other clubs could emerge as options in the summer, building up his leverage even further.

But the central disconnect seems to be that: Just because he's young, just because he plays soccer for a living, Sterling isn't allowed to maximize his market value. Never mind that he's a speed merchant, who is perpetually one literal misstep away from soccer oblivion. Never mind that he's prodigiously talented and has overcome staggeringly prohibitive odds to get where he is, and that the market for soccer players now wants to reward him for it.

This is the pungent hypocrisy of those who observe professional sports, and therefore enable it. There's an unmistakable aspirational quality to fandom. Most all of us have dreamed of being Sterling at one time or many times in our lives. It's a fantasy life he gets to live. Envy is inevitable. And then comes the ire when he insists on converting every penny of his earning power, rather than just being happy to be there. He's called ungrateful.

Athletes are entitled to make whatever they're able to make, just like anyone else. The arguments are well-worn: capitalism, short shelf-life, blah blah blah. But it seems that someone at that age – when most of us were doing something making the minimum wage, if that – turning his back on that kind of money stokes the fires of fury even higher.

Another hackneyed trope: Athletes are overpaid. Actually, their market is ruthlessly efficient. For the most part, they are paid exactly what they've earned, what the market will bear. (Even if they don't always produce enough to justify a new contract based on past performance.) To a large extent, fandom is born of some deep-seated desire to belong to the team. So it's an odd quirk of the majority of fans to side with management on these matters.

In the public's view, it's almost always the player who is overcharging. It's seldom that the club is underbidding.

But Sterling is well within his rights – legally and morally – to push for whatever money he can get. Or to not take any money at all. And nobody else has any business telling him what he's worth or isn't.

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