What made Manchester City winners: Sterling reveals its Guardiola’s fines

Manchester City star Raheem Sterling believes Pep Guardiola’s introduction of fines to punish indiscipline has proven crucial in turning the side into Premier League’s gold standard. Guardiola was revolutionising English football one step at a time, with the age-old tradition of fines. The Catalan showed his methods and style could work on these shores, despite much criticism during an unsuccessful first season. Guardiola has decided to alter the manner in which players are fined for misdemeanours such as lateness, using your mobile phone at the dinner table and urinating in the showers to do so. Rather than have a set figure for each ‘crime’, players will be fined a percentage of their weekly wage. That is because paying £100 fine is nothing for star players such as Kevin De Bruyne or Sergio Aguero, but for youngsters like Phil Foden that is a much larger part of their weekly wage. That money might go to charity. "It's got to be a mentality," Sterling told the Daily Mirror. "He [Guardiola] tried to change that, change the mentality. He brought in fines and, I don't want to talk about it in too much detail, but fines to keep people in check to make sure we were serious and ready. They were just for things like being late, being late for a meeting, little things to make sure your mentality is right, you are not slipping away. Then we showed we were [ready], he took the fines out. But credit to him because the standard has actually been raised this season." City will aim to complete a historic domestic treble by winning the FA Cup against Watford this weekend at Wembley.

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