In recent times, Mr. Sterling, who plays for the Premier League champions, Manchester City, has featured in tabloid stories criticizing the hours he keeps, the cars he drives and the junk food he has been seen to consume.

He has been criticized for buying his mother a house, for flying on a budget airline when he is paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and for chartering a private jet.

Image Mr. Sterling has explained the tattoo by saying, “My father died from being gunned down to death. I made a promise to myself that I would never touch a gun in my lifetime.” Credit... Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“I’ve got that face,” he said in an interview with The Guardian newspaper last year. “You know when you see someone on TV and go, ‘I don’t like him?’ Some people have that face and I’ve got it. I can’t do anything about it. I’ve just got face: He looks like a brat. The ‘I don’t like face.’ That’s how I see it. And I’m not a brat. Sometimes I’m watching a movie and you see a character and go, ‘I don’t like him’ — that’s me.”

He has explained the image by saying in a statement that “when I was 2, my father died from being gunned down to death. I made a promise to myself that I would never touch a gun in my lifetime.”

That episode happened when he was growing up in Jamaica before moving to North London. And, he has pointed out, the tattoo is on the same right leg as he uses to kick the ball into the goal with such deftness and regularity as to make him an important part of the England squad. “I shoot with my right foot so it has a deeper meanings,” he said.

But, of course, the latest controversy resonates much further at a time when the United States is seized with controversy over ownership of versions of the weapon Mr. Sterling displays on his leg.