Q.P.R. was the first club to recognize Sterling’s talent. He was enrolled in the team’s academy not many years after arriving from his native Jamaica when he was 5. He was a prodigy early on, and by his own account was working toward becoming a professional player by the time he was 8 or 9.

Raheem Shaquille Sterling knows he has gifts. When he goes back to Jamaica, he hangs out sometimes with Usain Bolt, and he knows that the world’s fastest man would change places with him at the drop of a hat.

O.K., it happens to be another English team, Manchester United, that Bolt imagines playing for in his wildest dreams. But it is the game, more than the fame, that Bolt envies in Sterling.

For Bolt, at 28, this will be an unfulfilled wish, aside from occasionally training with United.

For Sterling, who turns 20 in December, every dream seems still attainable.

Yet sports, and life, is never that simple or predictable. Sterling’s career path has been obvious since he scored precious goals for England at the Under-17 World Cup in Mexico three years ago. He has a child, a daughter, from a brief relationship. He has twice faced charges, though never found guilty, of violence against women.

Liverpool takes care of his training and his lifestyle, and he, being ever more determined, takes on extra time in the gym to strengthen his slender upper body. Strengthen, though he is careful to say he does not want to add bulk to a slight frame that may still be growing, one that allows him to sway with extraordinary dexterity out of the way of harmful tackles.

The club versus country context is not of his, or Liverpool’s, making. FIFA and UEFA crowd the calendar with ever more games, more demands on the same bodies, more encroachment on the free time of star players.