Silva compared a childhood picture of Mendy to a character on a Spanish sweet brand ‘Conguitos’ and captioned it “Guess who?”.
The Portuguese international deleted the tweet after online users descended on him, although Mendy took no offence by laughing it off as a joke between two friends who have played together at French club AS Monaco and now Manchester City.
The Football Association are investigating Silva for the tweet while Anti-Discrimination group ‘Kick It Out’ have condemned last season’s PFA Player of the year nominee who has since apologised regardless.
Mendy has personally written to the FA stating his teammate’s innocence.
“I don’t feel there’s any racism in it,” Sterling told Sky Sports after City’s 3-1 win at Everton on Saturday.
“It’s a situation between two friends, Bernardo and Mendy, as everyone knows. I can see exactly the point where some people can get touchy-feely on it but I feel in that situation Bernardo made a joke to his friend.
“He’s not referred to his skin colour, he’s not referred to his lips. In both the pictures they’ve both got small heads, you know. The most important thing for me is he didn’t refer to a colour.”
Sterling added: “I feel it’s really sad to see someone like Bernardo, the whole week, be kind of down about it because he’s not that way inclined. I keep going on about it, they’re really good friends, it’s really sad to see.
“He’s not in the wrong for me but at the same time I can see where people think it’s wrong and we just need to be smarter on social media.
“We understand in this day and age anything you say and anything you do can quickly be judged and it’s really just a sad situation in this moment in time.
“There’s not one moment he uses a negative term to speak about his skin colour so that’s the most important thing. He tried to make a joke and that joke wasn’t the best, but we’ve got to move on and understand it was not intentional.”
