Nobody should feel good about the Alexander Isak transfer saga - player, clubs and even fans come out of it looking bad.
Sooner or later, the Alexander Isak transfer saga will come to an end. A story that has chewed up headlines will be resolved one way or another, and eventually the world will keep turning. It will turn with plenty of people on it who should feel rather embarrassed about themselves.
That includes the player himself, both Newcastle United and Liverpool, and the many of the fans of the two teams involved in the farrago. This is a transfer story that has made most people involved look like either hypocritical or slightly foolish, and the way in which it has unfurled says a lot about the lopsided relationships between players, clubs and supporters – and perhaps about a collective failure to accept a changed footballing landscape.
The Alexander Isak transfer saga shows us a world in which loyalty means little
The moment that Isak decided to force his way out of Newcastle United by refusing to train or play despite being paid £120,000 per week to do so, he made his view of the relationship between the club and himself eminently clear.
No matter that Newcastle and their fans had put their hopes and dreams into his performances or that they had intended him to be the centrepiece of their journey towards glory – he wanted more. More money, more chances at trophies. He held no loyalty towards his team.
In that light, it’s not too hard to have sympathy with the overwhelmingly negative fan reaction to his ‘strike’ – even if the individual who used the medium of a bedsheet dangled over a railing to describe Isak as a ‘pure rat’ should perhaps seek at least some degree of counselling.
From the supporters’ perspective, Isak agreed to a contract which compelled him to remain with the club for some time yet, and was being paid very handsomely (both in money and affection) in return. From Isak’s perspective, that contract was clearly more of a suggestion.
On the other hand, we have a fair idea of how the club would have treated Isak had he struggled after signing from Real Sociedad. Then, the contract he signed would have been no more than a suggestion to Newcastle. He would have been sold at the first opportunity, perhaps even exiled from the first team and isolated to force him out, with scant regard for his own wishes or whatever life he had built for himself on Tyneside. It’s how every top level club now operates – and players know it.
Michael Owen – admittedly not the former professional that Newcastle fans most wish to hear from on any given day – had an interesting perspective on the affair:
“Nine times out of 10, when a move comes about, it's normally a club forcing a player and nobody's bothered,” the former striker told The Chronicle. “Nobody says anything despite any kids that are in school or any families that have settled in an area or anything else like that.
“But when it's on the other foot… The whole world goes into meltdown and how dare somebody try and force a move through? I'm not going to sit here and criticise Isak.”
When it suits clubs, players are treated not as people but as commodities. Just look at the way that Chelsea have handled their so-called ‘bomb squad’ of unwanted players, isolated from the rest of the first team, or cherry pick your favourite example of a player being elbowed out from their club either because they were no longer wanted or simply because their team saw a chance to turn a profit.
And if players seem to demonstrate a lack of loyalty and gratitude, then it’s also partly because they know how fickle fans can be, too. Heroes become villains at remarkable pace - the perceptions of Marcus Rashford among Manchester United fans provide an example - and vice versa, as Granit Xhaka will know from his time at Arsenal, when he went from swearing at the fans as they booed him off the pitch to a firm favourite within a season or two. The reality is that should Isak end up staying at Newcastle and reintegrating into the squad, then any rancour will likely turn into cheering his goals before too long, and Isak knows it.
Remember Andy Carroll, who was in many ways the Anti-Isak of his time - forced out at St. James’ Park in 2011 because Liverpool were offering so much money that it was felt the offer simply could not be turned down. Carroll made it pretty plain through media comments that he had wanted to stay, but his hand was forced. Then, when Liverpool next visited St. James’ Park with Carroll in tow, he was booed by the same fans in the Gallowgate End that had cheered him on just a few months before.
Isak (and many other players who have done much the same down the years) treat their teams and fans without loyalty because they rightly know that they won’t get it back in turn. Why should players not put their careers and earnings first when the clubs would put their bank balance over their personal needs if the boot was on the other foot?
Of course, while Isak may have every fundamental right not to give a damn about Newcastle or its supporters, it’s still only right to acknowledge the immense amount he has been paid and to perform his job, even at a basic level, and the extent to which the fans underwrite that hefty pay packet. Isak doesn’t come out of this affair in the right, as there is still and underlying debt owed to the supporters which demands lip service, at least.
Not that anyone else comes out of all this looking much better than Isak. Liverpool’s blatant tactics to unsettle Isak are beneath basic decency too, not that Newcastle would have done anything different – indeed, they are doing precisely the same things right now in their pursuit of Yoane Wissa, all while complaining bitterly about the way that Isak has comported himself. Moral high ground is hard to find in this saga, but people trying to claim it seem to be in abundant supply, not least among the fans.
Fans have to accept that football has changed – and the Isak saga is only the tip of the iceberg
For all the many Newcastle fans furious at Isak, how many are equally upset by the behaviour of Wissa, or were critical of Anthony Gordon when he forced his way out of Everton to move to St. James’ Park? If Isak is a ‘pure rat’, then why are either of those players welcome or wanted?
The hypocrisy of Newcastle fans in holding their player to a completely different standard to the ones that they hope will join their club is, of course, completely normalised behaviour right across the footballing world and not something that should be held against one club’s supporters in particular. Liverpool fans have been doing much the same thing this summer – compare their excitement over the prospect of signing Isak with the way they reacted to Trent Alexander-Arnold’s departure.
Alexander-Arnold never once downed tools and helped Liverpool to win the second Premier League title of his long career with the club, but was still pilloried by his own supporters for daring to leave at the end of his contract despite playing such an enormous role in the lifting of several pieces of silverware. Most Liverpool fans know that they would not have won the 2019 Champions League without him, but that hasn’t prevented an outpouring of vitriol.
At the heart of the hypocrisy, of course, is the fact that when we watch players wear our club’s shirts and score goals or lift trophies, we are watching other people live out our dreams – dreams that are entirely unobtainable for those mortals amongst us not blessed with immense athletic prowess. Our teams’ players become the avatars of those dreams, and we hold them up to a standard that they don’t ask for, don’t want and mostly don’t really try to live up to.
Nor should they, at least now. The era in which player, club and fan were bound by a sense of community and common background are long gone, and it’s a truth which many fans struggle to accept.
We still hear clubs trot out the same old hackneyed clichés, of course, about fans being “the lifeblood of the club” and all that, but community institutions who put their supporters at the heart of their thinking don’t increase charges for disabled parking outside the ground, as Manchester United and Aston Villa recently have, or try to gouge them for every penny they have in dozens of different inventive ways.
Clubs at the highest level are no longer community institutions at all, for the most part. They are run by billionaire hedge fund investors looking for a slice of fame and a chance to make even more cash, and the fans mean nothing to them beyond their capacity to spend. When we go through the turnstiles into the ground, we are entering a business transaction, money for entertainment. Nothing more.
Clubs treat fans with no more loyalty than they treat players – the difference is that the players have wised up to the fact, often through bitter experience or simply thanks to the tutelage of cynical agents, while many supporters still cling on to a memory a different era that once existed but which came to an end decades ago.
Fans, of course, still have their own community between themselves, and that’s a precious thing – but it’s not realistic to expect the players to share it when their lives are so very separate. For the most part, they aren’t local lads living on the same streets as the people in the stands. That connection, with a handful of rare and treasured exceptions, has been severed.
As such, when players like Isak use such blunt means to force through transfers, it should be understood that they are making a business decision as the commodity they know themselves to be – and not as a person who can be expected to feel any great kinship with the people who ultimately pay his way. Jackie Milburn may have worked at an Ashington colliery, but Isak comes from Sweden. There’s no point in asking him to feel the same way about Newcastle.
Isak, of course, has been particularly brazen in this instance and it probably isn’t asking too much to expect players to display a basic level of gratitude towards the supporters whose money ultimately pays their exorbitant wages and lays the foundation for their fame. Many players have the decency to pretend. Some probably even mean it. Isak just can’t be bothered. There’s a certain honesty in that, perhaps.
Still, Isak should appreciate his good fortune a little more, and treat those who pay him with more respect. Equally, clubs should perhaps remember that the players they haggle over are human beings – and fans should learn the harsh lesson that relationship between them, their teams and the players has shifted, or at least to tone down the bile aimed at players like Isak if they aren’t going to spray it evenly in the direction of the likes of Gordon or Wissa. All of this is just the modern reality of the sport.
The Isak transfer story has accidentally held a mirror up to football and its cynical, business-oriented nature quite perfectly. It isn’t pretty, and nobody involved looks good in the reflection.
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