Newcastle United want to keep him, Liverpool want to sign him, and the player has gone on strike. Everyone's being a bit of a dick about it, and that's *very* 2025.
The case of Alexander Isak, Newcastle United and Liverpool is one that we have seen play out a thousand times before. A player arrives at a football club, plays happily enough for a while, but then decides that he wants another club. There is, coincidentally, another club willing to take him. But his current club don’t want him to sell, leading to a ridiculous stand-off between grown men with no easy resolution.
Of course, the lines on this are already firmly drawn. Liverpool supporters believe that he should have the freedom to break his contract any time he feels like it. Newcastle supporters believe that he should stay at their club and quit his whining. Everybody else is watching on in baffled bemusement.
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Isak hasn’t helped his case by being such a dick about it all. In another, smarter world, he could have made an ethical case in public for being allowed to leave the club. But we don’t live anywhere near the smartest timeline, so he’s acted like a petulant kid over it, presumably under the instruction of his agent.
The paucity of his argument doesn’t exactly help. Players happily sign six-year contracts because it gives them financial security in an extremely volatile industry in which you’re only as good as your current contract, and to suggest that players should be able to just breach that contract because a better offer comes along is weak, as is the argument that there was a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ in place over it.
Lads, this is a huge financial contract. If Isak was to go to Liverpool for £150 million and they matched Mo Salah’s estimated £400,000-a-week earnings for him on a five-year contract, the total value of it would be just over a quarter of abillion pounds. If Isak seriously believes that anyone is going to agree something informal over a deal with that financial value, he’s only trying to fool himself.
And you do start to wonder what Liverpool make of it all. Fans are obviously all over this - having seemingly forgotten their reaction to Trent Alexander-Arnold’s decision to move to Madrid at the end of his contract rather than sign another extension at Anfield, whichwasn’t even breaching his contract - but the hierarchy of the club itself could be forgiven wondering why they should be spending such a hefty amount on him when a, they’ve already signed Hugo Ekitike, who is a remarkably similar player and is arguably better in that highly specific role, and b, what happens in a couple of years’ time, should Real Madrid or Barcelona come knocking for him.
Certainly, if Isak was planning these sort of high-jinks, he possibly couldbn’t have considered a worse club to perform them with than Newcastle. The owners of the club are some of the few in the world who actuallycould let him rot in the reserves for the remainder of his contract and not feel any particular financial burden, even if it didn’t do the club’s PSR position any good.
To be clear, I don’t think he’s going to be fed into a wood-chipping machine, or anything like that. I’m just uncertain of the wisdom of antagonising extremely wealthy people with a history of violence towards their enemies, who come from a culture in which a great deal of weight is put upon ‘honour’.
But the most striking thing about all of this is how very 2025 it all is, because nobody really emerges from it all with a great deal of credit. Alexander Isak is a dick. His agent is a - possibly even bigger - dick. Liverpool have clearly tapped Isak up while feigning innocence in the way that the biggest clubs always do, and Newcastle’s owners are Newcastle’s owners. How are you supposed to cheer for among that cast of rogues?
There’s a been spate of this sort of behaviour at the start of this season, of players being withdrawn from team because their “heads aren’t in the right place”, all of which makes you wonder about the efficacy of the anti-tapping up rules that do exist.
Of course, the international nature of the game makes them harder to enforce, particularly with UEFA now being pretty much in the hands of the biggest club teams. But the extent to which the biggest clubs are simply hoovering up all the best players does seem more noticeable than usual, this summer, as does the extent to which players are prepared to publicly throw their toys out the pram to get that move.
And nothing ‘s going to be done about it because it suits the biggest clubs - “sorry, but there’s a food chain” isn’t a convincing answer when such hoarding will be the death of competition in the goddam game - and because it’s practically impossible to enforce. In an era of hush-hush Whatsapp conversations, trying to enforce football clubs not acting like a creepy old man round a set of school gates at home time feels more or less impossible.
It should go without saying that footballers shouldn’t sign six-year contracts with clubs on the basis of a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ (which is suspiciously one-sided) and unless they’re prepared to commit to that club for that period of time. The price that you pay for the security of that longer contract is that you won’t be going anywhere for the duration of that time unless the club that hold your registration agree to it.
And it should be added that yes, clubs routinely act like dicks too. “Bomb squads”, those groups of players who are sent off to train on their own in a manner which often seems deliberately targetted to humiliate them into doing what they’re told, are an abomination. It does rather feel as though the entire professional game of football could do with being sat down and told to grow the fuck up.
What’s the answer to the Isak situation? Well, the transfer window closes on Monday and there are still few signs that this signing is going to happen. But five days is a long time at this time of year, and Newcastle still don’t have a replacement for him. Until they have one, the likelihood of him leaving the club will be slight. The one thing that we can say for certain is that no-one will do anything that isn’t in their very narrow self-interest, because nobody does that any more.
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