Alexander Isak’s brutal rejection of Newcastle causes confusion, irritation and discussion about how to react

How does it feel to be told you are no longer wanted?

Upsetting, obviously, but what about confusing, irritating, heartbreaking? Did you see it coming, or did it hit you where it hurts, like a right-foot volley struck from close range?

And how do you respond to it? With denial, perhaps? By pleading for another chance? By lashing out or breaking down, with a reluctant acceptance and a sad letting go, or by gripping on with everything you have?

These questions, or versions of them, have enveloped Newcastle United this summer as they have wrestled with the distressing issue of Alexander Isak, their best and most valuable player, who has made it clear, first in deeds and now through words, that “the relationship can’t continue”.

From boardroom to head coach’s office to dressing room to terraces, emotions have vied with each other. In this, football provides contradictory guidance. On the one hand, a team is a collective that can only function with buy-in, and the old cliche goes that you do not keep an unhappy player. For fans — particularly at a partisan, passionate outpost like Newcastle – the equation is simple; at a minimum, players must give everything for the cause.

Advertisement

On the other hand? Well, this is a business, and Isak is both a world-class talent and an estimated £150million asset. Happiness does not feature on the bottom line.

If Newcastle have employed a consistent strategy (and it has wavered on occasion), it has been to tough it out. At the end of last season, after winning their first domestic trophy for 70 years — Isak scored against Liverpool, the team he now wishes to join, in the Carabao Cup final — their priority was to keep the centre-forward and open negotiations about a new contract.

The details of how the situation has broken down so badly from that point are disputed, but some facts are clear. Isak travelled with his team-mates to their pre-season training camp in Austria, which is when Liverpool first expressed an interest in signing him. He was then omitted from coach Eddie Howe’s matchday squad for a friendly against Celtic and did not accompany his colleagues on their subsequent pre-season tour to East Asia.

Since then, he has trained alone, and was not involved in Newcastle’s first Premier League fixture this season, a goalless draw at Aston Villa last Saturday, after which chants of “One greedy b*****d,” were aimed in Isak’s direction by travelling supporters, a reference to the bigger salary he would presumably earn if he moved elsewhere.

At the start of the month, Liverpool — who had already beaten Newcastle to the signing of Hugo Ekitike, another high-profile striker, this summer — had returned with an official bid of £110million (about $148m), which was immediately rejected. Nobody is disputing that Isak is refusing to play for Newcastle, although the club’s hope has always been that he can eventually be brought back around.

Then came this week’s statements, in which Isak spoke about promises being “broken and trust is lost” and Newcastle responded by insisting that “no commitment has ever been made by a club official that Alex can leave Newcastle United this summer”.

With a juddering sort of inevitability, Newcastle’s next match is against Liverpool, an evening kick-off at home on Monday — which is a national holiday in the UK. A boozy, boisterous atmosphere was always likely anyway in such circumstances, but there has been a strong strand of opinion within St James’ Park that Liverpool’s unsettling of such an important player has been part of a deliberate strategy. They are certain another bid for Isak will follow with the summer transfer window heading into its final week. It means that Isak will again be an absent focal point.

Advertisement

The end of Newcastle’s statement was like a smothering by kindness.

“This is a proud football club with proud traditions and we strive to retain our family feel,” they said. “Alex remains part of our family and will be welcomed back when he is ready to rejoin his team-mates.”

They grip on.

Newcastle’s stance on Isak can be viewed in three ways. From the top of the club, the message has been a very clear “he’s not for sale.” While the club have suffered through a couple of years with limited spending on transfers — their majority owner, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), is very wealthy, but football has strict rules on profit and sustainability, the dreaded acronym PSR — this summer brought greater freedom to augment the squad.

While selling good players is now part of every club’s model — something Newcastle have traditionally not been adept at — Isak is not the good player they want to sell. In both of the past two seasons, he has scored more than 20 goals in the Premier League, the kind of return that puts him in the same kind of bracket as Mohamed Salah and Erling Haaland. Great strikers are difficult — and expensive — to find.

“Not for sale” is not quite the same as “won’t be sold”, however. Ultimately, everybody has a price, and Newcastle value Isak at £150m, which would represent a significant profit on a player they bought from Spain’s Real Sociedad for £63m three years ago this month.

The third element is that Newcastle would need to find a replacement for Isak, which is complicated further by already needing one centre-forward after Callum Wilson’s departure when his contract expired at the end of last season. The No 9 shirt is famous on Tyneside, previously worn by the likes of Alan Shearer, Les Ferdinand and Malcolm Macdonald. For now, with most recent occupier Wilson gone and its potential next one Isak absent, it lies empty, both physically and spiritually. At Villa Park six days ago, Newcastle played with winger Anthony Gordon as a “false nine”.

Advertisement

By signing Ekitike from Eintracht Frankfurt, Liverpool made it less easy for Newcastle to sell Isak, but difficulty in recruiting strikers has been a wider theme for them in any case. Liam Delap, Joao Pedro, Ekitike, Benjamin Sesko and Yoane Wissa have all been targeted and either moved elsewhere or, in Wissa’s case, stayed put at Brentford. For now, anyway.

With the transfer window closing until January next Monday, September 1, time is short. As Newcastle said in their own statement, “the conditions of a sale this summer have not transpired. We do not foresee those conditions being met.”

Howe has walked a delicate line along a pathway strewn with obstacles.

Here is what he knows.

He knows that, in the short term at least, he will not find a better striker than Isak — under his coaching, the Sweden international has lost his reputation for inconsistency and developed into a serious talent.

He also knows that to react with anger might destroy any chance of a rapprochement. As a football man, he knows that an unsettled player can poison a dressing room. He knows he has to demonstrate authority, that the rest of his squad are watching; if he does not set an example, might others try to emulate Isak? He knows that if he keeps his hands clean in any dispute between agent and directors, he can prevent himself from being seen as an enemy. He has described himself as “totally detached from the situation, to a degree.”

Howe’s approach has been very deliberate. He has refrained from specific public criticism of Isak. The closest he has come was on that pre-season tour in South Korea when he told reporters: “You have to earn the right to train with us. We are Newcastle United. The player has a responsibility here to be part of a team and part of a squad — you have to act in the right way.”

After that discordant song from the fans at Villa last weekend, Howe said, “The door is well and truly open. But, yeah, (Isak) has to decide what he wants to do … There’s only one person really that can control it.”

Howe’s has not closed the door on Isak’s return (Stu Forster/Getty Images)

With Isak having three years left on his contract, this is not the full picture; Newcastle are in control of whether to keep him or sell him. Isak merely controls how he reacts to it.

This morning (Friday), at his regular pre-match media briefing, Howe responded to Isak’s statement with diplomacy which veered towards the gushing. He described him as “an outstanding player and a very, very good person, a very good character. This has been a difficult situation for him.”

On Isak’s future, Howe reiterated: “100 per cent I want to see him back in a Newcastle shirt.”

For fans, loyalty is simple. The clue is in the word “supporter”. If you follow a club, chances are it is a relationship for life, one handed down within a family. If you grow up in a compact, one-club city such as Newcastle, there is usually little choice in the matter. If you find your team another way, the same kind of rules apply. The decision is made and you are lumbered with them.

Advertisement

For players, it is different. Football is a short career, and opportunities are limited. Before Newcastle’s takeover in 2021, players understood that Tyneside was not a place to fulfil ambitions. Most fans hated it, but they recognised it, too. The club were, in the words of Steve Bruce, Howe’s immediate predecessor, “ticking along,” and sometimes scarcely that.

Newcastle have a long and depressing history of selling their best players, from locally-reared stars such as Paul Gascoigne and Peter Beardsley in the 1980s onwards. The notion remains a hard one to accept, particularly now the club does have the ambition to compete for the biggest honours, even if their infrastructure — and wage bill — are not there yet.

Isak is not a Geordie but a Swede. He did not grow up idolising Shearer, Newcastle’s greatest No 9 of all and still the leading goalscorer of the Premier League era. He does not have an umbilical bond with the club, but there are ways to behave and ways to leave. By refusing to play, by going public, he has severed a link. It is a very basic kind of betrayal.

“I feel sad, angry, disappointed, all those things,” says Thomas Concannon, a Newcastle season-ticket holder. “Isak is held in such high regard because of what happened last season. After the cup final (that win against Liverpool in March), I couldn’t have imagined a situation where that lad wouldn’t have legendary status at Newcastle for the rest of his life. He’s found a way to ruin all of that. It feels so unnecessary.”

“For me, it’s pure bewilderment,” says fellow supporter Graeme Robson. “I don’t understand how we’ve gone from the cup final to the parade afterwards, when the whole city was absolutely buzzing, to this. It baffles me. What’s got into his head? I feel so sorry for Eddie and the coaching staff. They took the punt on him. Where were Liverpool then?”

Fan Chris Heron has concerns about the conduct of Isak’s camp, the role of the media in stories such as this and how English football’s traditional ‘Big Six’, a group of clubs that does not include Newcastle, hoard power and influence, but he says that if this is “purely coming from him and wanting to move, then that’s where I’ve got zero sympathy for Isak. It’s really disrespectful”.

These are three opinions, all valid in their own right. But they are interesting, too, in that Concannon, Robson and Heron are influential figures within Wor Flags, the group whose tifo banners have become such a feature of matchday at St James’ (and at Wembley, which they helped turn into a frothing sea of black and white that day less than six months ago). Their displays capture a moment and set a tone.

Isak believes he has worlds outside of Newcastle to conquer (Stu Forster/Getty Images)

Last season, Wor Flags paid thousands of pounds — they are fan-funded and operate independently from the club — for a display in Isak’s honour. His name, in the blue and yellow of the Swedish flag, filled one end of the stadium. At the other, there was a picture of him above the legend “Alexander the Great.” It feels both very recent and very distant.

Advertisement

The Liverpool match on Monday provides Wor Flags with a dilemma. “It’s probably one of the hardest displays we’ve had to do,” Robson admits. “Because there are so many different opinions, it’s almost impossible to get it right,” says Concannon. “I’ve been up and down on it. Do we go hard on the situation?” “Nigh-on impossible,” Heron agrees.

“As a group, we’ve gone above and beyond what we’ve done for any other player for him, simply because we recognised how important he was,” Concannon says. “We’ve shown him nothing but support and respect, and it feels like that’s just been thrown back in our faces.”

It would be representative of one strand of thinking if, for example, Wor Flags superimposed Isak’s face on the body of a snake or next to bags of cash. It would certainly add to what might well be a hostile atmosphere. But what about the optics of attacking one of their own in front of a global television audience, when the focus should be on beating the champions? When there are 11 other Newcastle players to support?

And if Isak’s strategy is to muscle his way out of town, wouldn’t this fury only play into his hands and offer very public evidence of the shattered relationship he talked about? Would it serve to help him and help Liverpool, and therefore hinder Newcastle’s chances of keeping him? Perhaps loyalty and disloyalty are not so straightforward.

The people at Wor Flags chat through their ideas as a group, then vote on what to do. No spoilers here, but the general tone of their display on Monday will be a celebration of togetherness and an affirmation that a united Newcastle is a strong Newcastle. They have attempted to reflect Howe’s thinking, that a positive message is better than the opposite, and that a direct attack on Isak would be counter-productive.

But, contained within that, there is a powerful message to the striker, if he chooses to acknowledge it.

“You have to remove your own emotion and think about what the bigger picture is,” Concannon says.

Advertisement

“Some people will complain that it’s not strong enough, but we can’t die on this hill as a fan group,” says Heron. “We can’t just put expletives on a banner. We’re there to support Newcastle, not just complain about one player.”

The sadness is that this level of consideration feels very one-way but then, as Howe also said, “this is an unfortunate situation but there are always two sides to every story”. Howe even claimed not to be aware of whether Isak had been fined or disciplined for missing the Villa game.

“I’m still in a place where I struggle to believe this is happening and that Isak would actually be going on like this,” Concannon says. “I mean, he obviously is, but I long for the day that he comes back, he’s integrated into the team, we’re singing his name again and he has a fantastic season for us.”

The volume against Liverpool is certain to be high, and there are few better, more raucous arenas than an aggrieved St James’. “We need to harness that, use it, but not be reckless with it,” Howe said. “We have to concentrate on the game, deliver our game plan and not get too emotional, but use the energy from the crowd.”

It is the kind of fixture that Isak graces, that he relishes and rises to. It is his choice not to be involved in this one. He wants something else.

What Newcastle want is to remind him of what he already has and that it is not too late. That they still love him, only now their love hurts.

(Top photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)

Click here to read article