How Alexander Isak tried and miserably failed to sabotage Newcastle’s Champions League bid

Editor F365
Newcastle striker Alexander Isak looks dejected during a match
Newcastle striker Alexander Isak looks dejected during a match

Alexander Isak tried to sabotage Newcastle by scoring important goals before showing players ‘have the power to move where they want when they want’.

The post-deadline day Mediawatch is always a bit of a mess with the general coverage just trying to catch up on deal sheets and whichever players Chelsea and Nottingham Forest forgot to sell.

But Luke Edwards and Alexander Isak are the gifts which keep giving.

 

Isak it off
Mediawatch would much rather move on from questioning what has made Luke Edwards the way he is, but his continued attempts to make the Alexander Isak transfer saga ‘simple for simpletons’ makes it impossible.

Perhaps the most online man there has ever been has moved seamfully on from insisting Isak was not for sale, to saying he was ‘wrong…but in the end 100%’ right when Liverpool signed him, to now floating the suggestion that he had basically started sort of match-fixing towards the end of the season, so Newcastle are better off rid of him:

A reminder that this is a purported journalist who proudly told the world in a ‘boast post’ about not spending enough time with his family that ‘I only ever report what I’m told and learn’. So when ‘some insiders’ tell him Isak was phoning it in for the final months of last campaign, Edwards has no choice but to parrot that without challenge.

His Daily Telegraph article obviously contains no mention of how Isak scored four Premier League goals and assisted one in April and May. All were in victories. Three of the goals he scored or assisted were the first in eventual wins and the last was an 89th-minute penalty equaliser at Brighton, immediately after which he tried to retrieve the ball to take it back to the centre circle and commence the search for a winner.

If he ‘did not want the team to qualify for the Champions League’ then he made a right sodding hash of sabotaging things. And why on earth did Newcastle continue to play and try so desperately all summer to keep such a destructive influence? Those ‘insiders’ are weirdly quiet on that contradiction.

In the article, Edwards adds that Newcastle ‘began to consider what they would do if Isak wanted to leave’ around that point. They really ought to have told Edwards, who for months up until Isak arrived at Anfield on deadline day was adamant him leaving wasn’t an option.

‘They were braced for bids and attempts to unsettle the player. An asking price in excess of £150m was the first and most important step. It was so high, it was designed to effectively inform potential buyers that the player was not for sale.’

Because the best way to underline how something or someone is ‘not for sale’ is to set an ‘asking price’. An asking price they didn’t even hold out for, no less.

Why? Because ‘Isak had done so much damage to his reputation, incensing the supporters, that in the end PIF decided a deal made sense, as long as Liverpool were willing to pay £130m.’

It’s just weird that Isak hadn’t damaged his reputation whatsoever and knocked £20m off his not-for-sale-asking-price in April when actively trying to stop Newcastle qualifying for the Champions League by continuing to score goals.

At this stage, the game is on to see who can get Edwards to report just the most batsh*t insane thing possible. The man is duty-bound to only ever report what he is told so it shouldn’t be too difficult.

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Fight the power
The contrast between how Isak and Yoane Wissa forced their dream moves this summer while Marc Guehi was prevented from making his is most certainly a talking point coming out of an absurd transfer window.

But there is that and then there is Oliver Holt in the Daily Mail saying this was ‘the summer player power went mad’ while citing… three examples.

It doesn’t especially feel like ‘player power in football is out of control’ and that ‘what Isak did used to be the exception… now, it is getting to the stage where it is the norm’.

Is something sort of similar happening three times really ‘the norm’?

Isak, Wissa and Viktor Gyokeres all refused to train or play and deployed some other nefarious tactics to facilitate their transfers, sure. But one cost a Premier League record fee, the other moved for £55m as a 28-year-old in the last year of his contract and the other was always going to be sold no matter how he conducted himself this summer.

Holt’s framing of Isak as forcing a move ‘from a team that pays him extremely well to a team that will pay him even more’ is wonderfully deliberately obtuse in pretending that he hasn’t just joined the Premier League champions and Champions League favourites from a team outside the established elite.

And this line is exceptional:

‘If Isak can get himself out of Newcastle, a club owned by a repressive nation state whose rulers are not exactly shy about dealing uncompromisingly with dissenters, then it can happen anywhere.’

Sure, the owners ‘are not exactly shy about dealing uncompromisingly with dissenters’ but they also weren’t going to assassinate Isak for not playing, so what’s your point?

Ultimately Mediawatch does not disagree with the premise that players should at least honour the parts of their contracts which stipulate they should train and play while they are able to and being paid for the trouble.

But this is just nonsense:

‘Isak’s transfer underlines the fact that this was the summer when players cut themselves free of the last remaining structures that govern employment and loyalty in the game and proved that they have the power to move where they want when they want.’

Isak moved for £125m, Wissa for £55m and Gyokeres for £64m. It worked for them to go on strike but it also cost their new employers a small fortune to cut them ‘free of the last remaining structures that govern employment and loyalty in the game’.

The point remains: players only ‘have the power to move where they want when they want’ if someone can afford them. The clubs they are contracted to still need to be recompensed. This isn’t going to spark some sort of free market in which players control everything.

There is a reason the only other two cases Holt brings up are Pierre van Hooijdonk from literally the previous millennium, and Sepp Blatter’s daft ‘slavery’ stuff on Cristiano Ronaldo in 2008 – a year before Manchester United allowed him to join Real Madrid for a world-record fee, mind.

If players and agents have really ‘served notice that contracts are not worth the paper they are written on,’ why did Liverpool have to pay £125m to release Isak from his?

READ NEXT: Liverpool and Isak top transfer winners ahead of Arsenal, Chelsea and, in the end, just about Spurs

Mediawatch Alexander Isak

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