Not many players are capable of upstaging Mohamed Salah, but Alexander Isak revelled in that rare ability as recently as last month.
Salah had assumed centre stage at Manchester’s Opera House. As the latest recipient of the Professional Footballers’ Association Player of the Year award, he was preparing to deliver an eagerly awaited acceptance speech when he lost a previously rapt audience.
Numerous discreet vibrations from phones switched to silent had transmitted the news of Isak posting a provocative Instagram message. In accusing Newcastle United of breaking promises and leaving a relationship severed, it reduced even Liverpool’s Egypt forward to a mere warm-up act before the night’s main event.
Isak has always possessed the knack of timing his runs to perfection and now the Sweden striker had picked precisely the right, high-profile moment to pave the final stretch of an arduous path towards joining Salah at Anfield.
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His Instagram message certainly blindsided St James’ Park executives. It also extinguished any hopes that a player refusing to either train with or play for Newcastle could somehow be “reintegrated” into the squad.
Rather like a centre half panicking in the face of one of Isak’s penalty-area advances, Newcastle’s majority owners, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), lunged in with a bullish statement of their own. They insisted that their player – signed from Real Sociedad for £63 million three years ago – was going nowhere.
Suggestions that Isak’s social media-powered hand grenade had blown up in his face proved wide of the mark. Behind the public intransigence reflecting their own desperation to save face, Newcastle knew that the endgame of a long-running saga was under way.
It all started when, in the spring of 2024, the former minority owner Amanda Staveley informed Isak he would be awarded an enhanced contract that summer. Then, in June of the same year, Staveley lost an internal power struggle with Newcastle’s now-outgoing chief executive, Darren Eales, and was ousted by the owners.
The upset extended to head coach Howe and his players. Staveley’s communication skills were so strong and her emotional intelligence so high that friends speak of the financier’s uncanny ability to persuade initially sceptical footballers that Newcastle is England’s finest city.
Howe does not dispense trust easily, but he knew he could rely on a woman whose in-depth knowledge of the Arab world and its distinctive business culture enabled her to understand PIF’s thinking in a way others could not.
Her exit coincided with the arrival of the more abrasive Paul Mitchell as Newcastle’s sporting director. He would stay less than a year but one of his first acts was persuading Yasir al-Rumayyan, Newcastle’s Riyadh‑based chair, to revoke the decision to improve Isak’s £140,000 a week contract. The striker was furious.
Howe would later speak repeatedly of a “very difficult” summer and an “unsettled” dressingroom as Newcastle opened last season slowly, with Isak scoring once in the opening seven games. That he ended it having scored 27 times in all competitions as Newcastle won the League Cup and qualified for the Champions League speaks volumes for the manager’s soft leadership skills.
It was, however, noticeable that Isak’s form dipped after the cup triumph. Howe has rebutted claims he told the player he could leave this summer, but it is understood a June training ground meeting involving the striker, his representatives and the manager ended badly.
By now, the club’s owners were happy to improve his contract, but the Swede wanted more than the £200,000 weekly wage on offer. Aside from this, his desire to join Liverpool was highlighted during a difficult training camp near Salzburg in early July. Divisions were understood to be drawn between players critical of the 25-year-old and sympathetic friends including Sven Botman and Joe Willock.
Howe has since said squad morale is now “very strong” but the first two weeks of pre-season training were tricky. Perhaps coincidentally, that was the fortnight Isak spent with Newcastle before dodging the team’s summer tour to Singapore and South Korea and working out alone in Spain for a week without managerial permission.
After returning, Isak declined all Howe’s offers of reintegration, was told to stay away from a club bonding barbecue and trained in isolation from his team-mates, kicking balls repeatedly into empty goals and against a rebound wall.
Privately, Newcastle’s determination to retain Isak was softening. The only problem was that with a series of strikers including Hugo Ekitiké and Benjamin Sesko rejecting moves to St James’, they could not find a suitable replacement, let alone the desired two. Moreover, Newcastle United’s owners regarded Liverpool’s initial £110 million offer for Isak as an insult.
Fast forward to late last Monday afternoon back in Darras Hall, an affluent Northumberland enclave, 13km northwest of the city. A Saudi delegation joined Newcastle’s minority owner Jamie Reuben on a visit to a property hidden behind the high hedges and opaque security gates that characterise northeast England’s wealthiest neighbourhood.
Inside the house, Isak and his representatives, most notably his uncompromising Serbian adviser, Vlado Lemic, informed their guests he had no intention of wearing black and white stripes again. Within 45 minutes, Reuben and co were driving back to St James’ Park, where Howe’s team lost 3-2 against Liverpool later that evening.
At that point, the manager had not spoken to his supposed star striker for almost a fortnight and was reiterating that he “only wanted” players “fully committed to Newcastle”. It finally proved the cue for Rumayyan, making a rare trip to Tyneside, to sanction a successful £70 million move for Stuttgart’s Germany striker Nick Woltemade.
By Saturday evening, Howe diplomatically refused to deny reports from Sweden that Isak had already bid his former team-mates farewell. The longest and messiest of goodbyes was almost over. It left the Saudi owners stung by suggestions that even Newcastle’s former and unlamented owner Mike Ashley would have handled things better. – Guardian
