Not too many players are capable of upstaging Mohamed Salah but, last month, Alexander Isak revelled in revealing that rare ability.
Salah had assumed centre stage at Manchester’s Opera House and, as the latest recipient of the Professional Footballers’ Association player of the year award, 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 particularly provocative Instagram message. In accusing Newcastle 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 albeit still arduous path towards joining Salah at Anfield. His Instagram message certainly blindsided St James’ Park executives while virtually extinguishing increasingly faint hopes that a player then refusing to either train with or play for Newcastle could somehow be “reintegrated” into Eddie Howe’s squad.
Rather like a centre-half panicking in the face of one of Isak’s penalty-area advances, Newcastle’s majority owner, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, lunged in with a bullish statement of its own insisting that its £63m signing from Real Sociedad three years ago was going nowhere. There were briefings that Isak’s social media-powered hand grenade had blown up in his face but they would ultimately prove 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 the June, Staveley lost an internal power struggle with Newcastle’s now outgoing chief executive, Darren Eales, and was ousted by the Saudis.
The upset extended to 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.
No matter that he had four years left on his current deal and Newcastle were struggling to avoid breaching Premier League spending rules, the striker was incandescent.
Howe would later speak repeatedly of a “very difficult” summer and an “unsettled” dressing room 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 Carabao 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 him 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 Saudis were happy to improve his contract but the Swede wanted more than the £200,000 weekly wage on offer and 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.
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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 Newcastle’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 teammates, 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 the Saudis regarded Liverpool’s initial £110m offer for Isak as an insult.
Fast forward to late last Monday afternoon back in Darras Hall, an affluent Northumberland enclave, eight miles north-west of the city where 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 north-east 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 bank holiday Monday 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 £70m 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 teammates farewell. The longest, and messiest, of goodbyes was almost over, leaving the Saudis stung by suggestions that even Newcastle’s former and unlamented owner Mike Ashley would have handled things infinitely better.
