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It was around this time of year eight seasons ago when Philippe Coutinho told Liverpool medics that he felt pain in his back, only for scans to reveal there was nothing wrong with him.
This came shortly after Liverpool had rejected a series of record bids from Barcelona to take him away from Anfield, barely eight months after he had signed a new contract. You can imagine how Coutinho’s chess move went down internally but the decision-makers at Liverpool understood and went with it.
The club was determined to only sell when it was right for them, and Coutinho’s ‘injury’ bought them some time. Though Jurgen Klopp’s instinct told him it was better to release a footballer who might stink the place out, he was wise enough to play along, at least when he was asked about the situation at press conferences.
Coutinho did not appear for Liverpool in that 2017-18 season until September, and he was even made captain for some fixtures before finally moving to Barca early in the January transfer window. In fairness, Coutinho never made his desire to leave public, helping the reintegration process. Coutinho submitted a transfer request in an email but otherwise kept his thoughts private. There was no hand grenade lobbed in the manner of Alexander Isak on Tuesday, a barbed statement that deepens his isolation on Tyneside.
Philippe Coutinho wanted to leave Liverpool but went about things differently than Alexander Isak (Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)
There are parallels between these ‘I’m a footballer… get me out of here!’ stories. An eye-watering sum of money at stake? Check. Missed matches because of a mysterious injury? Check. A head coach, in this case Eddie Howe, putting on a brave face, suggesting he would like to think there was a way back? Check. Talk of an unwritten promise that the player can move on if an acceptable bid is made? Well, sort of.
As far as Isak seems to be concerned, that promise was made by a former Newcastle executive some time ago, but has not been followed through by those making decisions following a restructure (Newcastle, unsurprisingly, dispute this version of events). By comparison, in a much shorter period, Liverpool came to accept Coutinho was going but engineered a path towards their own deadline, affording the space to plan what they did next.
This is not an attempt to suggest that Newcastle have been naive and Liverpool supersmart. Rather, it simply illustrates how chaotic football tends to be, despite the best attempts of all participants to claim everything is under control. Whereas everyone, including Coutinho, ended up looking rather good in 2017 (until the Brazilian actually started playing for Barcelona), if Isak appeared at the Newcastle vs Liverpool game at St James’ Park on Monday, sulking in the stands, he would feel as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit, as the comedian Billy Connolly once put it.
The sense of blissful behind-the-scenes harmony routinely presented as the gospel truth by most football clubs is amusing. Increasingly, we see managers or head coaches proudly talk about their “no d**head” policies when they know all too well that such characters not only exist but are regularly the ones who end up winning matches for them.
Isak may or may not fit such a description (that verdict will probably be coloured by whether your allegiances lie on Tyneside or Merseyside) but while his actions have given Newcastle’s supporters the opportunity to say he is acting like one, should they make Liverpool more wary about signing him? Should they be steering clear of a player so willing to press the nuclear button?
Er, no.
Let it not be forgotten that while the whole Coutinho business was going on, the same was happening with Virgil van Dijk, who, according to his manager at Southampton, Mauricio Pellegrino, had effectively gone on strike to force a move away, resulting in him training alone. All this time later, Van Dijk remains at Liverpool, where he has emerged as a Premier League-winning captain, and because of what has happened since, the manner of his departure in the same window as Coutinho is only really spoken about among the fans of Southampton.
Virgil van Dijk wanted out at Southampton (Jordan Mansfield/Getty Images)
Maybe it is a failure of journalism and other forms of reporting that the victors tend to get to write their own histories but Isak knows if he pushes through the move to Liverpool and he becomes an Anfield legend, as Van Dijk has, it will be worth it as far as he is concerned.
This is not a Geordie representing his local club. There is no umbilical cord to cut. It was different for, say, Trent Alexander-Arnold at Liverpool, who once spoke of his dreams of becoming captain before joining Real Madrid for a relatively notional fee this summer.
Alexander-Arnold left his boyhood club for a fraction of his true value. So it shouldn’t really be that much of a surprise when a player from Sweden, who had already represented four clubs in his professional career and has made no secret of his ambitions, decides that his interests are better served at a club that has just been crowned champions of England, are Champions League regulars and can offer him a bigger contract, even if it involves reputational damage in the short-term.
This is the game, albeit a small band of players and their representatives are markedly better at playing it. Like Isak, Erling Haaland and Jude Bellingham used Borussia Dortmund as a stepping stone for their careers but their journeys have felt far more mapped out — going from a respected but moderately sized club (Red Bull Salzburg and Birmingham City), to a bigger one (Dortmund) and then a European giant (Manchester City and Real Madrid) in smooth succession.
Isak’s time at Dortmund was not successful (Atsushi Tomura/Getty Images)
Injuries and other unforeseen mishaps mean careers can only be planned so far, but with talents such as these, everyone knew what was coming. There were no nasty surprises for the clubs they represented when Haaland and Bellingham departed.
Isak’s journey has been different. His form faltered in Germany and, despite impressing at Real Sociedad, £60million ($81m at current rates) still felt like a lot of money for Newcastle to be spending on him when he arrived in 2022. It helps explain why many of the club’s supporters feel aggrieved at his apparent lack of gratitude.
Isak may yet stay put, of course, as Coutinho did in the short term. Luis Suarez (Liverpool), Wayne Rooney (Manchester United) and Harry Kane (Tottenham Hotspur) also returned to the clubs they claimed they had effectively outgrown before getting moves further down the line. Isak may watch his team-mates walking out for Premier League games in the coming weeks and wonder whether a self-imposed exile is really so appealing, especially with the Champions League beginning next month and a World Cup coming in 2026.
But it would probably do everyone — owners, managers and supporters — some good if the expectation was baked in that players’ relationships with their clubs are invariably finite. Ultimately, footballers are professionals whose time at the top is, in relative terms, vanishingly short.
Isak certainly seems to know this — and that, in a mucky industry, sometimes it is worth getting your hands dirty.
(Top photo: Michael Regan/Getty Images)
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