The Isak saga which damaged two clubs' seasons

It will now fall to a new manager to get the striker firing again. Liverpool have begun formal talks with former Bournemouth boss Andoni Iraola.

Those at the club firmly believe 2025-26 was a freak campaign for Isak, who only played 21% of the total minutes for Liverpool in the Premier League.

Isak suffered a severe fractured ankle and fibula in December and, by the latter stages of the season, Liverpool were unwilling to risk him whenever he picked up minor concerns.

They are confident that once he is fit, the Sweden international will deliver, just as he did for his country with a brilliant goal in the 3-1 defeat against Norway on Monday night.

Isak requires players around him to create more, but he also needs to get involved more in games.

In the Champions League quarter-final second leg against Paris St-Germain at Anfield, for example, Isak managed just five touches in 45 minutes.

Isak lives a quiet life and has, of course, struggled with not being able to play, but he is well aware of the expectation on him leading into the World Cup and next season.

Image caption,

Alexander Isak scored 62 goals in 109 games for Newcastle after signing from Real Sociedad in 2022

'No other player like him in world football'

Newcastle certainly did not want to lose Isak.

However, having initially held firm, as Isak trained away from the rest of his team-mates, the club ultimately buckled and sold the striker to Liverpool on deadline day.

Lessons have been learned.

After operating without an executive structure a year ago, Newcastle now have a chief executive, David Hopkinson, and a sporting director, Ross Wilson, in place.

The absence of the latter position, in particular, was felt when it came to handling the Isak situation and dealing with agents.

So it felt telling that Wilson mentioned how conversations between all parties had been "conducted confidentially and with a great deal of professionalism" after forward Anthony Gordon completed his £69.3m move to Barcelona last week.

Gordon, as a result, left on good terms in a marked contrast to Isak's painful departure, which rocked the club.

At the height of the Isak saga, head coach Eddie Howe privately pointed to how Newcastle still had "a lot of the same players that we had, who have been successful for a long period of time".

Deep down, however, he knew Isak's exit marked the "end of one type of Newcastle team", as he later put it publicly.

"It was a pivotal time for us because Alex was such an important player," Howe said at a recent news conference.

"There's no other player like him in world football and that's why he went for the transfer fee that he did."

The manner of Isak's exit, in itself, offers no excuse for Newcastle's disappointing league campaign after Howe's side slipped to 12th place in the table.

Other clubs, such as Bournemouth and Brentford, have rebuilt swiftly and smartly following the loss of key players.

Image caption,

Alexander Isak scored his 17th goal for Sweden in their 3-1 friendly defeat to Norway in Oslo

Yet it was still an undoubted factor considering the team had orbited around Isak, who scored 27 goals in the previous season.

He even netted what proved to be the winning goal against Liverpool in the 2025 League Cup final to end Newcastle's seven-decade wait to win a major domestic trophy, and also helped his side qualify for the Champions League.

In his final top-flight season with the club, the striker scored 18 goals despite having just 36 'big chances', which Opta define as situations where a player should reasonably be expected to score, usually in a one-on-one situation or from very close range.

No wonder Newcastle had the third-best overall big chance conversion rate (41.1%) in the Premier League in 2024-25.

However, that figure, tellingly, dropped in the 2025-26 season.

Of the 90 big chances Newcastle created, Howe's men only put away 31 of them. That works out as the fifth-worst return (34.4%) in the Premier League.

It may not seem a huge difference, year on year, but in a season when Newcastle threw away the most points from winning positions (27), failed to build on leads and struggled to respond to going behind, it is still significant.

Howe has ended up trialling four options up front, including summer signings Nick Woltemade and Yoane Wissa, before settling on William Osula for the final weeks of the campaign.

"Losing Alex was going to be very difficult for us to find a new team," the Newcastle head coach said.

"But that was the challenge we had to do, and we had to do it in a really short period of time before the transfer window shut.

"I don't think you can ever look at one moment, look for excuses or look to blame anything or anyone.

"It was just the situation that it was and we had to try and make the best of that moment."