Isakly what we need (AKA Isak Hunt)
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If the “good manager” Eddie Howe hadn’t of forced out their existing DoF and engineered a move to place his nephew in such a critical role…then maybe he wouldn’t be in this mess of a string of failed bids for replacements.
View: https://x.com/mhardysport/status/1955208267883266118
The home in the North East that Alexander Isak has been living in was put on the rental market the day after he was omitted from Newcastle United’s players and families day.
Isak, 25, was the only member of Newcastle’s first-team squad not allowed at the bonding day held at the club’s training ground last week. The striker’s desire to leave is so strong that he has moved out of the property in Ponteland, with the owner now seeking new tenants.
Isak had lived there for three years since he moved to Newcastle for £63million from Real Sociedad in 2022.
The property was first put on the market when Isak flew to Spain for personal training rather than take his place on Newcastle’s pre-season trip to Asia on July 24. It was advertised for £6,950 a month on the same day he left for Spain, where he spent time training at Real Sociedad. It was quickly taken off the market and Isak returned to Newcastle, but The Times has learnt the property, empty once more, is back on the market again with a local rental company.
The Times has been told that it was Isak’s decision to leave his team-mates before their game with Celtic on July 19. Eddie Howe, the Newcastle head coach, had previously said he sent Isak home from the friendly in Glasgow because of the mounting speculation about his future.
Isak and his representatives broke off contract talks with Newcastle earlier this month, and he has since refused all subsequent offers to discuss staying at the club, reiterating his desire to leave.
Newcastle insiders were braced for an approach from Liverpool as early as June 24, as revealed by The Times. Liverpool have made one offer of £110million that is way short of Newcastle’s reluctant valuation of £150million.
Howe admitted at the weekend that the club cannot force Isak to stay, and the player continues to train alone in the afternoon at the club’s Benton training ground.
Isak remains insistent he will not play for Newcastle again. The club’s owners, however, are adamant he will not be sold and will not be allowed to force a move to Liverpool, who have yet to make a second offer.
That situation may change if Newcastle can sign two centre forwards before the window closes. They had a £25million offer for Brentford’s Yoane Wissa, 28, turned down. Brentford want nearer £40million for the player, who has 12 months remaining on his contract in west London.
Newcastle have missed out on the forwards Hugo Ekitike, Benjamin Sesko and João Pedro during a disastrous transfer window, with Howe admitting the squad is not strong enough before a return to the Champions League. The Newcastle head coach said he does not expect Isak to be involved in the club’s first game of the season, at Aston Villa on Saturday, even if he is still a Newcastle player.
Henry Winter's the most overrated journo out there, and even then he's his own biggest fan. If he were made of chocolate he'd eat himself.
Haha! The Odemwingie story is insane
In steps Colonel Blimp.
Who’s in the 1%?
Exactly, can Newcastle say they would have won Leage cup or CL without him? They got rid of Their other Fav son Calum, whom I know through mates whos kids now have to swich life they loved. It’s part of life, we don’t own them. They get 130m for a player they brought for a lot less. If they were such a big box office as they thought, they won’t moan as much. I get why they are annoyed but it’s not like he was born there. They need to be realistic, this is footballl and we had same done to us for a lot less.
You must be on the marching powder as well!
Having an elite striker on the end of all the chances we create is long overdue.
As good as we are we waste far too many good chances & it has cost us. I presume Slot knows this hence why Liverpool want the best number 9 that it's possible to get.
I've wanted an elite number 9 for a long time & a proper attacking/creative midfielder & look what's happened. Couldn't have asked for more.
As good as we are we waste far too many good chances & it has cost us. I presume Slot knows this hence why Liverpool want the best number 9 that it's possible to get.
I've wanted an elite number 9 for a long time & a proper attacking/creative midfielder & look what's happened. Couldn't have asked for more.
Yes you could, you should ask for another defender, and a strong midfielder.
You could probably guess
What's the deal with indykaila? I have missed something?
It feels like - to someone who is perhaps out of the loop like me - that it's gone from some random account peddling nonsense like the rest of them to getting linked by Ornstein. Is there an inside joke I'm not in on?
It feels like - to someone who is perhaps out of the loop like me - that it's gone from some random account peddling nonsense like the rest of them to getting linked by Ornstein. Is there an inside joke I'm not in on?
pretty sure someone said on here the account was sold to journalists. but i’m also clueless with this so that might be a joke or nonsense.
He's been remarkable this summer.
Tweets out ridiculous tinfoil hat transfer stories in his usual comic teenager hyperbolic style, only for Ornstein / Joyce /Fabrizio/ other journos to confirm them a few hours later.
Obvious that a few journalists are in on it as some kind of joke, but who it is remains a mystery.
The joke was he was a KFC employee apparently. Not sure how true it is. But they were definitely unreliable.
However the account earlier in the summer said that there are 5 different people who have access to the account. Indicating it had been sold, but not confirmed.
View: https://x.com/FabrizioRomano/status/1955379658473816437?t=nfBItbnsyFj52yLJ2Dbn5Q&s=19
Are we nearing endgame?
Let's hope so - hard to tell, since (though I rate him at his best) he's no Isak replacement, but it could be part of a developing wider situation.
But from what I can see - Ramsey is more of an AM / LF? Anyway, not sure why he'd want to make a lateral move from Villa to Newcastle. Does Newcastle really pay better or is capable of paying better?
With their recruitment / executive side turmoil factored in, I think Newcastle are more likely to finish below Villa this season. But hey, if this gets us Isak for what we're willing to pay, go for it Ramsey!
With their recruitment / executive side turmoil factored in, I think Newcastle are more likely to finish below Villa this season. But hey, if this gets us Isak for what we're willing to pay, go for it Ramsey!
And Wissa.
View: https://x.com/TeleFootball/status/1955881683846062106
As unlikely as it may seem, the relationships at the heart of the transfer saga that has dominated the summer can be traced all the way back to Portsmouth in the early 2000s, when Alexander Isak was just a toddler.
The friendship forged between Newcastle United manager Eddie Howe, Fenway Sports Group’s chief executive of football Michael Edwards, who effectively runs Liverpool, and the club’s sporting director Richard Hughes, may go back two decades, but it appears to have been put under severe strain over Isak’s future.
More on that later, but let us first rewind to December 2008.
A friendship forms
There is a photograph taken at Portsmouth’s training ground in which shows a smiling Sean Davis driving a Reliant Robin that has been modified in the livery of the popular 1980s TV show The A-Team.
In the background are a bunch of his laughing team-mates at the then Premier League club including Peter Crouch, Nwankwo Kanu and Hermann Hreidarsson. The latter once drove the same vehicle around the car park with the horn changed to a chicken sound.
To the left of the photo, also grinning is then Portsmouth midfielder Hughes. At the time it was reported that the stunt – which included having to modify and drive the car, hence the Mr T-inspired theme – was the forfeit for being the worst in training.
That was not an unusual jape at a football club and upped the ante from having to wear the “yellow jersey of shame” for a week.
But at Portsmouth it had nothing to do with training. What was unusual is that it was the booby prize for who finished bottom of a predictor league for Champions League matches in a contest organised by “Prozone Eddie”, as he was known at the club.
That was Edwards, who is still known by the nickname “Eddie”, although the “Prozone” bit has long been dropped. Edwards is now one of the most powerful executives in football as the person who effectively runs the Premier League champions. He has clearly moved on to bigger and better things than being regarded merely as the stats geek, a young guy in the background, who initially became popular because of the game.
Also involved at Portsmouth was David Woodfine, who would succeed Edwards as the club’s head of performance analysis, when he left to join Tottenham Hotspur, and who eventually organised for the Reliant Robin to be sold off to charity when the predictor game came to an end.
The careers of Edwards, Hughes and Woodfine have been intertwined ever since, with all three now extremely important at Liverpool. Edwards returned in March last year having previously been the club’s sporting director and immediately recruited Hughes from Bournemouth into that role.
A year after he left, Woodfine was also persuaded by Edwards to go back to Liverpool, within weeks of he himself returning, as assistant sporting director and No 2 to Hughes, who was serving his notice at Bournemouth.
During his time in between leaving Liverpool in 2022 and going back, and after a year off, Edwards worked as a consultant at Ludonautics – a sports advisory business set up by Liverpool’s former director of research Ian Graham – and recommended Hughes to several leading clubs. They did not act but he did on his return, declaring he “trusted him completely”.
To add to the extraordinary Portsmouth link, Hughes also hired Mark Burchill, who was Bournemouth’s chief scout. He was also a former team-mate and friend going back to the Portsmouth days – and, like Hughes, a Scot.
But there is also another, significant character in this story: Howe. The Newcastle manager and former defender is not in the photograph because he had long left Portsmouth by then with his two years at the club – from 2002-04 – plagued by injury after he was one of Harry Redknapp’s first signings along with Hughes and the Bulgarian striker Svetoslav Todorov.
Edwards joined Portsmouth the year after, sent there by Prozone, then a pioneering data analysis company, as the stats business started to take off. Partly because he was out injured and had time, Howe was one of the first to take interest in Edwards’s work – which included analysing performances and looking at the opposition – and would spend hours in the analysts’ first-floor office at the Wellington Sports Ground where Portsmouth trained. Hughes was also drawn there.
Some of the younger players at Portsmouth had that thirst for knowledge and Edwards was at the vanguard of a new approach and players would often go and see what he was doing on a Monday, after the weekend’s match. Soon they were also going the day before games.
It helped that Edwards was young, too – the trio are all roughly the same age, now in their mid-forties– and had played football to a good level, although he was released by Peterborough United without making a first-team appearance.
It meant Edwards, who has a sharp tongue and good sense of humour, could speak their language, knew the game from a player’s point of view and also did not hold back on his opinions when it came to the “banter”.
He was confident, even if he was regarded with suspicion by some of the older staff – although not assistant manager Jim Smith and first-team coach Joe Jordan – at Portsmouth and by Redknapp himself before he became a convert.
It is a long-lasting friendship, between Howe and Hughes in particular, with the pair having even lived together with another former player Warren Cummings (and another Scot), who was on loan from Chelsea, when they were all teenagers making their way at Bournemouth.
Howe and Hughes ended up playing 102 times together for the club. Howe joined Portsmouth in March 2002 for a club-record £400,000, with Hughes following that summer for a more modest £72,000.
Indeed there was a point when it looked like Hughes and Howe would also be following each other to another club and both be sold together, as a package, to Wigan Athletic, who were then on the up and managed by Paul Jewell.
No room for sentiment as Isak tug-of-war unfolds
But it is a friendship now under strain thanks to the Isak transfer saga.
When news first broke it was assumed that the friendship would mean that it would all be conducted cordially and that those in charge of Liverpool – Edwards and Hughes – would try to work with Newcastle.
It was even claimed that they would try to keep the deal confidential until Newcastle had signed the two replacement forwards they needed – and still need – if Isak goes. But that never happened and was indeed blown out of the water when Liverpool gazumped Newcastle’s move for Eintracht Frankfurt forward Hugo Ekitike in a deal worth up to £79m.
Suddenly everything was being played out in public.
Hughes also knows how it feels to be on the other end. When he was at Bournemouth he identified Andy Robertson, Harvey Elliott and Joe Gomez as potential signings and lost out to Liverpool each time. He even tried for Virgil van Dijk before he signed for Southampton.
But it was still suggested the Howe-Hughes relationship might help smooth the Isak deal over. They worked so long and successfully as manager and sporting director for eight years at Bournemouth, partly on the back of Howe’s recommendation after he persuaded Hughes not to concentrate on becoming a TV pundit and running a restaurant he co-owned with his brother.
Instead it has become increasingly fraught and acrimonious and as much as sources want to blame Isak and, in particular, his agent Vlado Lemic with how messy it has become, he has hardly acted alone to try to force the move.
Liverpool maintain they have acted appropriately and there was even a briefing that their only bid so far – the £110m that was rejected by Newcastle, who value Isak at £150m – would not be followed up. But no one believes that and while an exasperated Howe has remained diplomatic, he has said that Newcastle “try and do things the right way”. That felt pointed.
It is understood that Howe is disappointed with Liverpool’s behaviour, and not least because of his relationship with Hughes, and to a lesser extent Edwards, and those relationships have inevitably become tense.
All three could be at Liverpool
If true then it is a shame and not least because, had things fallen differently, and such is their admiration for each other, then the trio could all be working at the same club together again – 22 years after Portsmouth.
Howe was on the three-strong shortlist with Jürgen Klopp and Carlo Ancelotti to replace Brendan Rodgers when Liverpool considered making a change in the summer of 2015, before sacking him in October. That was despite the fact that Howe, at that time, had not yet managed in the Premier League, having only just gained promotion with Bournemouth, who he took through the divisions.
But that is how highly regarded he was by Edwards, who was instrumental in the search which ended with Klopp agreeing to join. It was not the only time Howe was on the radar with Edwards, aided by Hughes, leading the managerial search again last summer when Klopp left and Arne Slot was hired. Once more, Howe was on the shortlist, scoring highly in Liverpool’s analysis. He has an undoubted ability to improve players and Isak, perhaps, is the finest example.
Conversely it is believed Howe was keen to take Hughes with him to Celtic in 2021, before he pulled out of that move because the club would not give him the staff that he wanted.
Howe is indisputably the most highly rated British manager at present and, as their interest over such a long period of time shows, is much admired by Edwards and Hughes, who have a strong track record of being good judges. To this point it has been mutual.
But this is football at the highest level and competition trumps everything, it seems. Even so Hughes, in particular, is regarded as the kind of character who, while extremely professional and good at his job, would not enjoy the cut-throat element of it.
Indeed Hughes, who was so amenable as a player that he had a column in the local newspaper, the Portsmouth News, called “Look Hughes Talking”, even lost the tip of the third finger on his right hand when he was a player after the door he was courteously trying not to slam shut swung back in a gust of wind at the training ground and sliced it off.
Traumatised Hughes walked back into the treatment room, ignoring Burchill who greeted him, and told the physio Gary Sadler what had happened. Despite going to hospital, they could not sew the finger back on.
In saying that Hughes can be ruthless. A cultured midfielder he reinvented himself under Redknapp as being far more combative so that he could get into the team.
It was a sign of Hughes’s intelligence that he realised that. He even boasted that one of his career highlights was provoking Cristiano Ronaldo into butting him in a league game against Manchester United in 2007 – therefore evening the teams up a 10 men each after Sulley Muntari had been sent off two minutes earlier – which ended in a 1-1 draw.
View: https://x.com/CraigHope_DM/status/1956023774664351846
Alexander Isak is on strike. There is no other way for those inside or outside Newcastle United to dress it up now. His words and actions mean he is unavailable for Saturday lunchtime’s Premier League opener at Aston Villa.
He does not want to train with the squad and, by extension, that rules him out of all fixtures for the foreseeable future, while the club continue to pay his £140,000-a-week wages. As of last weekend, he had not been disciplined by way of a club fine. We understand that will change if he misses a competitive match, as he will this weekend.
But so long as the transfer window is open, Isak’s stance will not change. Or rather, the instruction of his agent Vlado Lermic will not. Why? To cross the picket line, they fear, would give Newcastle encouragement of a truce and the club could decelerate their search for the replacement strikers that will enable his move to Liverpool, a hunt which is ongoing.
Don’t show any sign of weakness, Alex, is the order from his camp. But in listening to the advice of those who want the transfer to happen - this is said to be Lermic’s last big deal before winding down at 60 - Isak has already shown a fragility that has disappointed those closest to him within St James’ Park.
Disappointment would be the right word, too. Not anger. Not disgust. Indeed, there is some sympathy. As one senior club source said: ‘It did not have to be like this.’
Eddie Howe is many things as a manager, but he is fundamentally a decent person. He, his staff and the club’s hierarchy have known of Isak’s feelings for over a year.
At least in that they have known he was unhappy following the decision, last summer, by new sporting director Paul Mitchell to renege on the promise of a new contract made by the previous co-owner Amanda Staveley, who believed he deserved a significant pay rise.
Then, earlier this summer, Isak and his agent communicated their desire to leave, as exclusively revealed by Daily Mail Sport. But what has played out since, and the unsavoury nature of it, did not need to happen. That is the frustration among owners, management and team-mates.
Isak has given Newcastle three brilliant years and 62 goals in 109 appearances including and the decisive one in the club's first trophy victory for 70 years. For sporting reasons as well as financial, he wants to move on.
Howe was 24 - one year younger than Isak - when he left Bournemouth for rivals Portsmouth. He is not blind to a player’s ambitions when a career is so short. The regret among insiders is that Isak could, and should, have shown more respect for those who have helped to accelerate his rise.
As one source suggested, even if Isak had gone public with a statement declaring his wishes, but continued to train and play, the club would still have explored alternative strikers and a solution that worked for all parties. They have done that anyway, but a bitter taste has lingered throughout.
So much so, now that options A, B, C, D & E have come and gone, they have arrived at F, and we all know what F stands for. There is a feeling among some that the most viable avenues have been all but exhausted.
Indeed, in nearly four years, post-takeover recruitment has been exceptional. From Isak to Bruno Guimaraes to Kieran Trippier to Dan Burn to Anthony Gordon and Sandro Tonali, they have barely got one wrong. They do not want to start now, especially not when dictated to by external forces.
That being the case, one door that will be left ‘wide open’, as one senior source put it, is the one that allows Isak to return to training and playing. That has always been scenario A - he has a change of heart, signs a new contract (even with a release clause or promise of a move next summer) and spends this season at St James’ Park.
Scenario B is the one the club have been working to for the past two months - sign the players that would act as a palatable replacement for the Swede and then negotiate a sale that would extract maximum value for their star man, who has three years to run on his contract. Newcastle are in a strong position.
Scenario C, and one that becomes more likely with each passing day, is that Isak remains against his wishes and the club gamble on him returning to the squad post-September 1. Howe and his staff brought Isak ‘back in the building’ after the upset of last summer and he went on to score 27 goals, including the winner in the Carabao Cup final.
It could, in theory, be done again, and once a ball hits the back of the net, the ripple effect can quickly turn into a wave of forgiveness among supporters. Isak should also recognise the lengths the club have gone to in trying to sign his replacement - they did not tell him he was going nowhere.
Scenario D, and one that was not on the table a few weeks ago, is that Newcastle sell Isak without having signed two strikers (they would need at least one) and get through until January with a likely combination of Yoane Wissa and Anthony Gordon at centre-forward. Wissa’s arrival from Brentford is expected in the coming week.
As Howe said last weekend, all options are still at play when it comes to Isak’s future. The most likely? That depends on who you speak to and, as such, 50-50 would probably be a fair estimation of the move happening. Is he for sale? No. Will he be sold? Let’s see.
It should also be said, of all the unknowns in this saga, Liverpool returning with a second offer is not one of them. They have not come this far to walk away after one bid of £110m, which they knew would be rejected.
Isak’s conduct is, yes, governed to a large extent by his agent, but Lermic’s conversations with Liverpool would have influenced their exit strategy.
Newcastle sent a high-powered delegation to Leipzig to sign Benjamin Sesko last week, and had they done so, Isak would have been on his way to Liverpool by now. The negotiation over a British-record package between the clubs is unlikely to be the major stumbling block here. More so, it is Newcastle feeling ready to negotiate.
For now, Isak continues to train alone, to the point where some team-mates have not seen him since before the club’s Far East tour.
The house he rents from former Newcastle defender Ciaran Clark went on the market last month - neighbours say Isak was moving out anyway after two burglaries - but you can be sure he is not looking for another 12-month lease on Tyneside, as it stands.
That leaves Newcastle with a striker who is currently of no use to them, and you can interpret ‘striker’ as you wish. Isak’s exile is self-imposed - Howe has made it clear he wants him with the team now - and the longer he stays in the cold, the more the warmth of affection for him evaporates.
Not that he appears to care, and that is what stings the most for those who have cared for him greatly.
