Understanding Liverpool’s record-signing Alexander Isak – ‘He was always looking for an opportunity’
Jacob Whitehead
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/654019 ... SYFcfwGedA
Sept. 2, 2025
Stu Forster via Getty Images
The finish was instinctive, a split-second moment of skill, but then there is all that came before.
There’s the movement, where he sticks on
Virgil van Dijk before drawing away as the Dutchman turns his back. There’s the sixth sense, as he reads
Jacob Murphy’s intention to nod the ball back across goal. And then there’s the belief, to shoot and score again just minutes after having a goal ruled out.
They are 10 seconds which demonstrate why
Alexander Isak is one of the most coveted players in world football.
LIMBS 
— Newcastle United (@
NUFC) March 21, 2025
This was the goal that delivered Newcastle United their first domestic trophy in 70 years, and Isak was the man to score it. It was his first major trophy too.
As the 25-year-old runs away to celebrate, he points his thumb behind him. Done. Next.
But it is now Newcastle that are in the rearview mirror, and Liverpool, their Carabao Cup final opponents, who pay Isak’s wages.
With the Anfield club paying £125m, a deal worth £130m to Newcastle due to other savings and solidarity payments they are not covering, he is now the most expensive arrival in Premier League history.
He arrived in Newcastle for £63m three years ago, a highly-rated and talented striker but not marketed as a prodigy. Since, he has hit the Premier League with the force of a tornado, becoming Newcastle’s greatest striker in two decades.
This is who Liverpool are getting in their new No 9.
It is right to go back to Isak’s feel and movement for that Carabao Cup final goal, but that began long before that day. Growing up in Solna, a working-class suburb of Stockholm, Isak always separated himself with his brain, despite his preternatural physical gifts.
Making his debut for boyhood club AIK at just 16, he had already impressed senior professionals at the club with a game understanding which, at times, felt like it eclipsed their own.
Like Isak,
Henok Goitom is another Swede of Eritrean descent. Isak’s father,
Teame, taught him the Tigrinya language as a child — some years later, the veteran striker repaid the debt by mentoring the teenage Isak.
Isak at AIK youth training (Alexander Snacke)
In the summer (before his debut), he was one of two or three that came to train with us,
Goitom told The Athletic in 2023.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/453197 ... newcastle/
We were doing a drill and I wanted the ball. I was the starting striker and I really wanted it. But he didn’t pass, he gave it to someone else.
Then I looked behind me and there was an opponent right there. His intelligence shone through. He was — not sneaky, that sounds like a negative — but always looking for an opportunity.
He was smart,
adds
Jesper Bjork, Isak’s long-time coach as a young teenager.
He wants to try to trick defenders into doing stupid things, then move the ball in another direction.
But in hindsight, this is part of the reason why Isak’s first big move to Borussia Dortmund failed.
Several European giants had been in for him — Liverpool first expressed interest in him as a 16-year-old, with Real Madrid asking
Ronaldo to
FaceTime the young Isak in a bid to convince him to join. Dortmund’s record of youth development won out, but Isak struggled for gametime, stuck behind the likes of
Marco Reus,
Paco Alcacer,
Andre Schurrle, and
Michy Batshuayi.
But shorn of opportunities to build up experience, Isak struggled when given rare starts — it was not until he was given a run of games while on loan at Dutch club Willem II that he began to hit his straps, scoring 13 goals in just 16 appearances.
You go into games more relaxed,
Isak told former The Athletic columnist
Alan Shearer last year.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/519835 ... e-shearer/
Not thinking about having to score because you feel like you’re in a flow. But it’s football and this momentum, you can lose it very fast. You need to use all your chances.
People think that spell (at Dortmund) was a failure,
adds Goitom.
But he was 17. He’d played just one season in the Allsvenskan. It was like playing games even when just training with Dortmund. It was the right step.
Signed by Real Sociedad for just €15m in 2019, Isak regained his confidence in the Basque Country. The large spaces afforded to him in La Liga suited his ability to run in behind, while he struck up an excellent partnership with now-Arsenal midfielder
Martin Odegaard.
His record in Spain was impressive — 33 league goals in 105 La Liga appearances — but has gone to the next level at St James’ Park, with 54 Premier League goals in just 86 games.
Eddie Howe worked intensively with the striker when he arrived, recognising the importance that a club-record £63m fee was repaid in goals. As one club source told The Athletic in March, Howe was the driving force behind Isak’s recruitment, with the Swedish striker having become something of an “
obsession”. To an extent, his own future would be tied to Isak’s form.
Despite his debut goal at Anfield in August 2022, his debut season was not as smooth as it might have outwardly appeared — the Swede struggled with several niggling injuries, with
Callum Wilson entrenched as the starter for much of the season, including that February’s Carabao Cup final against Manchester United.
Isak celebrates scoring on his Premier League debut at Anfield (Photo by Visionhaus/Getty Images)
One major area was Isak’s off-ball work — with Newcastle’s high press necessitating that the No 9 plays an important role defensively.
With Alex, we try to find a balance between information and freedom,
Eddie Howe told The Athletic last season.
He’s so creative naturally that putting too many restrictions on where he moves would be a negative.
We give him a lot of structure out of possession, that’ll be very clear. We certainly won’t be leaving that to chance — there is a directive that he has to follow, and he’s done it really well this year.
With the ball, yes, we have a certain way that we play and what we ask him to do, but there is certainly an element of freedom within that as well.
It shows the trust that Isak has developed. As a teenager at AIK, coaches worried about his coachability — whether he had the urge of self-improvement.
That was the only problem he had,
then team-mate
Gabriel Ephrem remembered.
He liked to joke, sometimes too much. His only enemy was himself.
It was not that he was unprofessional,
added
Peter Wennberg, AIK’s academy chief.
It was just that there were kids’ habits which needed to transform into professional habits.
Allied with physical difficulties as he went through a growth spurt, Isak was not a guaranteed starter in the under-13s and under-14s, and was one of only three or four members of his AIK age group who wasn’t selected to play in a countrywide tournament.
Of course, I have had tough periods before,
Isak told Swedish newspaper
Aftonbladet in 2017, during his spell at Dortmund.
I was dropped to the bench. They thought I didn’t work hard enough and they were right. It was then that I realised this was serious. So that’s when I sorted myself out.
Isak playing for AIK in 2016 (Anders Ylander/Ombrello via Getty Images)
He began doing extras, both inside AIK’s academy and with local coaches from the Eritrean community, while a positional shift also helped him develop a wider skillset. Recognising that Isak could sometimes rely on his speed too much, AIK decided to play him as a midfielder to improve his sense of the bigger picture. Now, his ability in deeper spaces is a major part of his game.
We wanted him to gain 360-degree awareness,
explains Wennberg.
It meant he became more involved in the game, put pressure on his first touch, made him contend with more traffic. We saw how he could affect the game in the build-up.
Aspects of his academy experience, however, reminded AIK’s coaches that he was still a precocious teenager.
He was called up for a national team camp, which started on the Monday, but we had a game against a really local under-19 team the day before,
remembers Wennberg.
It was an away game, not so fancy, on a suspect pitch south of Stockholm.
So I spoke to the national coach and we agreed to play Alex for the first 45 minutes — he was not going to start the first national team game anyway. But when I told him, he said: ‘I don’t want to be a part of it’. I told him to trust me and he played — but he didn’t leave the centre circle for the entire half.
He’d checked out and we were really angry with him. But then, as soon as he came back, he apologised for not seeing the bigger picture.
Isak celebrates a win for Sweden (Photo: Alex Nicodim/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In refusing to play, Isak’s behaviour bears some resemblance to his move to Liverpool, almost a decade down the line. There have been no apologies this month.
But back then, this was a stage where Isak was developing quickly — only just beginning to understand the latent talent in his laces, and earning the right to train with the first-team in preseason under new head coach
Andreas Alm. Coachability had become a strength.
We began to realise that we had a special one,
Wennberg adds.
The coaches’ office was at the entrance, at the top of the stairs. Every time he’d pass it and just say: ‘Hi’. There were four or five of us, planning his future, taking care of individual analysis, just for him.
So one morning I said: ‘Hey, Isak, come and sit down’. Every coach was sitting there, by the whiteboard. ‘Everyone here is working 24/7 for you,’ I said. ‘And you just pass us and say: “Hi”. Next morning, I want you to come in here and ask: “What do I need to do to improve today? What is the mission?”.
We had the training and the very next morning, there he was, straight into the coaching room. ‘Hey coach’, he said. ‘What is the plan for me today?’ If you really want to be great, you need to be the main star in your own life, to drive it. That’s when I knew he was ready.
Isak’s is a unique personality — one which is intensely driven, but which can also be construed as laid-back and introverted. His outspokenness in his attempts to leave Newcastle has surprised some observers and caused annoyance at the club, though the striker put that down to “
broken promises”.
Newcastle denied he had been told he could leave this summer, but before it all turned sour his ambitions had matched that of Howe’s to raise his game and the club.
Howe’s work has extended to one-on-one sessions — for example, at the beginning of last season, he delivered a presentation to Isak outlining how more opportunities would come his way if he spent more time in the box.
Gym work has also become an important part of his routine, as he sought to adapt to the Premier League’s intensity.
He’ll be the first one to say, ‘I don’t love the gym,’ but he’s taken the onus on himself to do the work,
former Newcastle team-mate
Matt Ritchie told The Athletic in March.
He’s not like (Sergio) Aguero, where he’s solid. He’s more like a gymnast. As a young player, you have to evolve because your body’s never been exposed to that and he needed that to be able to meet the Premier League’s intensity.
But the major improvement in Isak’s game has come in the most important currency — goals. Liverpool are among his favourite opponents, with four goals in just six games.
I think I have a lot to give, I think I have a lot to improve,
Isak said after joining Liverpool.
I’m a striker but I always want to give as much as possible to the team, mainly goals but much more than that as well.
I want to win everything.
Three years ago, there had been a perception whilst he was at Real Sociedad that his numbers had fallen off — or at least plateaued. Newcastle resisted that — but recognised that improvements could be made. Despite his penchant for the spectacular, there were low-hanging improvements that Howe was certain he could work on.
Do you know what he needs? More tap-ins,
Howe told The Athletic
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/519835 ... e-shearer/ last year.
That’s the big thing for Alex, I think. The ugly goals. He does the beautiful ones.
Me and the gaffer look at how I can get, not easy goals, but ones where you’re at the right place at the right time,
Isak added.
That’s something I could get more of.
In 2024-25, his best season as a professional, Isak decisively delivered on that intent. His 27 goals across all competitions were a career high — but notably came about as part of a large uptick in those scrappy goals.
Eight league goals were scored from within the six-yard box, a career high, while 19 of them came with his first touch, another peak. Isak was decisive, instantaneous, and effective. In a Liverpool team whose No 9 could struggle to finish clear chances last season, the upgrade Isak offers is clear.
They say the deal has cost them £125m — and for that they get multiple strikers in one.
Isak has always been a dribbler and a ball-striker, he has worked to become a link-man and a poacher. He is now in his prime. How many worlds does Alexander have left to conquer?
