Would selling Alexander Isak to Liverpool for big money usher in a positive new era for Newcastle United, akin to when the Reds sold Coutinho?
DID you want to sell Phil Coutinho?
Cast your mind back to the heady days of summer 2017. Virgil Van Dijk was flirting in Blackpool. Theresa May was botching every possibility of a ‘soft Brexit’, and Liverpool were signing players like Andy Robertson, Mohamed Salah and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain to elevate to the next level under Jürgen Klopp.
There was a big problem, and it started with Paris Saint-Germain’s pursuit of the mercurial Neymar, who they signed for €222 million on 3 August, thus bankrolling Barcelona’s pursuit of Coutinho to the delight of Luis Suárez.
It’s fine if you were absolutely against selling. Coutinho was one of Liverpool’s best players who had struck an affinity with Sadio Mane and countryman Roberto Firmino.
Klopp was adding exciting signings for Liverpool’s Champions League return. The mood was buoyant. The perception of a big sale gave whiffs of Liverpool being knocked down a peg or two.
And yet the reality was so different.
Klopp was, it turned out, happy to lose the player, and knew there would be other ways to offer potency in attack.
The money famously allowed Liverpool to go big on Van Dijk and Alisson Becker over the coming year. In addition, Coutinho flopped at Barcelona so spectacularly that it culminated in the ultimate humiliation of being present on Anfield’s greatest ever night just over 12 months later.
We got to be smug. To say things like ‘the grass isn’t always greener’ or ‘we’d have built a statue’. We became more successful following the sale, not less. Context is everything in this sense.
It’s so hard to tell Newcastle the same thing will happen if they sell Alexander Isak this summer. They don’t have Klopp, for starters. They have Jason Tindall and in that sense, they should hold on to all they have with dear life.
Supporters are right for thinking that a trophy winning and Champions League qualifying season should be a wave they keep riding into the summer; that big signings should be added to what’s there already and that Isak has three-years remaining on his contract.
But the reality is different. Newcastle are struggling to generate a coherent transfer strategy. They don’t yet have clear PSR headroom and Isak is training alone in Sociedad, seemingly with no intention of returning to Tyneside.
How Newcastle have got themselves into this mess is baffling.
You can make the argument they should have sold a big player last summer in the shape of Anthony Gordon, Bruno Guimarães or even Isak and kept the likes of Yakuba Minteh and Elliot Anderson around.
They win the argument by virtue of last season’s success. But to what cost now?
From a Liverpool perspective, a waiting game extends beyond the potential transfer to questions around what it potentially means for Hugo Ekitike and Darwin Nunez, and how they can pull this off financially.
Liverpool are clearly still in for Isak. If they thought the inverse of the Coutinho transfer was possible – and they were enabling future Newcastle success – you wonder if they would be. They must be sure about the player and the implications of giving Newcastle a British record fee.
It’s a fascinating scenario. Comparisons to Coutinho are interesting because this situation simply doesn’t happen that often anymore. Transfers are usually taken less personally on account of the commodity-like way we view players and their own needs.
Selling a club’s main player has drama, twists and turns. It creates villains out of heroes and the bridges get burnt for eternity.
This has Andy Cole and Alan Shearer energy. But that’s because Isak represents goals at Newcastle in a manner which is very throwback.
It’s not for us to say Newcastle should sell Isak and diversify their attack. It worked for Liverpool, but they’re clearly not Liverpool in this scenario.
