Depraved. Sickening. Toxic. Foul, but also pestilent. The end of days? That last thing wasn’t the end of days. This right here is the end of days.
But is it though? Is it really? Going on a summer holiday is always a bit strange when your life involves staring at sport. Taking a break just as football is preparing to enter its own sweaty, steamy eight-month meat pocket is extra tough. Re-engagement can be difficult. Oh look. There’s football hiding behind a bush in the car park again, frazzled and wired from staying up drinking crystal meth negronis and writing a presentation about merging marketing and sales, all the while gripped with a gathering sense of horror that it’s just not possible.
This time around it feels as though some entirely coherent sub-reality has been created. Re-entering it is like trying to understand a fully realised fantasy role play world. The sparrows have flown the battlements of Frottingdon. A dwarfish army is rising in the east to reclaim the jewel of Wangdor. Tottenham are in crisis. Arsenal are in crisis. And Alexander Isak is still out there doing nothing, extravagantly.
The Isak affair has been remarkable above all for its scale. It is undeniably massive. No. Don’t even look at the Isak affair. Or at least, don’t look too hard, because you might find that while undeniably vast and beautiful, it is also strangely hollow. So hollow that you’ll keep thinking you’ve missed the key detail that will make it all make sense, hunched over a screen at 2.37am as a droning robot YouTube voice says things like the most sensational transfer saga in history, and thinking, yes, yes, but what is it actually?
There was a weariness about all this by the end of the week, the sense of a rolling 24-hour media reduced to tossing this thing around in its jaws, the dead squirrel that just won’t play any more. One newspaper website has been publishing four Isak Does Nothing stories a day. On Wednesday Isak Does Nothing was on the BBC News at Ten, driven by his INCENDIARY Instagram post that wasn’t actually incendiary, just some stuff about “promises”, which clearly don’t count for much in any case.
And now we have the Game of Hate, Liverpool at St James’ Park on Monday. But do we really have a Game of Hate here? Will anyone present actually feel hate, or just a sense they should at least feel something? What is Alexander Isak? A tall, thin sad-looking man. A way of standing and running. A man whose career highlight so far remains scoring the key goal in a League Cup final. My colleague Louise Taylor wrote a good article about all this in which she quoted Rafael Benítez saying “everything in football is a lie”. It could have gone further, because the Alexander Isak transfer saga is also a lie, albeit a shared and apparently very powerful one.
You have to be careful saying things like this. There will be accusations of just not understanding football. And also the ultimate gotcha: there you go writing about the thing while saying it’s not a thing. But this is to miss the point. The Isak saga is important, and its emptiness is the most interesting part at a time when the battle between the real and the fake is an active front in sport, and a key staging point in what it is now becoming.
Most obviously, this is a symptom of too much media and not enough content. We know this process now, the familiar summer journey towards some hyper-jaded late-August TV anchor sat behind a desk saying: “And now we go live to … no, not just yet” while simultaneously stabbing himself in the leg with a compass needle.
This was previously known as the silly season. But the silly season is now all the season. Sky Sports has an entire morning show dedicated to the feelings of its roster of elite Fanfluencers. Saudi Arabia is planning to buy the silly season and stage its own three-month Mega-Silly Super Season of Death. Mark Goldbridge has acquired broadcast rights to the Portuguese Silly Season and will be salivating over it in his basement YouTube.
This is significant. It embodies another step in the dissolution of ties to actual events and physical space, sport as a shared real-life experience. Plus it is self-fuelling: mimetic emotions, algorithm rage, quasi events that become simply events, like when Sydney Sweeney killed woke with her cleavage, which can’t happen and didn’t happen, but it doesn’t actually matter as long as you get Sydney Sweeney in your copy somewhere.
The fake v the real is a symptom of hard power too, of sport being hijacked by interests. The Club World Cup was this, a plastic spectacle constantly seeking to assert its realness, most obviously by piggybacking on the portable passion of Boca Juniors and River Plate fans. Dance for us. Weep for me, baby. Do it for the product. Make us feel real.
There is probably an irony that Saudi Arabia is at the heart of much fake sport culture, and that Newcastle United is particularly vulnerable to being used in this way. The club has long been an emotional touchstone for the Premier League itself. This goes right back to that amazing Kevin Keegan season, also the first time the cameras were turned on fans in the modern style, when the iconography of the title run-in, two large men hugging in black and white shirts like uncles at a wedding, really made the Premier League stand as its own entity.
Since then Newcastle passion, the inelastic hunger of Newcastle fans, has been the Premier League’s deep reserve, its Naples, its Mitchell family, the place it goes to feel husky and authentic. Prepare the close-up lens. Send in the beaters. Smoke out the crying Geordie. Whereas the reality, you suspect, is that most people who follow the club are realistic about all this. And at this point, it is worth stating what the Alexander Isak Episode is not.
It is not some fresh depth of depravity or player power gone mad. Nothing has finally died here. Footballers have always done this. Wayne Rooney has said this is unprecedented, but he did something similar himself in 2010, putting in a transfer request in October, criticising his teammates by implication, allowing the Manchester City rumours to circulate (he later denied them) to the extent that period classic, the group of balaclava-clad men, turned up at his house with a sign saying “If you join City you’re dead”.
It didn’t matter. Rooney said sorry and stayed for seven more seasons. Nobody, least of all Rooney himself, seems to care about it now. So what is real here?
The one undeniable fact is that Isak wants more money. Fair enough. Once-in-a-lifetime wedges and windfalls rest on this kind of transfer. Also true it has been handled very badly, to the extent the hard commercial reality is now poking through and interfering with the fantasy realm of loyalty and honour that ultimately pays for it, which isn’t good for anyone in the industry.
It is also out of scale. Isak’s talent-ceiling is thrillingly high. He’s also 26 in a month, has two good seasons, and two goals from open play for Newcastle since March. And now we have this, an airborne toxic event, a void filled with fake feeling. Weeks and months are being lost. Is this going to be his defining Thing?
It is also real for Newcastle, who need a top-class striker whoever that may be. But Newcastle are not In Crisis. The team is still good. Its biggest asset is spirit not star power. They have space to grow. Eddie Howe has come out of this really well; hand steady, upper lip stiff, appearing in public like the kind of pained but decent police officer who turns up at your house late at night to break the news your cat has just been run over.
What about Liverpool? As we lurched into the weekend there was a suggestion the Isak affair could DERAIL their season too. Really? The three missing attackers from last season were good, but Salah-Gakpo-Ekitiké-Wirtz-Chiesa looks pretty decent too. They could do with another poacher. Maybe just sign Jamie Vardy and be done with it. He’ll win you the league simply to annoy the Rooneys.
In reality what has happened here is pretty old-school. Structures have been maintained. The owning club is currently getting its way. There is talk Isak may move once Monday is out of the way. On the other hand it might not happen at all. And even if it does, this is one player not a team and nobody knows right now how good Isak might be at the next level of intensity.
The most significant part is the sheer operatic scale of it all, a sense of the domestic league and its rhythms starting to become a little more porous and vague, of a scrabble for what this sport can become; eyeballs, content, streamable drama. At the centre of which a thin, sad-looking very rich man will be reduced to the role of spectator at the game of hate. Which is at least an unintended note of connection. Welcome, Alexander, to our world.
