When Alexander Isak was promoted to the AIK first team at the age of 16, one of his coaches made a telling request.
“I said to him ‘Hey Alex … I took you to the first team here, so when you go to Real Madrid or another big club, you’ll take me with you,'” Peter Wennberg, who coached Isak at both youth and senior levels during his time in Sweden, told ESPN.
Almost a decade on, Wennberg’s tongue-in-cheek demand appears prophetic, although it is Premier League champions Liverpool — not Madrid — who have secured Isak’s signature for a British-record £125m transfer fee.
It has been the transfer saga of the summer, with Isak essentially forcing his way out of former club Newcastle United after claiming “promises had been broken” by senior figures at St. James’ Park. Such claims were quickly refuted on Tyneside, but Isak’s departure began to feel increasingly inevitable and on deadline day, he was finally unveiled as Liverpool’s new No.9.
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Isak’s controversial transfer tactics have attracted criticism in some quarters and yet history dictates the 25-year-old is not averse to taking command of his own future. Indeed, even in his most formative years, the striker rarely passed up an opportunity to seize his moment — as evidenced during his time at AIK.
“When Alex was about 16, every time he came to our training ground and passed the coaches, he would just say ‘Hi,’ and then go to the locker room,” Wennberg tells ESPN. “One day when he passed us, I screamed at him to come back. He stood there, and I said: ‘Hey, there are seven coaches here all planning for your future, and the only thing you do when you come in is say ‘Hi.’ Where is the passion?’ He said: ‘Okay, I hear what you’re saying.’
“Then, the next time he came to training, he came to us directly and said ‘hey coaches, what have you got planned for me today?’ That’s typical of Isak. He is driving his future. He is not letting his destiny be in anyone else’s hands. He is driving it.”
Isak’s strong-willed persona suggests he’ll be eager to show Liverpool fans what he is all about as quickly as possible. Having missed the majority of Newcastle’s preseason training regime, doing fitness work away from the squad while his future was resolved, the striker was an unused substitute in Sweden’s recent draw with Slovenia, and was reduced to just one 18-minute cameo against Kosovo earlier this week.
The outstanding form of fellow summer signing Hugo Ekitike — who has already scored twice in the Premier League this term since joining from Eintracht Frankfurt — diminishes the need for Isak to be match-fit immediately, however supporters will be hoping to catch a glimpse of him in Liverpool’s clash with Burnley this weekend.
“When you train with him, you feel his fighting spirit”
There are two flags visible in Isak’s Instagram bio. The first represents Sweden — the country of his birth — while the other belongs to the East African country of Eritrea, the birthplace of both of his parents. Though Isak himself was born and raised in the Stockholm suburb of Solna, his Eritrean roots — and his parents’ decision to move to Europe at the height of their nation’s civil war during the 1980s — have helped shape his tenacious character.
Having started out playing football on a local patch of artificial turf simply dubbed “the pitch,” Isak joined AIK’s academy at the age of six and quickly began to make an impression on his coaches.
Alexander Isak is ready to show Liverpool fans what he’s all about since arriving on deadline day. Will his debut happen this weekend? Nikki Dyer – LFC/Liverpool FC via Getty Images
“He stood out early from the age of eight or nine, but you could really see how exceptional he was when he was about 15,” Wennberg says. “That’s when you could see he had special potential.
“It wasn’t just his technical ability. You could see and feel the passion in his eyes. His learning process was exceptional. When you train with him, you feel his fighting spirit.”
For Wennberg, that fighting spirit was particularly evident during a cup game Isak played for AIK’s Under-19s, when he scored a goal directly from the kick-off to help fire his team to victory.
“It was a local cup, so not a special game for us at all,” Wennberg says. “At the first whistle, he had the ball in the middle of the pitch and noticed the goalkeeper was out of his area … so he just kicked it directly into the goal.
“It wasn’t an important game for him, but he was so sharp in the moment and that for me is typical Alex. Most other players would approach a game like that a little bit tired, but in the moment when others can be a little bit lazy, he is the most sharp one.”
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It was no great surprise, then, when Isak was handed his first team debut at the age of 16, and quickly became AIK’s youngest-ever goalscorer after scoring against Tenhults IF in the Swedish Cup. The following year, having established himself as one of the brightest young talents in the Swedish Allsvenskan, teammate Chinedu Obasi declared the forward could be the heir to legendary Sweden striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who scored 573 career goals for clubs such as AC Milan and Manchester United.
“Alexander is a great talent,” Obasi told Swedish newspaper Expressen. “I don’t want to say too much, but he is extraordinary. He can become the new Ibrahimović.”
Isak’s growing reputation unsurprisingly led to plenty of interest from across Europe, with Real Madrid and Chelsea among the teams chasing his signature. But ultimately it was Borussia Dortmund who came out on top, signing the striker for €9 million in January 2017.
“He doesn’t even have to do too much for this talent”
Having burst onto the scene for AIK, Isak hit a stumbling block when he arrived in Germany. With then-manager Thomas Tuchel publicly admitting he had little to do with the forward’s signing, it quickly became clear that Isak’s chances would be limited at Signal Iduna Park. After failing to make a single Bundesliga appearance during the first half of the 2018-19 season, it was apparent Isak needed a spark to reignite his career.
“Our striker Fran Sol was leaving the club, so we were looking for another striker to replace him,” Adrie Koster, who managed Dutch side Willem II from 2018-21, told ESPN. “We watched some videos of Isak and I said to our technical director, ‘if you can get this guy, it would be great.’
“The previous summer, we had been on a training camp in Marbella and we were playing a friendly game against Dortmund. We saw Alex play against us and then we were convinced that he was the guy who could replace our striker.”
Isak joined Willem II on loan in January 2018 and quickly recaptured his fine form, scoring 14 goals and notching seven assists in just 18 games. In other words, he was directly involved in a goal every 75 minutes.
“The first time he came into the team, he stood out right away,” Koster says. “When he played, you immediately saw that he had unbelievable skills. We looked at each other on the bench and said, ‘well, this is a very good player.’ Everything seemed so smooth and easy for him that sometimes I was like ‘wow, he doesn’t even have to do too much for this talent.'”
After returning to Dortmund following the end of his loan at Willem II, Isak joined Real Sociedad on a five-year contract and there, his talent continued to grow. The forward scored 44 goals in 132 appearances for the Spanish club and by the summer of 2022, he’d done enough to convince Newcastle to make him their club-record signing for a fee in the region of £63m.
1:19
Isak completes first day in training at Liverpool
Take a look at the behind the scenes of Alexander Isak’s first day in training after joining Liverpool in a deadline day move.
‘Cool’ character key to success
It didn’t take long for Isak to announce himself in the Premier League. There is perhaps some irony in the fact that the forward’s first taste of life in the English top flight came against Liverpool, when he scored a superb goal in a 2-1 Newcastle defeat at Anfield in August 2022.
“It was a glimpse of what he can bring to the team,” manager Eddie Howe said after Isak’s impressive debut. “First and foremost, his overall performance was very good. I was pleased with how he played off the ball tactically. He gave us pace in behind and showed great composure and technique.”
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Isak’s blend of technical brilliance and clinical finishing made him an immediate fan favourite on Tyneside. There, he scored 62 goals in 109 appearances for Howe’s side, including the second in Newcastle’s Carabao Cup final victory over Liverpool in March, which secured the club’s first major trophy in 70 years.
“He’s like an assassin, the way he puts chances away,” former Newcastle striker Alan Shearer told BBC Sport earlier this year. “But what I really liked from talking to him is that you can tell he is still looking for ways to improve his game at the age of 25.”
For Isak, that desire to push the boundaries of his own abilities was one of the factors that compelled him to push for a move to Liverpool this summer. His methods may have proved unpopular — and arguably, they irreparably tarnished his reputation in the eyes of many Newcastle fans — but his determination to succeed at the highest level has been a consistent theme of his footballing journey so far.
“The way he is as a person means he can deal with the circumstances,” said Koster. “He’s very cool and calm, at ease even when the pressure is on. For example, when he had to take penalties for us, that was no problem for him. It was a goal even before he’d kicked it. Whenever he had the ball, you knew it would be alright.”
When asked by club media what he hopes to achieve at Liverpool, Isak simply said “I want to win everything.”
For Isak, the hard work has already started. The forward arrived for his first day of Liverpool training on Wednesday and took part in a session at the AXA Training Centre with the likes of Jeremie Frimpong, Federico Chiesa and Joe Gomez. In the coming days, he will be introduced to more of his teammates as they return from international duty, while manager Arne Slot will assess his readiness for Sunday’s trip to Burnley.
While it could still be some time before Isak is ready to play a full 90 minutes, training videos posted to Liverpool’s social media accounts show him looking incredibly sharp, and Slot may feel the striker could add an extra dimension to his attack off the bench at Turf Moor.
Of course, having now assumed the label of the most expensive signing in Premier League history, the pressure on the forward to realise that ambition will be greater than ever. However, if his career to date is anything to go by, only a fool would bet against him getting his wish.
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