So, it’s finally happened. Super respectful, acting in good faith, Liverpool have (finally) made a lowball bid for Newcastle’s world-class striker, seeking to extract him from the club, equally strengthening themselves and weakening us.
Eight months of concerted pressure from external media to ship Isak away from Tyneside has resulted in a derisory bid, £40-50m short of our evaluation and an AWOL player.
It is said that Isak ‘must’ move away from United to ‘win leagues and Champions Leagues’ and fans of the ‘Big Six’ (and those top clubs across Europe) have a well-worn line they like to trot out when they want to sign a player from a side considered outside of those select few. It has numerous forms but goes something like this:
“X player wants to win trophies and leagues, he should be allowed to leave and move to X club where he will have a ‘realistic’ chance of winning things because footballers have such short careers.”
Cheered on by sycophantic national media, sometimes they tack on the insufferable “because X will never win anything at your club,” something which is shamefully true, for the most part, but is massively detrimental to football and a facet of the game the authorities have been happy to champion pretty much since the turn of the millennium.
Why shouldn’t a player be able to win leagues at Brentford, Villa or Everton or any of the other 14 top-division clubs? Why should the chance of glory be enshrined by only a handful of clubs? We can all see (yes, obviously apart from fans of those ‘Big Six’ clubs who live in a bubble akin to that of rich people and real life) that it is wrong for the game to be this way?
How it used to be
Look at how football used to be: there were six different top-division winners in the 50s, eight different winners in the 60s, six different winners in the 70s, four different winners in the 80s, and
There were even five different winners in the 90s, a decade thought of as being dominated by Man Utd. By the first decade of the 2000s, this was down to three; and, putting aside the Leicester fairytale of 2015/16, only four clubs have won England’s top division in the last 15 years.
Towards the end of last season, there was heaps of media coverage about 2024/25 being the ‘season to break long streaks without winning something’ with Newcastle, Spurs, Palace, Bologna, and NAC Breda all breaking their streaks. It was lauded and applauded, but fast forward a few short months, and the reaction appears to be ‘we can’t have that again,’ and those ‘big’ clubs have doubled down and spent fortunes whilst everyone else has had players cherry-picked away from them, as Liverpool are trying to do with Isak.
The exact same thing happened to Leicester after 2015/16 – best players cherry-picked, and despite making an excellent fist of it (QFs of Champions League, FA Cup winners), were relegated just seven years later after never quite being able to break through the artificial ceiling put in place.
A lot to answer for
Sky Sports and the Premier League have a lot to answer for generally, but the money it has pumped into the game has taken away the romance and the ability to dream, as well as the literal ability for most teams to win league titles outside of a select few. Unless, of course, you’re owned by an oligarch or a sovereign nation, but the established order didn’t like that the first two times it happened, so they pulled up the drawbridge when it happened a third.
Putting aside Isak’s supposed behaviour (and I would still encourage caution as we still don’t actually know what has gone on and what hasn’t), the odious onslaught of the Sky Sports/Fabrizio Romano-led effort to get Isak out of Newcastle for the last eight months is only possible because the ‘Big Six’ gate-keep the other sides’ ability to win things – just look how the rules are bent and contorted to their will, or when they do something obviously egregious, it’s reported with all the zeal of a shrug of the shoulders.
The one good thing American sport tries to do
Before anyone kicks off, I’m against the Americanisation of football, but they do have some principles that are designed to promote fairness across their top sports despite the faults inherent in them. We all know I’m talking about the draft system and the salary cap system. Non-perfect systems that have at least produced twelve different Super Bowl winners in the last 15 years.
According to capology.com, the average Premier League salary is nearly £3,000,000 p.a., but the differences by team are vast, from Man City (£230,646,000 p.a.) to Sunderland (£10,132,000 p.a.). Although this is probably more skewed than usual due to Sunderland’s very recent residence in League One, it still highlights the obvious winds most clubs are sailing against. United’s own salaries came in at £88,920,000 p.a., with a near £180,000,000 difference between ourselves and Man City.
I don’t think a draft would work in this country as our universities are not set up in the same way as their American counterparts, but what would work (and isn’t complete anathema to football as there is one in place in League One and Two) is a salary cap.
A salary cap would level the playing field overnight. Make it £150,000,000 p.a., and watch the ‘big’ clubs squirm. A lot of salary cap discussions used to be shut down by the fact it contravened EU laws, but that’s not a factor anymore…
Overplayed competitiveness
Top-level football in England is not a level playing field, and the competitiveness of the Premier League is vastly overplayed by media hype and spin, who, of course, have a vested interest in marketing it that way as they have the ridiculous TV contracts to pay. The league probably is the most competitive but only in the middle ground; top and bottom are fast becoming/have been for a while in the case of the top spots a closed shop.
Lastly, bringing it back to Newcastle, we as fans consistently ask questions like, why does the club appear to be playing fair when everyone else isn’t? Where are the front-of-training-kit sponsors and training ground sponsors? Or the more obscure sponsors that other teams seem to have, like moisturisers and cryptocurrency? And those are all great questions, but without the authorities who run the game for once backing the play of the ‘other 14’ (and them finally standing up and putting self-interest aside), nothing will change.
It stinks, and football should be thinking about these things before it eats itself completely.
Oh, and we shouldn’t sell Isak for any less than £160m and stick another £5m on every time Liverpool bid below it. How’s that for respect…
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