Alexander Isak and the Premier League players who have tried to force a transfer

New York Times

3 days ago

Less than a week before Newcastle United's Premier League season opener against Aston Villa, The Athletic reported that their star striker Alexander Isak is adamant he will not play for the club again.
Isak, who has scored 62 goals in 109 appearances for Eddie Howe's side, views his career there as over after three years. Newcastle, though, say they have no intention of allowing him to leave, and have turned down a £110million ($149.3m at the current rate) bid this summer from Premier League champions Liverpool.
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The question now is whether Isak will successfully force the club's hand or continue into the season still refusing to feature. Or maybe there will be a reconciliation — perhaps after the transfer window shuts on September 1 in what is now a World Cup year.
The Athletic looks back at some similar situations, from Harry Kane's non-move from Tottenham Hotspur to Manchester City to Dimitri Payet's one-man strike at West Ham United, to get a sense of what could happen next.
A problem for Isak is that being under contract at Newcastle until the end of the 2027-28 season significantly weakens his hand. It is the same obstacle fellow striker Kane faced when he tried to move from Hotspur to Manchester City this time four years ago.
He wanted out after Spurs failed to secure Champions League football for the 2021-22 campaign and believed he had a 'gentleman's agreement' with chairman Daniel Levy that he could leave if they received a suitable offer from another Premier League side. However, he had another three years remaining on his contract at the time and Tottenham would not countenance a sale for anything less than £150million ($203m today).
Sound familiar?
In an attempt to give himself more leverage, Kane did not return for Spurs' pre-season on the date expected by the club following that summer's European Championship with England, but after receiving criticism, he posted a statement on social media insisting he 'would never, and have never, refused to train'.
In the end, after City failed to meet the asking price and Levy stayed insistent that he would only sell him overseas, Kane remained at Tottenham. He went on to play a crucial role there for two more seasons before moving to Bayern Munich in summer 2023.
Isak believes he made it clear last year that 2024-25 would be his final season as a Newcastle player, though some at the club deny this was expressed and believe the striker planned to discuss the situation, including the possibility of fresh contract terms, this summer once the campaign was over.
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There are echoes there of 2013, when Luis Suarez became embroiled in a debate with Liverpool over whether he should be allowed to leave. He claimed their manager Brendan Rodgers had promised him he could go if Liverpool did not qualify for the 2013-14 Champions League (which they failed to do, only finishing seventh) and Arsenal submitted a bid of exactly £40,000,001 in the, incorrect, belief that Suarez had a release clause that would be triggered by any offer over £40m.
Suarez was forced to train on his own in pre-season over his attempts to force a move, and it was the intervention of Liverpool's captain at the time Steven Gerrard that eventually convinced him to stay and helped broker peace between the Uruguayan and Rodgers.
The following season, Suarez was named Premier League player of the year after scoring 31 goals in the competition as Liverpool came agonisingly close to winning the title. He was then sold to Barcelona in July 2014.
If Isak truly has no desire to reintegrate at Newcastle, as was reported by The Athletic's David Ornstein this week, the obvious question that follows is whether he flat-out refuses to train. That nuclear approach has been employed by different footballers when seeking a transfer, though with varied success.
In 1998, Nottingham Forest striker Pierre van Hooijdonk refused to return for pre-season over what he perceived to be the club's lack of investment in their squad.
'I think we all felt similar to Pierre that summer,' former Forest defender Alan Rogers told The Athletic in 2020. 'We all felt frustrated. But you don't expect one of your team-mates to go on strike like Pierre did. He just went about it completely the wrong way.'
The Dutchman was not a popular figure in the dressing room when he was finally persuaded to go back to work in the November, as team-mates Dougie Freedman and Steve Chettle recounted to The Athletic in 2020. One of the most memorable and succinct quotes from the whole affair, though, was then Forest manager Dave Bassett's initial reaction to the idea of Van Hooijdonk returning: 'If he thinks we're going to offer him an olive branch, he knows where he can stick it.'
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As it turned out, Van Hooijdonk was a decent player, even with a metaphorical olive branch somewhere uncomfortable. He could not save Forest from relegation but did score six goals in 19 starts and two substitute appearances in the league, a tally only bettered in the squad by fellow forward Freedman, who got nine. He then moved to Vitesse Arnhem in his homeland that summer.
This was a strike that could not be reconciled.
West Ham United co-owner David Sullivan hailed Payet as a 'world-class player' when he arrived at the London club in summer 2015, later describing him as 'the best player I've signed in 25 years. He's a £30million ($41m at today's exchange rate) player. He's a supreme footballer. He makes every player in our side play better. On his day, he's world class — he's unstoppable.'
After an excellent debut season in which he scored 12 goals and provided 15 assists in 38 appearances across all competitions, Payet was named West Ham's player of the year. But the Frenchman's exit the following season was as explosive as he could be on the pitch.
After a quieter start to Payet's second season (22 games, three goals), West Ham manager Slaven Bilic revealed in January 2017 that the player wanted to leave. The situation was that Payet was on strike over the issue, refusing to train or play. He was eventually banned from the first-team training ground and told to work with the under-23 squad at another facility.
There was no way back and at the end of that month, West Ham accepted a £25million bid from Marseille and Payet returned to the club they'd bought him from for less than half that amount 18 months earlier.
By Bilic's admission, the Frenchman was his team's best player. He was also contracted to West Ham until the summer of 2021. But neither of those factors stopped the move he wanted from materialising.
Young forward Berahino's relationship with West Bromwich Albion, the club where he came up through the youth ranks, never recovered from 2015's summer transfer window.
The 21-year-old had scored 20 goals across all competitions in 2014-15, leading Spurs' manager at that time Mauricio Pochettino to push for the north Londoners to sign him. West Brom's chairman Jeremy Peace maintained Berahino was not for sale, despite multiple Tottenham bids and a transfer request by the player.
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The saga came to a head with Berahino saying he would never again play for a club run by Peace.
On September 1, he posted on Twitter (now X): 'Sad how I can't say exactly how the club has treated me but I can officially say I will never play (for) Jeremy Peace.'
The post was later deleted and Berahino did play for West Brom again, apologising for his threat to go on strike, but his career at the West Midlands club never recovered. In January 2017, he made the short move to Stoke City. He has since played for Sheffield Wednesday and in Belgium, Cyprus and Slovenia and had a brief spell with a team in India, but never again hit the heights of goalscoring that he reached in those early years with Albion. He only turned 32 last week and is currently without a club.
'I think 'frustrating' is the word to sum him up because he had such a high and then such a low,' James Morrison, who played with Berahino at West Brom, told The Athletic in 2020. 'But maybe we let him down. Having that Tottenham move rejected obviously affected him, and as a club we maybe could have helped him more.
'He'd worked his way up and was scoring goals in the Premier League and that chance came for him to go to Tottenham and play Champions League football. I think most players would be disappointed, and as a footballer you could see his frustration. I don't think he ever got over that.'
(Top photos of Suarez, left, and Isak: Getty Images)
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