On the evening of 25 August last year Alexander Isak stayed inside his rented house in Northumberland. Ten miles away, Newcastle lost 3-2 to Liverpool. By 1 September he was shaking hands at Anfield, a £125m British record signing who had spent the summer refusing to play in order to get there. At 16.30 on Sunday he goes back to St James' Park, and the year in between has done almost nothing to justify any of it.
The ledger is short. Three Premier League goals in 14 appearances, six of which he began on the bench, and 21% of Liverpool's league minutes. It was his worst goalscoring season since 2017-18 at Borussia Dortmund, when he played 12 times. For Newcastle he scored 54 goals in 86 Premier League appearances and 27 in all competitions in 2024-25, a season that put him in the PFA Team of the Year. He also scored the decisive goal in Newcastle's 2025 Carabao Cup final win over Liverpool at Wembley.
The reasons are not mysterious. He skipped Newcastle's pre-season tour of south east Asia, trained alone at his former club Real Sociedad, and arrived on deadline day short of match fitness. A groin injury against Eintracht Frankfurt then cost him almost a month. In December he came off the bench at Tottenham, scored, and did not finish the game: a heavy challenge from Micky van de Ven as the ball went in left him with an ankle injury that included a fractured fibula, an operation two days later and 100 days out.
Injury does not explain all of it, and his head coach said so before the leg broke. Arne Slot conceded in early December that Liverpool were not bringing the best out of their record signing, and blamed the shape of his own squad and the shape of the league. "With Jeremie Frimpong being injured and Conor Bradley being out it is not like we have so many options on the right-hand side, and it is a bit similar on the left," he said. "But the main difference for him is that we are facing a low block many times. It is not that it never happened at Newcastle but not as much, I think."