Alexander Isak posted a provocative Instagram message accusing Newcastle of breaking promises, diverting attention from Mohamed Salah at a high-profile awards event. The message arrived via numerous phone alerts and intensified speculation about Isak's desire to leave. The post damaged prospects of reintegrating a player who was refusing to train or play, prompting the club's majority owner, the Public Investment Fund, to publicly insist Isak would stay. Briefings that the move backfired proved inaccurate as executives privately recognised an endgame was underway. The situation traces back to spring 2024 when Amanda Staveley promised an enhanced contract that summer.
Not too many players are capable of upstaging Mohamed Salah but, last month, Alexander Isak revelled in revealing that rare ability. Salah had assumed centre stage at Manchester's Opera House and, as the latest recipient of the Professional Footballers' Association player of the year award, was preparing to deliver an eagerly awaited acceptance speech when he lost a previously rapt audience.
Numerous discreet vibrations from phones switched to silent had transmitted the news of Isak posting a particularly provocative Instagram message. In accusing Newcastle of breaking promises and leaving a relationship severed, it reduced even Liverpool's Egypt forward to a mere warm-up act before the night's main event. Isak has always possessed the knack of timing his runs to perfection and now the Sweden striker had picked precisely the right, high-profile moment.
His Instagram message certainly blindsided St James' Park executives while virtually extinguishing increasingly faint hopes that a player then refusing to either train with or play for Newcastle could somehow be reintegrated into Eddie Howe's squad. Rather like a centre-half panicking in the face of one of Isak's penalty-area advances, Newcastle's majority owner, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, lunged in with a bullish statement of its own insisting that its 63m signing from Real Sociedad three years ago was going nowhere.
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