Isak - Perspective and Acceptance

Grief moves at different speeds for all of us. But Matthew, for one, is ready to move on.

Sometimes a little perspective is needed.

I mean, we all know how grief works. After the denial comes the anger. And in the seething, frothing, algorithm-fuelled echo chamber of social media, that can only be expressed in all out fury.

But anger directed in whose particular direction? After all, there are plenty of plausible suspects in the curious case of Alexander Isak and the 2025 transfer window.

The club in the conservatory with the structural incompetence? Surely by now even the sunniest and most loyal advocate of the “project” has to admit that we are club infused with complete dysfunction.

No CEO, no sporting director. Transfers in the hands of Eddie's nephew. Day to day operations seemingly left to a spoilt rich boy who's never had a proper job in his life, let alone one in football. A transfer strategy that shows all the clarity and thought of a Steve Bruce team selection - shit thrown at a wall to see what will stick, as it was once memorably put in these pages.

If you're a player coveted by every other club in Europe, a player earning half their market value, a player seeing no uplift of talent around them, a player who has had promises (allegedly) broken, then you might reasonably want to explore your options elsewhere. The club has to take significant blame.

The Premier League in the dining room with the financial regulations? Well, obviously. But I'm sorry, I really can't be arsed to write this paragraph. I've had enough. Just construct your own suitably irate sentences out of the following words: cartel, big six, corrupt, PSR, FFP, US venture capitalists, Chelsea, modern football, bollocks, pigs, troughs, snouts, blah fucking blah.

Isak and his evil whispering “representatives” in the library with the selfish betrayal? We give our selves, our money, our time, our dreams to that shirt. We have done for more years than we can remember. Is a little loyalty too much to expect in return? Is £6.5 million a year in wages really not enough for jogging round a pitch for 90 minutes on a Sunday afternoon and occasionally coming to life to prod a ball into a net? Leave? How very fucking dare you!

All true and yet also all utterly irrelevant. Because a weekend is a long time in grief.

I spent Friday bargaining. No one can afford him. A new contract might yet emerge. We must surely be about to appoint someone who knows what they're doing? We can't be far from announcing a new back-up goalie and the window will be saved? Everything will be OK, won't it?

Meanwhile, Saturday's child is a child stuck in depression. What's the point? Football has become a mirror of the worst parts of the world we live in. Isak will go. Eddie will go. The project will unravel. This is as good as it will ever get. Hello, mediocrity, my old friend. Come in, take a seat, let me get you a drink. I've missed your reassuring company.

And then, finally, comes the peace of acceptance.

In building from nothing, this was always the deal. We bought promise, we bought potential. We bought undervalued players who other teams decided they didn't want. Bruno, Sven, Scouse Ant, and Alexander The Not Yet Great. It was built into the business model that they would improve, increase their value, become the fatted calves sacrificed at the altar of PSR. We should be grateful that only one has reached that point and one whose value might mean no others need be sold.

Can we afford to be without him? No, of course not. But then that's also the problem. So brightly does his star shine that its shadow snuffs out everything else. A second striker is almost impossible to find when the first is so all powerful. His new contract would be prohibitive, resources all invested in a single player. This is no sensible way to build a squad.

And if we don't sell him now? We end up with the worst of both worlds. No paradigm shifting influx of cash and also a sulking underperformer in the one position where we can least afford to carry a player.

There were already some worrying signs last season. For every game-changing performance, there were five where he was off the pace: seemingly uninterested, definitely unable to make the kind of intervention you'd expect of a £100m plus footballer. And that's before we get to the increasingly tactical muscle injuries that only seem to arise at Anfield or the Emirates or in the departure lounge for Singapore.

Cut through the understandable anger and depression, and the reality is that our squad would be much better off with two high quality additions up front and loose change from £120m. Not that anyone has any faith in us finding and securing those two players, but that is a whole different set of issues.

In truth, this is an issue as old as professional football itself. It feels personal. It feels unfair. It feels different. But it's really not. Players have always outgrown their clubs. Players have always been bought and sold for silly money that was too good to refuse. Players have always been commodities in the most brutal of capitalist markets. It happened in the 1890s, it happens now, and it will always happen. Let us at least be in control of that process and use it to our advantage.

I'll always have the view from the lower Bullens as Sir Alex pirouetted down the Goodison bye line on a magical night when I stood on those wooden seats and clung to one of those pillars, swept away by the joy of a new world. I'll always have Wembley, that effortless controlled sweep into the corner and the Angel of the North made flesh.

And now I accept and move on. We accept and move on. Because they are nothing but employees who stay and go as whim and opportunity dictates.

We will always be here long after they have gone. We are the constants. We are the club.

Matthew Philpotts

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