It\u2019s a big question, a loaded question, an inherently unfair question. And it\u2019s a question that now needs asking: Is Alexander Isak the floppiest flop in all of Premier League flopsville?<\/p>\n
We\u2019re really starting to think he might be. It absolutely feels like it\u2019s such a perfect combination of assorted floppery elements that not only does it beat all that have come before, it\u2019s actually really hard to see how anything that comes after can challenge it.<\/p>\n
Think of all the things that might contribute to a player being a flop, and you\u2019ve got them here. The starting point is obviously the vast transfer fee. We are, by actual law, required here to note that The Player Can\u2019t Help That, but a huge transfer fee always comes with inherent risk of acquiring albatross status.<\/p>\n
Then you\u2019ve got the drawn-out saga of the transfer itself, which only added to the heft of the whole thing. The longer it dragged on, the greater the importance of this move became, the less Liverpool could be seen to blow it, and the more pot-committed they became to getting it over the line at any price and any cost.<\/p>\n
And those aren\u2019t even quite the same thing, are they? The price is the eye-watering nine-figure fee they had to cough up; the cost is in the work they didn\u2019t get done as a result, with the showy bravura of putting Newcastle in their place and snaffling their star player becoming so all-consuming that it was only desperately \u2013 and ultimately too \u2013 late on deadline day that Liverpool properly got round to the far more necessary task of sorting out their ageing and under-manned defence<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n Throw in the fact that as a confirmed Barclays talent, Isak wasn\u2019t even ever going to be granted any kind of acclimatisation allowance, and you\u2019ve got a heady brew indeed.<\/p>\n Liverpool signing Isak was such a luxury, such an overt power move that was hard to justify financially or logistically from a football perspective \u2013 blinded as we all were by the sheer thrill of it all at the time \u2013 that even if he\u2019d been Quite Good, it would still have been bad.<\/p>\n Isak didn\u2019t actually need to flop to be, in broader terms, a flop. Had he scored, say, four or five Premier League goals by this point as he gets his feet under the table at Anfield, it still wouldn\u2019t have been enough to offset the damage done to Liverpool\u2019s overall squad by the related failure to address other areas of the pitch.<\/p>\n By the time Liverpool embarked on what really does increasingly look like a catastrophically misjudged yet wholly-focused pursuit of Isak, they had already strengthened their attacking stocks with the arrivals of Florian Wirtz and Hugo Ekitike.<\/p>\n The latter of those is particularly significant, because signing Isak after signing Ekitike was so redundant that the joke at the time was that Liverpool had screwed Newcastle twice by signing Isak after they\u2019d already signed his replacement.<\/p>\n And this is the key point now in placing Isak on the great all-time list of flops: Liverpool didn\u2019t actually even need a good Isak. They \u2018already had Isak at home\u2019 in the form of Ekitike. Deploying laser-focused 20:20 hindsight it becomes clear that Isak was going to have to be truly exceptional to be even halfway worth it for Liverpool given what they sacrificed to get that deal over the line.<\/p>\n And he hasn\u2019t been exceptional. Or Quite Good. Or adequate. Or slightly disappointing. He\u2019s been, to use a technical term, pure sh*te.<\/p>\n Liverpool are an actively worse team with him on the pitch. Not even just in the \u2018Guehi but no Isak would have been more useful than Isak but no Guehi\u2019 sense, but even in comparison to the other players they actually do have.<\/p>\n Isak is making Liverpool worse than they should be now, and significantly worse than they could be had the time and money spent on him been used elsewhere.<\/p>\n A player who needed to contribute significantly just to break even on a cost:benefit analysis is instead turning in numbers that wouldn\u2019t do from a free transfer.<\/p>\n