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Newcastle wantaway Alexander Isak is pulling out all the textbook moves to force a switch to Liverpool; having told the Magpies he wants to leave, the striker has been left out of a friendly, pulled out of the pre-season tour and, of course, gone ‘AWOL’. It’s a throwback to some of the great transfer sagas of years gone by, and it seems to have some way to run yet.
A matter of days after Liverpool made their interest clear, Isak was sent home ahead of Newcastle’s friendly defeat to Celtic having been unsettled by the intense speculation surrounding him. Then, after Al-Hilal joined the race for his signature, the striker was left out of the Magpies’ pre-season tour to Asia due to a supposed thigh injury.
Reports that he had gone ‘AWOL’ soon followed amid the Tynesiders’ refusal to sell and it emerged that he had been training at former club Real Sociedad in Spain, rather than at Newcastle’s facilities, in a bid to get back to full fitness. Isak wants to join the Reds, and it’s even been claimed that he could even take the ‘nuclear’ option of unilaterally terminating his contract to make the move happen.
This one’s not over yet, but how does the saga centring around Isak compare to some of the most infamous in football history? بالجم runs through the top 10:
Newcastle wantaway Alexander Isak is pulling out all the textbook moves to force a switch to Liverpool; having told the Magpies he wants to leave, the striker has been left out of a friendly, pulled out of the pre-season tour and, of course, gone ‘AWOL’. It’s a throwback to some of the great transfer sagas of years gone by, and it seems to have some way to run yet.
A matter of days after Liverpool made their interest clear, Isak was sent home ahead of Newcastle’s friendly defeat to Celtic having been unsettled by the intense speculation surrounding him. Then, after Al-Hilal joined the race for his signature, the striker was left out of the Magpies’ pre-season tour to Asia due to a supposed thigh injury.
Reports that he had gone ‘AWOL’ soon followed amid the Tynesiders’ refusal to sell, and it emerged that he had been training at former club Real Sociedad in Spain, rather than at Newcastle’s facilities, in a bid to get back to full fitness. Isak wants to join the Reds, and it’s even been claimed that he could even take the ‘nuclear’ option of unilaterally terminating his contract to make the move happen.
This one’s not over yet, but how does the saga centring around Isak compare to some of the most infamous in football history? بالجم runs through the top 10:
Few possess the cojones to cross the fierce Clasico divide, but that’s exactly what Luis Figo did as he became the most expensive player ever in 2000 when swapping Barcelona for Real Madrid, supposedly due to feeling undervalued at Camp Nou and displeasure with the way the Blaugrana were being run at the time.
The perceived betrayal drew a vitriolic response from the Barcelona faithful, who infamously greeted the Portuguese icon by launching a pig’s head at him as he attempted to take a corner on his first return to Camp Nou in 2002. Figo will probably feel he had the last laugh, though, claiming the Ballon d’Or in 2001 and going on to win the Champions League in 2002, cementing his status as a great of the game.
In 2005, it seemed for all the world that Jose Mourinho had somehow managed to convince Steven Gerrard to ditch his boyhood club and join his revolution at Stamford Bridge. Having failed to sign him the previous year, Chelsea went again with a £32 million offer that summer after the midfielder flirted with an exit mid-season, with furious Liverpool fans even burning his shirt and graffitiing ‘traitor’ at the Reds’ training ground.
That bid was rejected, with Real Madrid in the race too, and Gerrard, then 25, went to the lengths of handing in a transfer request despite a club-record £100,000-per-week contract offer being on the table. “This has been the hardest decision I have ever had to make,” he said at the time.
However, just 24 hours later, he dramatically U-turned on his decision and penned a new deal at Anfield, with the club apologising for how talks had initially been conducted.
The other Swedish striker at the heart of a transfer saga this summer, Viktor Gyokeres was always expected to make a big-money move once the window opened after another prolific season with Sporting CP in Portugal – the only question was where and when.
Despite widespread interest, it became clear that the ‘where’ would be Arsenal, but the Gunners and the player himself had to fight tooth and nail to make the deal happen. Gyokeres became embroiled in a bitter war of words with the Sporting president, who had apparently reneged on a gentleman’s agreement that he could leave, and went AWOL when pre-season training began. Sporting also quibbled over add-ons, but Arsenal eventually landed him for £64m ($86m).
In the first transfer window following their Abu Dhabi-backed takeover in September 2008, Manchester City were determined to make AC Milan superstar Kaka the poster boy of their project. They reportedly tabled what was an unprecedented, world-record sum worth £100m, as well as an incredibly lucrative £500,000-per-week contract. However, the Brazilian ultimately rejected City’s riches after a vociferous reaction from Milan fans to his potential departure.
He said at the time: “At the moment I don’t want to change anything. All the messages that I received said to choose with the heart and I think in the end that has been the decision. It is absolutely not about money.”
The Rossoneri’s late owner, Silvio Berlusconi, added: “Kaka has refused the offer from Manchester City, giving privilege to Milan, his companions and his fans. The fans are delighted too. Turning down so much money is something to admire.” Ironically, the Brazilian would join Real Madrid in June 2009 for a significantly lower sum, citing the global financial crisis and the need to help Milan.
Harry Kane finally reached the end of his tether with Tottenham in 2021 at the end of a disappointing season where Spurs finished outside the European places in the الدوري الإنجليزي الممتاز after Mourinho was sacked and with not a whole lot done in the transfer window to enhance their prospects for the new season. Having stuck loyally by the club to that point, he’d had enough.
Man City were after him as a result – Pep Guardiola even admitted as much – and seemed set to get their man, especially after the striker was a no-show at Tottenham at the start of pre-season in the belief he had a gentleman’s agreement to leave. A £100m offer was rejected, although City were reportedly willing to go as high as a British-record £127m. But after protracted negotiations a deal never materialised, and Kane was eventually forced to announce that he would be staying put.
Potentially the most drawn-out transfer saga of all time, Kylian Mbappe finally completed his inevitable move to Real Madrid in 2024, but only after years of flirting with the Spanish giants and stringing Paris Saint-Germain along in the process, ultimately depriving his now-former club of probably well over £100m ($133m).
A player who had been earmarked by Madrid as a child and who idolised Cristiano Ronaldo, Los Blancos made their first move for Mbappe late in the summer window of 2021 having been beaten to him when he was a Monaco player, offering €160m, but were rebuffed before subsequent bids were flat-out ignored. Nevertheless, Mbappe was entering the final year of his contract and it was assumed he would join Madrid for free in 2022. Then, out of almost nowhere, PSG announced in May 2022 that the attacker had signed a new contract – an incredibly lucrative two-year deal with the option for a third – leaving Real fuming.
Of course, that wasn’t the end of the story. It emerged in June 2023 that Mbappe had no plans to stay for that extra year, and the player verbally agreed to make the long-awaited switch in February 2024 and finally announced his imminent exit three months later, officially becoming a Real Madrid player in the summer.
A transfer that neither Barcelona nor Lionel Messi actually wanted, the Catalan giants’ dire financial situation (still a serious issue to this day) forced their hand in 2021. The club was unable to offer the Argentine icon a new contract due to La Liga’s salary cap rules, and ultimately they had to go their separate ways in a bitter ending to a glittering era.
Qatari-backed moneybags PSG were able to offer him a new home on an eye-watering wage, with Messi’s acrimonious exit from Barca immortalised in a now-infamous press conference where he announced his departure and bawled his eyes out in front of the world.
A transfer that was four years in the making, Neymar seemed destined for a top European club from the moment he emerged into Brazilian football at Santos in 2009, and Barcelona eventually won the race to sign him in 2013, most notably beating Real Madrid to his signature. However, that was only the beginning of a saga that was played out in various courtrooms.
Neymar’s father, Neymar Sr., was one of those accused of tax fraud related to the deal, with Barca’s hierarchy also implicated as it was revealed that the Blaugrana had paid far more for the starlet than had initially been reported. The deal was scrutinised for three years by prosecutors before everything was eventually ironed out, only for Neymar to then shockingly depart Camp Nou a year later.
When Real Madrid come knocking, they usually get what they want in the end, and Manchester United found that out the hard way in 2009. Los Blancos first came calling for Cristiano Ronaldo in the summer of 2008, with United going to the lengths of reporting Madrid to FIFA for what they believed was a deliberate attempt to unsettle their talisman.
The saga dragged on that summer, but Ronaldo eventually insisted he was happy at Old Trafford and would stay for the upcoming campaign, with the Red Devils the Champions League holders at the time. But the seed had been planted, and after often casting doubt over his future during the 2008-09 season amid continued speculation, the then-24-year-old completed a world-record £80m move to the Bernabeu at the start of July.
Another big-name star to cross a derby divide, Carlos Tevez swapped the red side of Manchester for the blue side in a hugely controversial move after shockingly rejecting the opportunity to turn his loan at Old Trafford from West Ham into a permanent switch in the summer of 2009, with Man City believed to have paid the Argentine’s advisors a massive £25.5m sum to make the deal happen.
It was reported that Tevez had become disgruntled with a lack of opportunities at United, having often been left on the bench by Sir Alex Ferguson despite netting 15 times in 2008-09 and with the 2010 World Cup swiftly approaching. However, he denied he had been given game-time guarantees at City.
“I have no assurances about my place and must win the respect of my team-mates as I fight to be first choice,” the striker said at the time. The flames of the rivalry were stoked as the transfer was announced with sky blue ‘Welcome to Manchester’ billboards in the city.
