Alexander Isak’s value just keeps on rising. A little more than two years ago, when Newcastle United prised him from Real Sociedad, it cost the Premier League club £63million ($77m). Last summer, as Arsenal and Chelsea contemplated the possibility of manoeuvring him to London, the theoretical bar for entry was considerably higher: £100m or so.
Such has been his form this season that even that seems too little. Isak has scored 19 goals in 25 games. Between the start of December and the middle of January, he went on a tear, scoring at least once every time he took to a Premier League field, setting a new club record in the process.
He is more than just volume; Isak also offers variety. He can score in a dazzling variety of ways, from a dizzying array of positions. He can sit on the shoulder, he can drop deep, he can drift wide. He can lead a press and link play and run channels. He is a true No 9 capable of playing like a false one, his slender frame belying a player who is almost the archetype of a contemporary centre forward.
And that makes him rare and precious and coveted, particularly in an era when strikers are held to be in short supply. A serious suitor would likely have to break the British record — the £106million Chelsea paid for Enzo Fernandez two years ago — even to tempt Newcastle to the table. A more realistic estimate might be closer to £150m.
That figure is purely speculative, of course, and it is increasingly likely to remain that way. There is no shortage of clubs who would dearly love to add Isak to their ranks, of course, but most, if not all, know the economics now make it close to impossible. And for that, Newcastle might like to thank a set of rules many of their fans regard as a deliberate attempt to curb their ambitions: the Premier League’s catchily-titled, wildly unpopular profit and sustainability regulations (PSR).
Ordinarily, Isak’s career from this point on would follow a familiar pattern. Three prolific years at Newcastle would convince either one of Europe’s old houses — Bayern Munich or Juventus or Barcelona — or one of the Premier League’s great powers to make Newcastle an offer too good to refuse.
Isak would move on to a team where he might (reliably) compete for trophies, test himself in the Champions League, push his talent to the limit. Newcastle would reinvest the funds from his sale across the squad; the collective might even emerge stronger in his absence. His departure would hurt, of course, but it would not always hurt for long.
That is, broadly, how the food chain of the transfer market has worked for most of football’s modern era: not just for Newcastle, but for thousands of teams across England, Europe and the world. Talent drifts to the very top, either directly or in instalments; in exchange, money flows back down.
Over the past few years, though, it has ground to a halt.
The most immediate, and likely most significant, factor in that is the sheer wealth of the Premier League, particularly in relation to its rival competitions around Europe. Its television revenues cast all else into shade. The curiosities that dynamic has produced are well-trodden: all 20 clubs in England’s top flight are among the 30 richest on the planet; Bournemouth have been bigger spenders, and better payers, than AC Milan for some time.
That has led, inevitably, to a concentration of talent in the Premier League. At a very generous estimate, there are perhaps a dozen clubs left on the continent with the financial clout to pay a competitive fee (and salary) to sign a player from England’s top flight. The days when English clubs regarded their European counterparts as predators are long gone. Now, they see them almost exclusively as prey.
That effect has been compounded by the money that has flooded into English football from outside. England’s clubs can call not only on all of that delicious broadcasting money, but the functionally bottomless resources of the nation-states, private equity houses and sundry tycoons who make up the ranks of its ownership.
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That has served not only to bolster the purchasing power of the Premier League clubs, but to make England the most expensive market imaginable in which to buy. The amount of money required to make an offer that is too good to refuse has grown exponentially. Manchester City had to pay £100million to extract Jack Grealish from Aston Villa. Arsenal had to pay even more to coax Declan Rice from West Ham. It should hardly be a surprise that the average cost of signing a player from another Premier League club has more than doubled over the past 10 years. It is only just an exaggeration to say that there is no longer really a point where anyone has to sell.
All of that would be true in a world without PSR, of course, but that does not mean it is not relevant. Until last season, even high-ranking executives at Premier League teams were not entirely sure whether the regulations were laws, iron and unflinching, or really more of a set of guidelines. They had never truly been tested, after all; plenty doubted the league would have the nerve to enforce them.
The raft of points deductions handed to Everton and Nottingham Forest for breaching the losses permitted by the regulations put an end to that, of course. The league might be preparing to change the way it assesses its members’ accounts — PSR will be phased out, in favour of a “squad cost” measure this summer — but there is no uncertainty that the rules are to be taken seriously.
That much became obvious last summer, as a host of clubs frantically bought and sold players before the June 30 deadline, helping them come under the PSR threshold. Newcastle, for example, were involved in discussions about the potential sale of more than half-a-dozen first-team players and ended up shipping Elliot Anderson to Nottingham Forest and Yakuba Minteh to Brighton & Hove Albion.
Anderson was sold by Newcastle to Forest during their PSR scramble (Photo: George Wood/Getty Images)
That has always been the principle criticism of PSR, of course: that it is, at its most fundamental level, a protectionist measure, deliberately designed to preserve the status quo in amber, to cocoon a self-interested and self-appointed oligopoly by limiting the ambitions of prospective usurpers. Newcastle, Nottingham Forest and the others can only hope to buy if they sell, flattening the curve of their growth. In this interpretation, PSR is inherently anti-competitive.
If anything, though, it is starting to seem as though there is a flip side. PSR applies to the clubs it is supposed to ringfence, too. Manchester United wrote to their fans this week warning them that the club is “in danger of failing to comply” with the regulations. Arsenal’s transfer activity has been influenced by the need to stay within their threshold. Liverpool, too, have tended only to spend considerable sums when they have been able to raise funds through selling players. Even Manchester City’s willingness to invest this month can be traced to the lucrative sale of Julian Alvarez, among others, last summer. (Chelsea, admittedly, stand as a rule to themselves.)
In an era in which clubs have to be careful how they allocate their money so as not to tread too close to their spending limits, it is hard to make a case for committing some vast proportion of a budget to the painful and expensive process of signing a player from a rival.
Isak is the clearest example, but he is far from the only one. Bruno Guimaraes, his team-mate at Newcastle, falls into the same category; so too do Murillo, Nottingham Forest’s prematurely grizzled Brazilian defender, Aston Villa’s Jhon Duran, and possibly even Brentford’s Bryan Mbeumo. One or more might agitate for a move; if not, though, they may well prove too expensive to buy.
And that is, very clearly, in the interests not only of their fans and their clubs, but of the league itself. There are obvious flaws to the rules, and the way they have been implemented: the fact that they incentivise selling homegrown, academy products is a clear drawback; that a number of clubs seem to have determined that the correct response to financial regulation is to search immediately for loopholes is far from ideal. But it would be unfair not to note the benefits. It is good for the Premier League if more clubs can retain their star players; if they can add to their ranks, rather than always having to refresh them; if there is a more even spread of talent down the table and across the country.
There is a very good chance it is just coincidence that this season, the first after the Premier League’s year of the asterisk, has served as such a fine showcase of what that might look like: an open, unusually forgiving title race; a bunched sprint for Europe; a table laced with fine margins and genuine jeopardy.
But it is possible, too, that this is one of the consequences of actual financial regulation, that this is what the next iteration of the Premier League might look like. The complaint of those clubs who felt held back by the rules was always that they served to freeze things as they are, to prevent movement. It seems only fair to acknowledge that, sometimes, that can be a benefit, too.
(Top photo: Richard Sellers/Sportsphoto/Allstar via Getty Images)
