It is 30 years since Liverpool smashed the British transfer record to sign Stan Collymore, a brilliant, brutally effective centre-forward with the build of a cruiserweight boxer and skills that, on his day, made him almost unplayable.
He was the match-winner on his debut against Sheffield Wednesday, conjuring an eye-catching goal out of nothing, and scored another beauty against reigning champions Blackburn Rovers a month later, but, behind the scenes, cracks soon appeared. From an early stage, he felt out of place at Anfield, cold-shouldered in the dressing room and an awkward fit in a team whose commitment to pass-and-move football was at odds with the strengths he had showcased at Nottingham Forest.
Just six games into his Liverpool career, Collymore aired his frustrations in an interview that was outspoken even by the unfiltered standards of the time. “I don’t know of any other industry,” he told FourFourTwo magazine, “that would lay out £8.5m on anything and then not have some plan from day one on how they’re going to use it.”
By the time the magazine hit the shelves two months later, in November 1995, things had gotten worse. He had not added to those two early goals, with the veteran Ian Rush and the prodigious Robbie Fowler often preferred in attack.
Thirty years on, another British record acquisition is enduring an even more chastening start to his Liverpool career. Since completing that highly acrimonious, record-breaking deadline-day move from Newcastle United, Isak’s only goal has come in a Carabao Cup tie against Southampton. His first four league starts for Liverpool have all ended in defeat, the first time that has happened to a Liverpool player since 1906.
In the abject 3-0 loss to Nottingham Forest on Saturday, he was substituted midway through the second half, having touched the ball just 15 times.
There is no shortage of problems for Arne Slot to address at Liverpool, whose Premier League title defence has crumbled in alarming style with six defeats in their last seven matches, but the struggles of his £125m ($163.7m) centre-forward are high on the list.
The big question here is whether this is a short-term issue, which will soon be resolved once he has built up his match fitness after forfeiting a proper pre-season programme in order to force his departure from Newcastle, or whether there are deeper issues.
Collymore got over that difficult start to his Liverpool career by adapting his game, running the channels and stretching defences in order to create more space for Fowler, with whom his partnership began to flourish.
But it did not last. He grew disillusioned and was sold to Aston Villa after two seasons.
Far more enduring than his impact on Merseyside was that line about the excesses of football’s transfer market. So often players are signed at enormous expense while appearing less compatible with the team they are joining — think Fernando Torres (Chelsea, £50m), Paul Pogba (Manchester United, £90m) and Jack Grealish (Manchester City, £100m).
The psychological burden of a big transfer fee can prove far heavier than imagined, but there are also times when, as Collymore suggested, clubs appear fixated on signing a certain player without having given serious consideration to how to use him.
The Isak deal did not seem to fall into that category. Liverpool’s recruitment team, led by Michael Edwards and Richard Hughes, is highly regarded within the game. They set their sights on Isak long before the club secured the title last April. This, along with the capture of Florian Wirtz from Bayer Leverkusen, was the centrepiece of a rebuild designed to elevate a title-winning team to an even higher level.
All the data, as well as the eye test, told them that Isak and Liverpool were compatible, and that a player who was just about to turn 26, approaching the peak of his powers, would enhance a successful side.
Instead, Isak arrived unfit, joining a team in a state of flux. Whatever his claims of “broken promises” at Newcastle, his refusal to train in the build-up to the season has hurt everyone: his former club, himself, Liverpool and the Sweden national team, who finished bottom of their World Cup qualifying group.
Isak has struggled to make an impact at Liverpool (Darren Staples / AFP via Getty Images)
Slot spoke frankly at his pre-match news conference on Friday about needing to find the balance, in his selections, between “what is the best for him as an individual and for us a team”.
“I do know that a 100 per cent fit Alexander Isak is a big, big plus,” the Liverpool manager added. “But for him to get there, he might need to have minutes where you could argue that another player might be further ahead of him in terms of match fitness.”
The other player in question, Hugo Ekitike, made a wonderful start to his Liverpool career, scoring five goals in his first eight appearances and bringing the kind of speed, clever movement and goal threat that Isak was meant to represent. It has led to questions about whether Liverpool even needed Isak, given that both players are of a similar technical profile and that, barring a change of system, there seems to have been little intention to play them in tandem.
The matter is complicated, like so much at Liverpool this season, by the dreadful impact of Diogo Jota’s death, with Slot telling reporters in September that the tragedy meant the club were effectively forced to bring in two No 9s.
There was a logic behind signing Ekitike and Isak, but the pressure to build up the latter’s fitness has complicated Slot’s job further at a time when he has already been dealing with various structural and tactical problems, as well as a crisis of confidence. After such a promising start, Ekitike’s momentum has stalled: he has just one goal in his past nine appearances.
Isak’s selection in the starting line-up against Forest on Saturday looked questionable at the time, given that he had played for just 29 minutes (in Sweden) since picking up a hamstring injury at Eintracht Frankfurt in October. It looks worse with hindsight.
This graphic, illustrating Liverpool’s passing link-ups on Saturday, is reflective of a team in which the connections in the forward line are not being made. You could find similar graphics relating to Erling Haaland at Manchester City, sometimes in games where he scored two or three goals, but this was not Liverpool’s vision for Isak; he, like Ekitike, was regarded as someone who would offer a more reliable goal threat than the departed Darwin Nunez, but also clever, perceptive, incisive play in build-up.
It does not seem to be a Collymore situation in terms of not knowing how to play to his strengths. Logically, he appears to fit Liverpool’s needs in a way that Nunez, for all his appealing attributes, did not. On Saturday, there were moments when Isak made the right runs or when Liverpool tried to play the right passes to release him, but wires were crossed or the execution slightly awry.
This move in the 17th minute was a case in point. Initially, everything went right, Isak dropping deep to lay the ball off, with Nikola Milenkovic snapping at his heels, and then turned to race forward in anticipation of a through ball.
It is the type of move we saw often at Newcastle, and a pass that Mohamed Salah has played to perfection in the past, but on this occasion, the Egyptian overhit the ball and the opportunity was gone.
Seven minutes later, Isak drifted to the left wing and, receiving the ball from Gravenberch, beat Milenkovic on the outside before hitting a dangerous low ball that was blocked by Murillo. As the ball ran loose, Cody Gakpo might have scored but for another excellent block. The other option for Gakpo was to tee up Isak, who had taken up a dangerous position behind him, but again the pass didn’t come.
In Isak’s mitigation, the performances of Milenkovic and Murillo at the heart of the Forest defence were outstanding. There was an incident in the early stages when Salah moved into space and tried to cut the ball back across the six-yard box, at which point Isak was nowhere to be seen. On closer inspection, he had simply been held off by Milenkovic.
But there were other moments when, having dropped deep earlier in the move, either to link the play or to free up space beyond him, Isak wasn’t in the danger area when the ball came in. In the space of 10 seconds in the first half, both Virgil van Dijk and Dominik Szoboszlai expressed frustration at the lack of movement from Liverpool’s front players, which included Salah and Gakpo as well as Isak.
His only real opportunity came in the 64th minute when Salah picked him out. It was a tough volleyed chance, similar to the opportunity Isak converted for Newcastle against Liverpool in the Carabao Cup final last March. On this occasion, he didn’t make a clean connection.
Was that a case of lacking match sharpness, or confidence? It looked like both.
Isak was unlikely to have played the entire 90 minutes, no matter how he performed, but the way things transpired, it looked merciful rather than ruthless when Slot replaced him with Federico Chiesa five minutes later. Ekitike will now hope for the chance to lead the line against PSV in the Champions League on Wednesday.
Isak is replaced by Federico Chiesa on Saturday (Darren Staples / AFP via Getty Images)
For Isak, the packed schedule means there will be playing time in the weeks ahead, but the notion of “playing him into form” was severely undermined on Saturday. He looked like a passenger and, right now, Liverpool cannot afford passengers.
There remains the expectation that, at some point, things will click. He has, after all, signed a contract until 2031, so the wisdom or otherwise of his acquisition should be evaluated over the course of six years rather than his first eight appearances.
But Isak’s failure to hit the ground running — to put it mildly — has created a pressure and a level of scrutiny that threatens to make life so much more difficult. Right now, Isak’s first few months as the Premier League’s most expensive footballer could hardly have gone worse.
Recruitment is so much more sophisticated than it was in Collymore’s day, drawing on data and hugely detailed analysis, but there are still so many imponderables and intangibles, so many reasons why spending vast sums of money is fraught with risk.
These are still early days, but right now the Isak deal threatens to become a case in point.
