Arne Slot’s ‘smaller club’ comment baffling as unhappy Newcastle look to forget Alexander Isak

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Arne Slot called Newcastle United a “smaller club” when addressing Alexander Isak’s injury blow at Liverpool.

Isak has so far struggled to justify his price tag since joining Liverpool for record-breaking money from Newcastle United.

At some point, a player that good surely has to click. For now, however, he remains on just the one goal from eight appearances. 

Isak’s relative struggles at the start of his Liverpool career were explainable. He did not conduct a pre-season with Newcastle and needed time to adapt.

Even ignoring the fact that his disrupted summer was from his own making, those excuses will run out. Slot himself recently claimed it was now fair to judge Isak after he worked on his fitness but again talked of a lack of pre-season impacting Isak even in October.

• Who is Alexander Isak? The striker who burned his Newcastle United reputation to force £125m Liverpool transfer

Arne Slot calls Newcastle United a “smaller club”

Asked about the groin injury that Isak suffered in Wednesday’s Champions League win over Eintracht Frankfurt, Slot said: “You cannot compare maybe a player that hasn’t played in pre-season at a smaller club than if you go to Liverpool.”

Slot is right, Newcastle are a smaller club than Liverpool by every metric but PIF are trying to change that. It’s also worth remembering that English is Slot’s second language.

However, it did seem a strange thing to point towards. Isak is the one who forced a move away from that “smaller club”, behaving in a way that saw him excluded from training with the rest of the group.

Even if Isak had been on the books at Real Madrid while looking for a way out, the fact he missed pre-season would have been all the same.

The size of Newcastle’s trophy cabinet might have tempted Isak to look elsewhere this summer but had no impact on his actual fitness, never mind an injury sustained while playing for Liverpool.

Newcastle United moving on from Alexander Isak despite ill-feeling

Geordie Boot Boys have been told that Newcastle are unhappy about losing Isak and the fact they sold him after a summer in which the owners insisted he wasn’t for sale was hugely damaging.

The team, however, are pushing to move on. Replacement Nick Woltemade has made a brilliant start to life at the club and, on Tuesday, there were signs that the towering German was building a brilliant connection with Anthony Gordon.

Woltemade has cut through the noise of the Isak saga at Newcastle. It’s hard to frame losing Isak as anything like a positive but he’s helping the dust settle on Tyneside.