Liverpool bought Aleksander Isak from Newcastle in the summer transfer window of 2025 and it was for a record-breaking fee in English football history.
For Liverpool fans, they have found the one piece that was missing. The one player that will Liverpool become a goalscoring threat in the Premier League again.
But the first half of the season has come and gone and there is nothing to show from an Isak point of view. It feels like the Isak at Newcastle is not the one playing at Anfield now.
So what has happened?
Well, we are taking a look into it today as we discuss what the problem is for Isak at Liverpool.
Slot system is not helping Isak
The way Slot likes to make his players to play football is not what Isak is used to.
For Slot, he wants to control the game by keeping possession and forcing players to be disciplined positionally.
This is not a system that Isak played in while at Newcastle. At Newcastle, Isak was playing in a system where the goal was transitions and counters.
So he had midfielders who could pass the ball after stopping the opponent’s attack down the middle for him to make runs in behind the defense of the teams.
This is not what typically happens at Liverpool especially because Liverpool hardly drop deep to anticipate counter attacking opportunities. Their goalscorers are those who can find the spaces in the final third and score.
Liverpool squeeze up when pressing and prefer to win presses high up the pitch and doing that means the opposition’s half is congested with Liverpool players. And Isak does not seem to be doing well in tight pockets of space.
There is no chemistry yet with his new teammates
Football is a team sport and this is where Isak is still struggling. He does not have chemistry with other teammates like Mo Salah and Cody Gakpo.
At Newcastle, Isak had a lot of wingers and midfielders feeding him from Barnes to Gordon to Bruno Guimaires and more.
This is not what he is seeing at Liverpool.
Liverpool has high profile players like Gakpo, Gravenberch, Ekitike, and Salah who have an eye for goals. And they are already used to scoring in tight spaces.
They are trying to score too and Slot will have his wingers cut in and they’d start drifting into the spaces where Isak would normally be waiting for the ball and because he is not used to that you start to see positional errors.
Isak has some problems himself
Slot and his tactics are not the only problem here and we can easily see some things that Isak is not doing right.
For a player of his capacity, there are things that should not be seen from the way that Isak plays.
We see moments of poor quality and a lack of decisiveness in the penalty area. It is clear he has lost his confidence.
It could be that he is feeling the pressure from the fans and the media. Also, the price he was bought for could be limiting.
But it is hard to not note that Isak at Liverpool is not the same lethal goalscorer we knew from Newcastle.
Fans are running out of patience
Players are facing a lot of scrutiny today thanks to social media.
You get #IsakOut on social media and many dark humor memes start to pop up.
Well, we cannot say that Isak is not worth it or that he would not be good for Liverpool because we have only seen the first part of the season.
There are games upcoming that he can show himself and his quality.
What is the solution?
First, Slot has to change his tactics and his system so that it can fit what Isak is good at.
This would mean that Liverpool would begin to play on the transition and through the middle of the pitch.
On the path of the player, he has to forget that everyone has expectations on him.
He needs to know that if he would play like he played before, he has to enjoy football like he used to otherwise he would keep struggling.
วิธีดูราคาน้ำบอล has a great coverage of Isak’s form and his progress so far.
There is time this season for Isak to come up and we are sure he will.
