Among the finest Swedish football is some of the most disgusting football in the world.
Alexander Isaac can dodge.
Just not good enough for this.
It’s the economy, stupid.
Everything is economy, system, cynical concession. The car you drive, the battery in your mobile phone, the companies sponsoring your favorite team, the food you ordered home with a cheap scooter without a group agreement, the taxi app in advertising, the clothes you found are on sale. You don’t want to know where you bought your shirt from, and why it costs you to get a quick courier home from the drugstore, who built the yard you sit in with their bodies as input.
Modern football has a huge advantage and a huge disadvantage: it helps us see geopolitical mechanisms – and makes us understand how hard it is not to be a hypocrite.
Now reports are pouring in from trusted transportation gurus: Alexander Isaac to Newcastle United for 700 million Swedish kronor.
A willful young man with exceptional talent is rumored to be the background of Saudi Arabia. A record transfer deal, whether for Sweden, La Real or Newcastle United, should be postponed and that appears to be the case already.
He’s far from being the first Swedish star to sell himself to sports washing projects, it’s just a matter of degrees. Zlatan Ibrahimovic – To take a clear example – the doors were opened for Qatar, whether in Paris, Barcelona or Milan. Anyone who wants to get to the top in football must also accept that the top is owned or financed by anti-democratic democracies, run by cold-blooded capitalists at best, and politically motivated rogue states at worst.
It becomes visible and sinfully rich
Newcastle United is not the disease, but the latest symptom of a sport that has stopped playing the stage.
Saudi Arabia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund has bought a classic club to be associated with nothing but executions, dictatorships, women’s oppression, Yemen, and state-organized murders of journalists. Like, for example, Alexander Isaacs, an intelligent and motivated super-talent from Solna.
I’ve seen Alexander Isaacs playing in the Oskal derby, heard Anoeta sing his name, and become proud that a boy from Stockholm could make it there. The next step took a few years longer than expected and, mathematically speaking, is a great transition, a dream for him to copy Dejan Kulusevsky’s phenomenal growth curve in Premier League. He joins a team coached by exceptional Eddie Howe, with the impressive Dan Ashworth as sporting director, and lands at the St. John’s Classic. James Park is in the part of England where football flows through veins and arteries.
He becomes visible and sinfully rich and gets every chance to measure himself in an environment that could take him from promise to world star in one fall if all goes well.
Fuck you, allihop
When Henrik Stenson received a bag of money from Saudi Arabia to play golf and began winning on Donald Trump’s course, he was praised by Donald Trump’s hard-line son, who called the win “the biggest fuck you’ve ever had in golf.”
It was easy to agree with Trump Jr.
Women persecuted, men executed, children bombed in Yemen: damn you all.
If Alexander Isaac receives his bag of money, he has the same things to deal with, and the same questions to answer. The world of football is a filthy place, but there are different degrees of hell and nowhere is it more burning than in North West England. As I sat in San Sebastian and watched him blast off into the starry sky, I heard La Real’s anthem reverberate from the concrete. I think about it now, on the line they sing after “Vamos La Real”:
Where are you going without a heart? Where would you go without your heart?
To Newcastle United for seven hundred million, it seems. There you have it, our football. Let’s go?
