Liverpool’s Isak Gamble: Pressure Mounts as Competition Looms
The money was outrageous, even by Premier League standards. The expectation, even higher.
In the summer of 2025, Liverpool didn’t just tweak a title-winning squad, they ripped up the transfer market. Florian Wirtz arrived for £116m, Hugo Ekitike for £69m, and Alexander Isak smashed the British transfer record when he walked out of St James’ Park and into Anfield.
It was supposed to be a statement era. Instead, the first year felt like a warning.
Wirtz, the German playmaker tasked with adding silk to an already slick attack, never quite grabbed the rhythm of English football. Ekitike’s season was wrecked in April by an Achilles injury. Isak’s was barely allowed to start: no pre-season, then a broken leg, and only four goals in all competitions to show for the most expensive move in British football history.
By the time 2026-27 kicked off, the questions had sharpened. Was this just bad luck, or a bad fit?
Isak, now 26, found himself under the microscope again. The price tag never leaves. The injury record doesn’t either. Yet across his last two Premier League games, something shifted. Three goals. Cleaner movement. Sharper finishes. A hint – at last – of the striker Liverpool thought they were buying.
For Arne Slot’s successor, Iraola, that flicker of form has at least silenced one headache. For now, there is no debate over who leads the line.
Ekitike is expected back around the turn of the year, though, and that looming return raises an awkward question: has Isak effectively been protected by the lack of serious competition while he searched for himself?
Jermaine Pennant doesn’t buy that.
The former Liverpool winger, speaking to GOAL in association with NetBet Casino, pushed back at the idea that Isak had been “fortunate” to have the role to himself.
“I wouldn't say fortunate because I think they would have found a way maybe to play them both,” Pennant said.
He pointed to timing and form elsewhere. Cody Gakpo had dipped. Ekitike, he noted, likes to drift off the left. That opens up a different picture of what Liverpool’s forward line might have looked like.
“The timing of Ekitike's injury, [Cody] Gakpo wasn't performing well. We know that Ekitike likes to drift out to the left, so it wouldn't have surprised me if at some point Isak would have started down the middle, Ekitike may have gone on to the left-hand side and come in on his right foot like Gakpo does and sometimes join up as two number nines.
“But they are two good players, great players and you can't have a player like that sitting on your bench. They would have made a way, I think, for them both to play at some point.”
That’s the vision Liverpool still haven’t seen: Isak fully fit, Ekitike flying, and a manager trying to cram both into the same XI. For a club that spent like this, it’s not a luxury, it’s an obligation.
Robbie Fowler saw the risk earlier than most. The Liverpool legend, still hailed as ‘God’ on the Kop, admitted to GOAL before this season that he was uneasy about the Isak project – not the talent, but the body and the burden.
He was blunt about what this campaign has to be for the Swede.
“Absolutely,” Fowler said when asked if Isak must deliver now to quieten talk of more reinforcements. “And that's the case with the managers as well. The manager [Arne Slot] obviously didn’t deliver in the second year, so people questioned that. And as we all know, if people start questioning things, then there’s only one way you go.”
The parallel is obvious. Managers live and die by results. Strikers of Isak’s price bracket live and die by goals.
There have been signs. He scored against Nottingham Forest. He scored against Ipswich. Those are the fixtures where a £100m-plus forward is supposed to fill his boots, but after the drought and the injuries, they mattered all the same.
Europe, though, told a different story. In Liverpool’s opening Champions League game of 2026-27, a tense night under the Anfield lights against Atletico Madrid, Isak drew a blank again. Liverpool still found a way, coming from behind to win 2-1, but their record signing wasn’t the one delivering the decisive blow.
That’s the standard he’s judged against now. Not whether he plays well, but whether he decides nights like that.
And while Isak fights to own the shirt, the club keeps spending.
Liverpool have just dropped another huge fee, this time on France international Bradley Barcola. £123m on a winger who brings pace, directness and yet another angle to an already crowded forward line. He doesn’t just add depth; he adds pressure. Every new arrival at that price point tightens the squeeze on those already inside the building.
For Iraola, this is the kind of “selection headache” managers pretend to love. In reality, it means big names on the bench and big decisions every weekend. When Ekitike returns and Barcola beds in, the attack will be stacked with options, but not everyone can be the headline act.
Right now, Isak has the stage largely to himself. He’s finally scoring, finally moving like a player who belongs at the top of the English game.
The question is simple, and it won’t go away: when the competition arrives in full force, does he keep the spotlight, or become the most expensive supporting role in British football history?
