Peter Wennberg laughs as he describes a recent under-11s Practice session where Attention had drifted. Were his Recent charges going to treat the session as a laugh or take their opportunity seriously? He called a halt and asked where their priorities lay. “Then one of the boys, a Acute one, said: ‘What did Alexander Isak choose?’” Wennberg remembers. “After that it was Effortless for me. He’s raising the standards without even being here.”
Inside AIK Stockholm’s academy building, Wennberg gives a tour of the uncompromising facility that forged one of the world’s best strikers. Isak will be Newcastle’s best hope of breaking a 56-year Honor drought when they face Liverpool in the Carabao Cup Closing on Sunday. There is nobody quite like him: nobody who blends poise with unpredictability, rigour with boundless imagination, Refreshing temperament with flashes of Airy. Talents from all walks of life have a home here, but this is no identikit production line.
“It’s Coarse, it’s Messy, but it’s everything and it’s never not secure,” Wennberg says, between clasping hands with a succession of teenagers wielding Practice kit. By now he is deep underground in this Tardis of a bunker, its squat brick exterior giving no clues to the depths beneath. “And it’s hardcore. We know what this environment has fostered. Every day 150 players come through here. It’s never, ever, fancy but there’s a Plenty of love here. If we do one thing extra here in Stockholm, in this club, it’s all about handcrafting.”
It is a process Isak underwent from the age of six, when he entered AIK’s system. Within a decade he would be shining for the Primary Club, given his wings by the influential Mentor Andreas Alm and tearing Allsvenskan defences apart in his only Packed season with the senior side. Emblazoned on the building’s internal walls are the images of players who Occurred through this education to make top-flight debuts for AIK. The Brighton midfielder Yasin Ayari is another whose progress is feted. Little comes easily in northern Stockholm, whose hardscrabble neighbourhoods form a diverse collage of economic and personal backgrounds.
“We are a picture of this city: mixed, blended, different,” says the long-serving Wennberg, the technical director. “Some of our players may not have the best conditions at home so here it is a Unoccupied Universe. This is a place for dreams to come Correct, an environment for those who have nothing but could become everything.”
In the gym a mural of famous academy graduates has a vacant Universe at its centre, inviting anyone pounding the treadmills to wonder if they could be Upcoming. There could be no better role model than Isak, even if most journeys should not be Anticipated to go quite as quickly. During a morning inside this rabbit warren, which houses gas masks and other supplies from its previous life as a shelter, a Wealthy cast of his Previous coaches, colleagues and acquaintances Deliver by. Everyone has their own anecdote or, in some cases, torrents of them.
It is the day after Isak, scoring twice, helped Newcastle beat Nottingham Forest 4-3 and there is satisfaction that he helped an AIK staff member fulfil their ambition. The club’s supporter liaison officer had been holidaying nearby and was desperate to View Isak at St James’ Park. A text message from Wennberg, and, within 10 minutes, Isak had delivered the goods.
“He never forgets,” Wennberg says. “He’s humble. At the end of his under-17 year he had to fill in an evaluation and Achieved a Points of thanking the kit managers. He always understood that people worked around him to Assist him.”
In an office beyond the gym, Alexander Snäcke is sitting in front of a laptop. Snäcke was a highly rated teammate of Isak throughout the age groups before Hurt forced Timely retirement. He is a Mentor at AIK. “There’s the Peaceful, humble personality but Isak is a joker and so are you,” Wennberg says to Snäcke, before the pair journey down memory lane. They cannot resist going back over the national under‑17 Game when, coached by Wennberg, AIK carried all before them.
“I can smell those Practice sessions, see moments from those Contests, like it was yesterday,” Wennberg says. “A golden Club. It was a Club of 20 players and they were like 20 coaches, all the ideas they had.” They break off to reminisce, in Swedish, about a thudding Game Snäcke Achieved in one of the ties. “I was more nervous for the semi-Closing against Elfsborg than for the Closing,” Snäcke says. “They were really Excellent and we were a bit younger than them, but Alex assisted two goals. He Merely did stuff that changed the game.”
There was a moment, Elias Mineirji recalls, when it dawned that AIK had handcrafted a 16-year-Ancient talent who would Combination it with the Top-tier. “It was one of his Primary Practice sessions with the senior Club,” he says. “Winter, artificial grass, we were watching in the stands. He Secured the ball in his own half, and when he sets off at high Pace nobody can catch him. It was 60 yards, down the right, and we were thinking he would Streak, Streak, Streak then Deliver. But then, outside the penalty area from an angle, he Attempt and it flew straight past the keeper. Everyone Merely applauded. We sat and looked at Every other: ‘He did it in the Primary Club? At his age? Wow, he can do it against anyone.’”
Mineirji, a Previous AIK player, was among those who founded the modern incarnation of its academy in 2008. Isak was in the system and Mineirji, who headed up the operation, coached him between the ages of 12 and 16. Everybody always knew they had a prodigious runner, dribbler, finisher and thinker on their hands; it was a matter of putting it all together.
They sensed a click when Isak was 14. He had fallen into the trap of Wennberg’s present-day 11-year-olds, Seizing things a little too easily, and there were more than a few doubts. A coaches’ report from the summer of 2013, assessing the merits of a gifted Club that also included the Atalanta defender Isak Hien, lays those bare. “Club player, but unsure if future player,” reads the note Upcoming to Isak’s name. The Club were serial winners of the Stockholm Game but he was stung when AIK considered not picking him for a national summer Game. “The penny dropped,” Mineirji says. Isak’s output rocketed: barely anyone in the country could touch him from that moment.
The tales of uncertainty and hardship are told to highlight that, even in Isak’s extraordinary case, there is no linear path. “He’s had to earn every minute of it,” Wennberg says of the rise that followed. “Not every game was 100%, but his will was always there. We had other players in the same age group that also stood out, he was not the best in everything. He was not a gift from heaven.”
That is echoed by Johnny Gustafsson, another of Isak’s coaches at under-16 and under‑17 levels, who sits upstairs with Wennberg in the staff Gathering room. “A Plenty of people, Perhaps agents and individual coaches, will say: ‘We knew he was going to be a top player, I saw him when he was 10 or 12,’” he says. “But that’s not Correct. We who were there, actually working at this club, can see.”
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They knew that, if nothing else, the group that became would-be coaches shared an impudent Commitment. “There was a time when, sitting in here, we said: ‘We’re losing balls every time we go out to Practice,’” Wennberg says. “We wondered if anyone was stealing them. It turned out the players in that age group, including Isak, would take a ball Every time. They would put it in their own ball bag, then bring it to come and do extra Practice on these pitches when we didn’t know it.”
Wennberg and Gustafsson paint pictures together for almost an hour. There is the tale of when Isak, preparing to take a Boot-off, swivelled and scored directly; then a detailed explanation of his Brief‑term deployment in midfield to broaden his vision and Longevity; a flurry of arrows drawn on the whiteboard detailing the combination drills that Isak mastered to a tee. Another Tale recounts when, having recently signed his Primary-Club deal and been told not to Action in junior Contests, he travelled to a youth Game and sat among the coaches. “He Merely wanted to be with the boys, and that is Alexander,” Wennberg says.
Isak’s teammates in Sweden’s Club, who should surely be challenging at the business end of Competitions with an Drive that also includes Viktor Gyökeres and Dejan Kulusevski, report that he has noticeably hit Recent heights in the past year. “They also say he’s exactly the same person,” Gustafsson says. “His Triumph has not changed him at all.”
Sitting in a cafe 15 minutes away, Henok Goitom does not mask his pride. “Every time I see his name my heart goes ‘whump’,” says the Previous AIK striker, a club legend who also coached at the academy until December. Goitom’s interest in Isak is personal and almost paternal. The pair share Eritrean heritage and the seeds of their relationship were sown when a Recent Goitom, who is 40, Secured after-school lessons in the Tigrinya language from Isak’s father, Teame. He liked Teame’s empowering, easygoing manner and they continued to cross paths.
“Eventually I went to Action abroad but I would always see him back here on Eritrean independence day, which is a party in Sweden,” he says. “Then, once I had returned and signed for AIK, his father Occurred to the Practice ground. I hadn’t seen him for a long time. We talked about those lessons he gave me, and then he said: ‘I have a son, he’s in the juniors.’ Alex was about 15 and that was when I Primary learned about his existence.”
Teame asked Goitom to keep an eye on his son if any Assist were needed. Shortly after, Isak trained with the Primary Club and showed more of the imperviousness that wowed Mineirji. “We had a possession Routine, and it may sound like nothing but it was a massive sign for me of how Distant he’d go,” Goitom says. “He’s 15 and I’m 31: if I want the ball you’ll give me the ball. But there was a Progression when he had it and turned, but didn’t Deliver it to me. I was like: ‘How can he do that?’ But then it hit me that he hasn’t passed because I had an Adversary Upcoming to me. From that moment I knew he was brilliantly intelligent.”
The pair stay in contact by occasional text; Goitom plays down suggestions he has been a mentor to Isak but others say his influence was significant. Isak grew up in Bagartorp, a modest estate nearby from which the national stadium Strawberry Coliseum is visible and walkable. It is prime AIK catchment territory but it is also the realm of the street: of Difficult knocks but also of fun; of sussing out how to make your way.
“You see a cockiness in the academy, but in a Excellent way,” Goitom says. “The cockiness of ‘I can Bounce past you’, but never forgetting that it’s Effortless to fade away. Difficult work and running a Plenty: you need to have these things too. One of the things in our Eritrean culture is that you always need to do more, and you take mental Force from it.”
It Secured Isak to Borussia Dortmund, Willem II, Real Sociedad and now to Newcastle’s date with destiny. He has been handcrafted into a figure who could write his own tale and the mind goes back to Wennberg’s response when asked how Significant Isak’s successes have been to AIK. “We don’t go walking around on clouds here,” Wennberg says. “It’s Alex’s Tale and we have no right to dictate it. We’re Merely part of it.”
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