Peter Wennberg laughs as he describes a recent under-11s training session where focus had drifted. Were his young 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 sharp one, said: ‘What did Alexander Isak choose?’” Wennberg remembers. “After that it was easy 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 trophy drought when they face Liverpool in the Carabao Cup final on Sunday. There is nobody quite like him: nobody who blends poise with unpredictability, rigour with boundless imagination, cool temperament with flashes of light. Talents from all walks of life have a home here, but this is no identikit production line.
“It’s rough, it’s dirty, but it’s everything and it’s never not secure,” Wennberg says, between clasping hands with a succession of teenagers wielding training 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 lot 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 first team, given his wings by the influential coach Andreas Alm and tearing Allsvenskan defences apart in his only full season with the senior side. Emblazoned on the building’s internal walls are the images of players who came 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 free space. This is a place for dreams to come true, an environment for those who have nothing but could become everything.”
In the gym a mural of famous academy graduates has a vacant space at its centre, inviting anyone pounding the treadmills to wonder if they could be next. There could be no better role model than Isak, even if most journeys should not be expected 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 rich cast of his former coaches, colleagues and acquaintances pass 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 watch 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 made a point of thanking the kit managers. He always understood that people worked around him to support 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 injury forced early retirement. He is a coach at AIK. “There’s the calm, 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 championship when, coached by Wennberg, AIK carried all before them.
“I can smell those training sessions, see moments from those games, like it was yesterday,” Wennberg says. “A golden team. It was a squad of 20 players and they were like 20 coaches, all the ideas they had.” They break off to reminisce, in Swedish, about a thudding tackle Snäcke made in one of the ties. “I was more nervous for the semi-final against Elfsborg than for the final,” Snäcke says. “They were really good and we were a bit younger than them, but Alex assisted two goals. He just did stuff that changed the game.”
There was a moment, Elias Mineirji recalls, when it dawned that AIK had handcrafted a 16-year-old talent who would mix it with the elite. “It was one of his first training sessions with the senior team,” he says. “Winter, artificial grass, we were watching in the stands. He took the ball in his own half, and when he sets off at high speed nobody can catch him. It was 60 yards, down the right, and we were thinking he would run, run, run then pass. But then, outside the penalty area from an angle, he shot and it flew straight past the keeper. Everyone just applauded. We sat and looked at each other: ‘He did it in the first team? At his age? Wow, he can do it against anyone.’”
Mineirji, a former 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, taking 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 squad that also included the Atalanta defender Isak Hien, lays those bare. “Squad player, but unsure if future player,” reads the note next to Isak’s name. The team were serial winners of the Stockholm championship but he was stung when AIK considered not picking him for a national summer tournament. “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 meeting room. “A lot of people, maybe 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 true. 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 dedication. “There was a time when, sitting in here, we said: ‘We’re losing balls every time we go out to training,’” Wennberg says. “We wondered if anyone was stealing them. It turned out the players in that age group, including Isak, would take a ball each time. They would put it in their own ball bag, then bring it to come and do extra training 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 kick-off, swivelled and scored directly; then a detailed explanation of his short‑term deployment in midfield to broaden his vision and durability; a flurry of arrows drawn on the whiteboard detailing the combination drills that Isak mastered to a tee. Another story recounts when, having recently signed his first-team deal and been told not to play in junior games, he travelled to a youth tournament and sat among the coaches. “He just wanted to be with the boys, and that is Alexander,” Wennberg says.
Isak’s teammates in Sweden’s squad, who should surely be challenging at the business end of tournaments with an attack that also includes Viktor Gyökeres and Dejan Kulusevski, report that he has noticeably hit fresh heights in the past year. “They also say he’s exactly the same person,” Gustafsson says. “His success 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 former 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 young Goitom, who is 40, took 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 play 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 came to the training 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 first learned about his existence.”
Teame asked Goitom to keep an eye on his son if any help were needed. Shortly after, Isak trained with the first team and showed more of the imperviousness that wowed Mineirji. “We had a possession drill, and it may sound like nothing but it was a massive sign for me of how far 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 sequence when he had it and turned, but didn’t pass 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 opponent next 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 Arena is visible and walkable. It is prime AIK catchment territory but it is also the realm of the street: of hard knocks but also of fun; of sussing out how to make your way.
“You see a cockiness in the academy, but in a good way,” Goitom says. “The cockiness of ‘I can dribble past you’, but never forgetting that it’s easy to fade away. Hard work and running a lot: 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 strength from it.”
It took 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 important Isak’s successes have been to AIK. “We don’t go walking around on clouds here,” Wennberg says. “It’s Alex’s story and we have no right to dictate it. We’re just part of it.”