“You don’t get crystal balls in football – but you didn’t need one to see that he was a player that was going right to the top,” says Adrie Koster, the former Willem II boss who worked with Alexander Isak during his loan spell in the Eredivisie in 2019.
Koster knows a thing or two about nurturing precocious talent. The former Netherlands winger was the manager at Ajax when Luis Suarez arrived at the club and watched on as the Uruguayan maverick used his stay in Holland as a springboard for moves to Liverpool and Barcelona.
