Transfer budgets are tightening. This striker is the exception.

On Wednesday, Gabriele Marcotti published an excellent article outlining an argument for why transfer spending is likely to stagnate or decline for the first time in decades. Clubs have stopped assuming that Number Go Up is an absolute given. The Premier League’s PSR and similar cost control measures in other leagues are preventing teams from gambling wildly.

If someone wants a £100m player, they need to prove they can afford it. That extra step is causing clubs to be more cautious. Congratulations to Chelsea’s owners, the guys who bought Gamestop stock at $420 a share.

But I think the biggest effect is going to be on the transfers of what I’ll call tier 2 players for lack of a better term. The kind of guys who used to go for £30-40m in a relatively sane world, and started inexplicably going for £60m+ a couple years ago. The likes of Antony and Mykhailo Mudryk. Good players who have some upside potential, but are neither super young prospects or immediate superstars. With stagnating revenue streams and increased financial regulations, that’s the easiest thing to cut back on.

But the rich clubs are still rich, and they’ll still covet the immediate impact superstars. I think that there are still going to be a handful of mega transfers from time to time, they’ll just be for players that teams are really damn sure can make them better. One player who I think is going to be exempt from this new reality and still spark a bidding war is Alexander Isak.

Newcastle broke their club transfer record to sign Isak, shelling out £63 million at the height of the market. It looked like a questionable investment at the time — Isak was coming off a down year for Real Sociedad, and was just solid, not spectacular, in his first Newcastle season. But he was one of the best strikers in the Premier League last year, scoring 21 goals in 30 games, and he’s been even better this campaign.

There aren’t many strikers who have Isak’s combination of pace, aerial ability, dribbling ability, and finishing quality. He’s scored all types of goals from all over the box, and he’s better than anyone else in the league at getting on the end of balls inside of 6 yards. This is about as good as shot maps get.

Isak is also an all-around contributor. His main quality is that he gets into the box and scores goals, which is what pretty much everyone is looking for in a starting center forward, but he does plenty of other things well. He’s an elite presser, and provides surprisingly decent passing output for someone who’s so good at all the other center forward things.

I don’t know if Isak even wants to move. He could sign a new contract with Newcastle, who more than any other club in the Premier League, have owners that could very easily provide him with massive financial incentives that never touch the books for PSR purposes. But if he does want to move on to a traditionally “bigger” club, he will have no shortage of suitors.

This summer will feature two big, seemingly contradictory stories: Every team is cutting back on their transfer budget, and there’s a 9-figure bidding war between several clubs for Alexander Isak. Between his age, well-rounded skillset, and proven Premier League quality, I think he’s the main player who will buck the growing trend of financial concern.

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