#FreeWissa, footballers wanting out and why fans have every right to defy logic

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If you’re still in thrall to beleaguered social media platform X, as many of us regrettably are, take a minute to click on the hashtag #FreeWissa.

You’ll be disappointed if you’re expecting lots of giddy Newcastle United fans, seriously demanding that Yoane Wissa should be liberated from his current club Brentford, allowing him to fulfil his true destiny at St James’ Park. It mostly seems to be bots and fans of other clubs, trying to whip up a bit of animosity, but it does highlight a rather curious situation in the north east of England.

Wissa withdrew from Brentford’s pre-season training camp in Portugal in an attempt to force through a move to Newcastle. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Basque Country, Alexander Isak is training at his former club Real Sociedad’s facilities, having not travelled with Newcastle on their pre-season tour to East Asia. Isak is trying to engineer change too — in his case, a move from St James’ to Liverpool.

Here we have two players, both unwilling to fully engage with their current employers and training away as they try to either leave or join Newcastle. It feels like a low-wattage version of those prisoner exchanges in Berlin during the Cold War, two men standing at either end of a bridge, desperate to reach the other side but not able to move until they are given the nod.

Yoane Wissa is eyeing a move to Newcastle (Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)

There is a surface-level inconsistency at play here. You have a club benefiting from, shall we say, forceful tactics from a player trying to push through a transfer, and the same club suffering because of another player doing the same thing.

Many Newcastle fans will recognise that this is the game, that there is a food chain and they are towards the top, but not at the top, so there will always be situations like this. But look around and you will find enough people earnestly explaining how the two situations are quite different, actually, with one player justified and the other very much not.

This isn’t confined to Newcastle. Nottingham Forest clutched their collective pearls about Morgan Gibbs-White, Tottenham Hotspur and his secret release clause, but you can bet there would have been few complaints had they needed to source a replacement through similar methods.

Trent Alexander-Arnold received much opprobrium for running his contract down and leaving Liverpool for nothing to join Real Madrid, but they will be the ones to benefit from Isak’s manoeuvrings.

Trent Alexander-Arnold applauds the fans are his mixed reception against Arsenal in May (Xinhua via Getty Images)

You can imagine the scenes if, say, Bukayo Saka went on strike if he wanted to leave Arsenal, whose fans would forget how Viktor Gyokeres arrived from Sporting CP.

We could go on. But the thing is, in the context of football fandom, there’s nothing wrong with any of this. Nothing wrong with the apparent moral and logical inconsistency, even hypocrisy. Nothing wrong with fans being happy when they’re benefitting from nefarious tactics but angry when they suffer due to the same.

Very little of being a football fan is logical. Fandom, even beyond the confines of football, is a place where you can live on emotions, and you don’t have to always live by the rules of the real world. How dull it would be if a fan in the stands reacted to an adverse refereeing decision not by howling at the injustice of it all, but quietly remarking, “Well, they do have a very difficult job, and I suppose it could have been a foul…”

The thing is, lots of people who say they are “football fans” aren’t really football fans, in the macro sense at least. They’re fans of their team, which is a slightly different thing.

There are some people who genuinely do watch Bundesliga games on Friday nights, La Liga on Saturday evenings, the Premier League on Sunday afternoons, then settle in for some Serie A to round off the weekend. There are some who do have a broad appreciation of the game beyond their personal sphere, and approach everything with logic and consistency. There are also some, mostly young fans, who don’t have a team and will follow a particular player, shifting their allegiance from club to club as their hero moves through their career.

But for the most part, people just want to watch a few big games, take a passing interest in everything else, read a few articles, maybe play a little Fantasy Premier League — but mainly just support their club.

Therefore, the rest of football is viewed through that prism, all points of view filtered through what it means for that club. The wider game is, at best, a secondary concern, without logical and intellectual consistency coming into it.

Which, again, is absolutely fine. It’s fine — desirable, even — for football fans to be illogical. Tribalism, to a point, can be good. You could argue that engaging in a little light hypocrisy is a relatively healthy way of channelling the emotions that come from such an illogical state. Tribalism can and does spill over into much more unpleasant areas, from basic name-calling to more insidious abuse. So if that’s expressed via some relatively harmless double standards when it comes to transfers, then it’s not that big of a problem.

The Wissa and Isak situations are a little messy, undignified and ideally, they’ll be solved soon — but as fans react, let’s not expect consistency, and embrace the contradictions.

(Top photos: Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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