This was the summer player power went mad. The way Alexander Isak, Yoane Wissa and Viktor Gyokeres downed tools is an obscenity - and proves footballers are self-entitled, spoiled, detached narcissists, writes OLIVER HOLT

Amid the drama, the intrigue and the excitement of the conclusion of Alexander Isak’s record-breaking move from Newcastle to Liverpool, darker truths about player power have risen to the surface of the oil slick that the modern game sometimes seems to resemble.

Isak is not the first player to go on strike to force a transfer away from a team that pays him extremely well to a team that will pay him even more, leaving disillusioned fans in his wake without a backward glance, and the success of his dubious tactic only helps to ensure that many more will follow his lead.

Yoane Wissa appears to be at the head of that particular queue as he closes in on the transfer to Newcastle from Brentford that he craved so much he also failed to appear for Brentford this season. Viktor Gyokeres did something similar to extricate himself from Sporting Lisbon because he wanted to move to Arsenal earlier this summer.

History reminds us, too, of stageposts in infamy such as Pierre van Hooijdonk’s strike at Nottingham Forest in 1998-99 and Fifa president Sepp Blatter’s suggestion that there was ‘too much modern slavery’ in football because Manchester United objected to being bounced into selling Cristiano Ronaldo to Real Madrid in the summer of 2008.

But if Isak’s tactic was hardly new, the success of it felt significant because the magnitude of it seemed to signal the fact that player power in football is out of control. What Isak did used to be the exception. Now, it is getting to the stage where it is the norm.

Now it has got to the stage where a player like Marc Guehi, who has acted honourably towards his club, Crystal Palace, in the face of interest from Liverpool, and continued to play for them and play well, is treated as a miraculous exception because he has not refused to play for supporters who worship him.

And if Isak can get himself out of Newcastle, a club owned by a repressive nation state whose rulers are not exactly shy about dealing uncompromisingly with dissenters, then it can happen anywhere. Isak’s move sends out a message that loyalty is not just dead. It’s unenforceable.

Isak’s transfer underlines the fact that this was the summer when players cut themselves free of the last remaining structures that govern employment and loyalty in the game and proved that they have the power to move where they want when they want.

The Bosman Ruling in 1995 ushered in one revolution in the free movement of labour and football employment law but this time the players and their agents have decided they do not need a ruling to change things. They are doing it for themselves. They have served notice that contracts are not worth the paper they are written on.

I have some sympathy with the argument that clubs treat players like pieces of meat, to be bought and sold at their whim, and that players are therefore entitled to act in a similarly capricious manner.

Except that argument ignores the fact that a club cannot simply cancel a player’s contract. If they have signed a six-year-deal, then they should at least deign to play for the club they are contracted to rather than down tools like the self-entitled, spoiled, detached narcissists so many of them appear to have become.

There is something obscene about what Isak and his like are doing. There is something obscene about talking about them going on strike. A strike can suggest something noble. It can suggest a stand taken by the oppressed. It can suggest a group of workers standing up for their rights.

But let’s not confuse Isak, Gyokeres, Wissa and the rest with any of that. This is not the Jarrow March. This is a march of the greedy. This is a march of the grifters. This is a march of the selfish and the self-obsessed.

And, as always, it is the fans who suffer. What is happening here represents a further erosion of the bond between player and fan. That bond has been progressively weakened anyway as elite players retreat behind tinted glass windows and outsized noise-cancelling headphones.

They’re fan-cancelling headphones, too. Players walk past supporters as if there is no one there. How is a supporter supposed to invest emotionally in a player if they know that player can leave at any time? Why buy a shirt with a player’s name on the back of it, if he might strike next week so he can walk away from you and your club?

That’s the real story of what Isak has done. It’s not just him but he has become the poster-boy for a new age, an age when, for Premier League fans, there will be no more heroes any more.