Everything changed for Isaac in the space of five short years. By the time of the Olympic Final he had already moved to Ankara, Turkey and top club Gençlerbirliği. He had the world at his feet. The plan was: Turkey first, then the flashier leagues of Europe. Three senior appearances for Nigeria’s Super Eagles followed, and Issac was well on his way to becoming a big name in the game.
“Everything was happening all at once,” said Isaac. He described club presidents who held him hostage in teams where he was no longer happy. He tells of shifty agents who bounced him from one club to another, uprooting his whole life for an extra zero or two. He was so young when he was offered his first contract, his mother had to fly from Kaduna to Turkey to sign it for him. “I was bouncing around. I started to feel lost.”
The Long Fall
Isaac played for seven different Turkish clubs in eleven seasons. He scored 79 goals in 355 matches. But those are just numbers. They tell only a fraction of a story. By the time he arrived to play in Saudi Arabia, he was jaded. He was unmoored. He was 27 and the shine was off the game. When news came of his mother’s death, it almost broke him.
He played just four times for Al Ahli, scoring one goal. “Her death hit me so hard it took a toll on me personally and on the field,” recalled Isaac, who returned to Turkey without a contract. “I didn’t play the game I loved, that was my profession, for two years and eventually I began to think: what am I doing? This isn’t going to bring her back. I can’t keep doing this.”
One of the first calls he made was long-distance – about 10,000 miles worth – to Atlanta, Georgia. Siasia, the father figure and youth coach who oversaw Isaac’s rise from schoolboy to Olympic captain, lives there. “We love each other,” Isaac sparked up, recounting how he came a long way to a new country. “We’re friends, but it’s more like family. He took me and my wife in and we settled here in the U.S.”
Eventually the time came for Isaac to lace his boots back up. “I wanted to revive my career, but a lot coaches were surprised to hear from me,” he said. “They thought I retired from the game and I had to tell them, ‘no I’m still around!’ I want to play. I can still play!”
