Things feel pretty rubbish at Newcastle United right now.
Uncertain, messy, badly timed.
Eddie Howe has gone. Bruno Guimaraes. The squad is in flux.
A season that already looked transitional now feels even harder to predict, and supporters are being asked to trust yet another version of “the plan”.
So no, this isn’t an argument that everything’s rosy in the garden. It clearly isn’t. But underneath the uncertainty, I can see the first shoots of something that might ultimately leave Newcastle United in a healthier place.
That may sound overly optimistic given the events of recent weeks, but the club has needed a reset for a while — in recruitment, squad profile, tactics and arguably managerial voice too. The problem is that instead of happening neatly in May, it has arrived all at once.
That’s what makes it feel worse than it necessarily is.
Howe leaves before the story turns
I’m glad Eddie Howe has left on his own terms and, crucially, before anything could really sour his legacy.
What he achieved at Newcastle United was extraordinary. Pep couldn’t have done what he did the first season. He dragged a relegation-threatened side into the Champions League, took us to Wembley, delivered a trophy and gave supporters some of the best years we have had in decades.
He should get his statue, and when they build it, I’ll be there with my trowel.
But if I’m honest, I wasn’t hugely optimistic about this season with Howe still in charge.
We’ve been on a slide for a while. Arguably since Wembley.
The biggest concern was tactical flexibility. Howe’s Newcastle could be devastating when the system worked, but there’s a fairly sizeable sample showing that his one dominant style struggled when European football was layered on top of the domestic calendar. And when we didn’t have the wind of a rabid St James’ Park behind us.
That intensity simply couldn’t hold out over a sixty-game season. (Even less so when a third of the first team had their eye on the exit door…)
That doesn’t suddenly make him a bad manager.
It just raises the question of whether he was still the right manager for the next phase.
Being consistently in Europe was surely fundamental to our prospects for growth. We have irrefutable evidence his style couldn’t cope with the demands alongside the league campaign. And almost as irrefutable was the fact that he was unwilling (or unable) to change it.
We’d been found out the last 18 months, and it was getting painful to watch. Groping around for solutions that only ever seemed to revolve around “Let’s give Murphy another shot on the right”. Our collective hearts dropping every time we saw that team sheet. Or BDB at left-back. A car-crash in-waiting every time.
This season was always going to be a transitional one, with the new transfer model kicking in. Problem was, after previously over-achieving, Howe no longer had the same amount of credit in the bank to ride out six months of indifferent results while a younger squad found its feet. He made the sensible move, and I’m glad for him. There was a danger of him staying long enough for the ending to resemble Bournemouth: a brilliant body of work overshadowed by a painful final chapter.
Instead, he leaves as the manager who transformed Newcastle United.
The maddening part is the timing.
This should have been resolved in May, when the club had a clean summer, and managers such as Iraola and Glasner were available. Howe may have been slightly selfish in leaving when he did, but Newcastle were equally slack in allowing the situation to drift.
However, I’m genuinely optimistic about Matthias Jaissle. His preferred style aligns with Howe’s (at its best), yet he’s supposed to be more tactically versatile, and he’s got genuine pedigree. Not in the PL, admittedly, but winning two leagues with Salzburg and two Champions Leagues in Saudi isn’t to be sniffed at. Internally, there’s meant to be real confidence behind him, and I’m certainly no more worried about the season with him at the helm – and the possibilities it could provide – than watching Eddie ruin his legacy, doubling down on what was a busted flush.
Bruno going hurts — but it doesn’t have to be disastrous.
Bruno’s departure makes the uncertainty feel more dramatic, of course.
There’s no point pretending Newcastle United are better without him. We aren’t.
He’s been the heartbeat of the team and one of the best midfielders I’ve seen in black and white. Losing him stings. As much as Isak. Far more than Tonali and Gordon.
But we also need to become slightly less emotional about what these exits actually mean.
Bruno is leaving because the project he bought into has stalled, the competitive side has been weakened, and another club can offer him more money and a better immediate chance of finishing first or second (rather than somewhere between sixth and twelfth).
Yes, he “got” the club, he kissed the badge, he cried those Wembley tears with all of us.
But from his point of view, it’s hardly an irrational decision.
You’re working at BT. You like it. They do a good subsidised breakfast and the Metro’s there and back in ten minutes.
But… you get offered a job at Sage. Double the money (an extra 5 million a year, in his case). And your career prospects, with it’s end fast approaching, are infinitely better.
Take emotion out of it. It makes sense. You’d do it; I’d do it.
Until Newcastle United can genuinely compete on wages, revenue, infrastructure and trophies, this sort of thing will continue to happen. At least we’ve had two summers in a row to get used to it. Break-ups always get easier after the first one, and if we’re sensible we’ll better brace ourselves for the next few years.
That’s not defeatism; it’s where we are. In reality. Not in our dreams. Not in Yasir Al-Rumayyan’s hot-air spiel and blue-sky thinking. In reality.
The good news is that since Wilson and Hopkinson got on board, we seem to have realised that. We’re hanging on grimly to the cartel/Top Six, but we are the Best of the Rest. Targeting players Brighton or Brentford might have been chasing, but this time it’s us that can leverage the legacy to secure the signatures.
We’ve lost three of our blue-chip players this summer, BUT we got 70 million for a guy who could only score when the ball was on the spot twelves yards out, 100 mill for a guy who sleep-walked through one season (and spent the other in GA), and 75 mill – double our money – on a guy who’s about to turn 29 and didn’t want to be here anymore. That’s fantastic business. Now, it’s what we do with it that counts.
What matters now is what happens next
This is where I see the first genuine shoots of promise.
For the first time since Amanda Staveley left, there appears to be an attempt to build a more coherent football structure.
David Hopkinson is in. Ross Wilson is in. Newcastle have brought in data and recruitment expertise, and there seems to have been a recognition that last summer’s approach couldn’t continue.
Under Howe, recruitment increasingly leaned towards oven-ready Premier League players or footballers already on the radar of the traditional elite.
We didn’t scout, we just got Andy Howe to watch MOTD2 on Sunday morning.
But Newcastle can’t win auctions against clubs with substantially greater revenues and bigger legacies. We’ve discovered that – fairly brutally and comprehensively – over the last few summers.
We need to find players before everybody else wants them.
That’s the shift. And it’s a wholly necessary one.
That’s why Bruno’s sale, painful as it is, could yet become a useful test of whether the new model actually works.
Don’t spend £75 million desperately trying to buy another Bruno. You can’t.
Use the money to improve three or four areas.
Bring in full-back cover to help compensate for Tino’s brittle bone disease and in case Hall jumps ship to Man U. Add another forward. Strengthen midfield. Build depth.
If one elite player becomes three or four very good ones with room to grow, the squad may eventually become stronger even if the starting XI initially looks weaker. And suddenly maintaining our levels over a 60-game season might not be so fanciful.
There is still a team here
And amid all the gloom, the squad hasn’t been stripped bare.
There is still Osula, Wissa, Barnes, Elanga, Miley, Ramsey, Livramento, Hall, Botman, Joelinton and Thiaw.
Woltemade, Wissa and Elanga still have every chance to come good. If two of those three establish themselves properly this season (and the performances of the latter two at the World Cup offer real hope), the picture changes quickly.
Then there are the younger midfielders.
Miley, Bamba, Steur and Ramsey could conceivably become the core of the side over the next year or two, with Joelinton still there to add experience and aggression.
Steur in particular is intriguing.
They raved about him in Holland, there was surprise he left, and by all accounts he has already made a big impression here.
No, he isn’t Bruno.
He does not need to be.
Perhaps the long-term plan is that Bruno’s influence is replaced collectively rather than by one £60 million signing.
That would make much more sense, especially when his absence has been so pronounced/fatal over the last four years.
And if Newcastle end up bringing in four or five hungry players with the money raised this summer while also cutting a sizeable chunk from the wage bill, then the squad could look very different twelve months from now.
Different does not automatically mean worse.
Højbjerg would fit the transition
This is also why I don’t hate the Pierre-Emile Højbjerg links. He is not a Bruno replacement either. But that’s not really the point.
He knows the league, he is consistent, experienced and capable of giving a younger midfield some stability while the next generation comes through. A solid 6 or 7 out of ten most games he plays. He could give us his last 2 or 3 good years and he won’t have one eye on the door.
If Newcastle genuinely believe Miley, Bamba, Steur and Ramsey will be the main men in a year or two, then having someone like Højbjerg around at a workable price makes sense.
Not every signing needs to be a 20-year-old data project.
Good recruitment is about value and squad balance.
An experienced midfielder who allows younger players to develop without carrying the entire burden immediately can be just as useful as the next wonderkid.
The data now has to be good
Of course, none of this works if Newcastle’s recruitment is rubbish.
That will be the crux of the whole thing.
Brighton and Brentford are praised for their model because they repeatedly identify players before their value explodes.
If Newcastle want to adopt a similar approach, only with greater financial muscle, then the data, scouting and decision-making have to be exceptional.
If Steur, Bamba and the next wave develop into top players, supporters will look back at this summer very differently.
If they don’t, then selling established quality and replacing it with potential will look exactly as risky as it currently feels.
That is why I was actually reassured by Hopkinson’s recent comments.
At least he’s been upfront that this is a re-alignment.
After last summer, it was a change that had to happen.
And it goes beyond recruitment. Movement on the stadium and training ground matters almost as much as what happens in the transfer market. Hopkinson’s 2030 plan might sound ridiculous to some supporters, but a visible route towards higher revenue — with the stadium the obvious one — would do an enormous amount to restore faith in the project. It would also help convince players that Newcastle are actually building towards something rather than simply treading water.
There may be teething problems, particularly over the first six months, but for the first time in a while there appears to be a clearer idea of what Newcastle are trying to become, both on and off the pitch.
Now, we find out whether they are any good at executing it…
I, for one, am very hopeful. I’ve spent long enough thinking otherwise.