Newcastle United are drifting. As a team, they’ve gone stale and as a club, they’ve stalled, robbing them of the extraordinary momentum that was fuel for a couple of years. That rate of progress was never sustainable in this frustrating world of financial restriction — don’t get me started — and it was never going to be a journey free of potholes, but as a columnist and fan, it does feel like the great, post-takeover “project” has reached a crossroads.
Drift, stale, stalled; those words were synonymous with the tail-end of Mike Ashley’s ownership. Twelfth in the Premier League was Newcastle’s finishing position in 2020-21, the last full season before Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) controversially bought the club and promised to make them “number one” and it is where they sit now. To suggest nothing has changed would be ludicrous and wholly false, but the adrenaline rush has given way to a hangover.
On the pitch, it feels like a huge spell of games are approaching for Eddie Howe and his players, who have put themselves bang under pressure with some poor results. Inconsistency is rife across a tight division, but big players do not perform as brilliantly as Newcastle did in their 3-3 draw with Liverpool and then so dreadfully as they did in losing 4-2 at Brentford. I sincerely hope there has been some soul-searching in the dressing room this week.
Off it, there are legitimate questions to be asked and how about these for starters: what’s happening with the chief executive? What’s happening with the stadium? What’s happening with the training ground? What’s happening with new signings? In turn, Newcastle would have some legitimate answers, like due process, not rushing huge decisions and the millstone of profit and sustainability rules (PSR), but the overall effect feels like drag, delay, an anchor.
The big concern is that all of these things are connected. This is the reality of any club’s ecosystem; excuses eat into its culture. As a pundit, one of my jobs is to analyse individual matches, which I did on Match of the Day for the Brentford game and it was ragged and full of error. It was unacceptable. Taken in context with Liverpool, it was slightly different. Taken in context with the whole season, the entire year, something far more complex emerges.
The best players deliver every week
Hard on the heels of Newcastle’s capitulation at the Gtech Community Stadium, this feels like a natural starting point, but I’m splitting this article into sections to emphasise separate issues and how they intertwine. You can’t legislate for the kind of haphazard, criminal defending that gifted Brentford four goals — you also have to acknowledge that any player, any team can have a stinker — but there was an underlying theme that I found more troubling.
Rewind 18 months and Newcastle had their supporters on the edge of their seats because they were so horrible to play against. For so long, they had been soft touches, but now they were as fit and ferocious as dogs, constantly pressing, constantly at it, running hard, winning every tackle. That commitment was unquestioned and it was collective. When one pressed, they all pressed.
Individual mistakes littered the Brentford game, but the biggest worry was how Newcastle pressed in ones and twos. There was hesitancy. It was a half-and-half, ‘Shall I go or shall I stay?’ and it gave Thomas Frank’s team time and space to beat the press and maraud upfield where, as it happened, they found an open door leading to a comedy club. Not for the first time in recent weeks, this felt like a problem of mentality.
Nobody questioned Newcastle’s attitude at home to Liverpool, which was a great, see-saw game against top-class opposition, two good teams going toe-to-toe. At St James’ Park, they’ve beaten Tottenham Hotspur — admittedly, not such a stretch right now — drawn with Manchester City, beaten Arsenal and seen off Chelsea in the Carabao Cup, which tells you Howe’s players are capable of challenging. Capable of far better than 12th.
But let me tell you something: big players do not just turn up for big games. The best players find a way of turning up every week, whoever the opposition and treating them the same. They turn up nine times out of 10. Newcastle are patently not doing this. There is no excuse for the lurch in performance from losing 2-0 at home to West Ham United and drawing 1-1 at Crystal Palace to Liverpool and then Brentford. Something isn’t right.
Howe needs help
This is not, in the main, a tactical issue. Granted, Newcastle have laboured against teams who are happy to give up possession and sit behind the ball. All sides must evolve and adapt. Like most managers or head coaches, Howe has a preferred system and style, a 4-3-3 that can become 4-5-1 out of possession, but I don’t see much wrong in terms of structure. Brentford was more a failure of energy and implementation.
Howe cannot escape scrutiny. Ultimately, he is responsible for results and performances and neither look great. Within games, some of his substitutions have not helped matters. Unlike a year ago, there is no mitigation of a congested fixture list, fatigue or injury piling upon injury, because with the notable exception of Sven Botman, Howe more or less has a full squad to choose from. Motivation falls within his remit, too.
Howe will be hurt and angry after Brentford. In public, he always protects his players and that was a game when nothing came back the other way. It means that Leicester City at home on Saturday will have an undercurrent of tension. Then it’s Brentford again in the quarter-final of the Carabao Cup, which now looks like a season-definer. After that, it’s Ipswich Town away. It feels like a pivotal spell.
I don’t have any doubts about Howe still being the right man for Newcastle. He can and should lead the team forward. After what he has done, not just pulling the team away from relegation and then straight into the Champions League, but in the way he has set standards and built an identity, he deserves time and patience. He needs support, because that identity is blurring. I don’t think there’s the mood — or the money — to make a change.
Somewhere down the line, the same thing happens to all managers: players stop listening. It happened all through my career. Think about it: you’re on the training pitch day in and day out, week after week, month after month and eventually it doesn’t matter how much you mix up your sessions or even how liked, respected or feared you are, it becomes the same voices and the same faces. You tune out. It’s human nature.
I’m not saying that this has happened at Newcastle, but all managers, teams and squads need to refresh in one way or another.
Left behind on transfers
You will understand where this is leading. I’m not the first person to point out that Newcastle haven’t signed a first-team-ready player for two consecutive transfer windows, partially because they have hit their limits with PSR and partially because it appears they fixated on Crystal Palace’s Marc Guehi last summer, which came after that desperate spell in late June when they ended up selling Elliot Anderson and Yankuba Minteh to balance the books.
The effect of all this was twofold and, like it or not, it ripples out all the way to Brentford. How do managers reinvent themselves? Well, they can innovate in training or they can bring in new coaches, but the most common method is through a turnover of players. When two or three come and go every year, the newbies change and lift things. They respond to the voices and faces and keep everyone on their toes.
It sounds simple but that’s how it is when your recruitment is sound and coaching forward-thinking. We’ve seen under Howe that it can become a virtuous circle; new players drive standards, the old players raise their levels, there is competition and energy, the side improves. The manager has buy-in. He can say, “Look we’re progressing. Do what I tell you and you’ll get better.” When you win, there is no argument to any of that.
The circle has unfolded at Newcastle. By standing still in the transfer market, they are overtaken. They are easier to work out by the opposition. Yes, there are fewer fitness concerns, but there is less in the way of competition and without the help of incomings, Howe has to conjure something from what he already has. Players who could and should have been moved on are still there. Stagnation is the risk, a marginal dropping off of percentages.
The other part of it came with those sales when, for a little while, it looked as though everyone had a price. There were talks with Liverpool over Anthony Gordon. It has been reported that Chelsea expressed an interest in Alexander Isak. That creates uncertainty and uncertainty is a breeding ground for excuses.
In Bruno Guimaraes, Isak and Gordon, Newcastle have signed some talented individuals. With selling now part of every club’s strategy, there was always a chance that one might go or that another might outstrip the team’s progress, but what you can’t have is players looking at each other in the dressing room wondering if the game is up. Wondering what it is they are buying into, even if it just becomes the flicker of a thought. Then it becomes an infection.
The need for a clear vision
Guimaraes, Isak, Gordon, Kieran Trippier and the rest were joining a club with big ambitions. Soon, Newcastle would be winning things, they were told. There would be investment in the team, there would be a new training ground and, in time, a modernised stadium and, over the first year or two, growth was undeniable. Their facilities were improved, there was a splurge on new players, they got to Wembley, finished in the top four. It was a rush.
As a sales pitch, combined with the appeal of playing in front of sell-out, passionate crowds, it was a formidable one. Why wouldn’t you want to be part of that, why wouldn’t you want to be part of a team that finally won Newcastle a trophy? Howe could point to progress, both for the players he already had and for those he wanted.
More than three years down the line, that progress is less easy to explain. Newcastle are growing their commercial and marketing departments — they are unrecognisable in that sense — but their footballing story is not so clear. Players have short careers and the biggest, most ambitious clubs do not go two windows without strengthening. And they do not go two seasons without Europe, which is now a distinct possibility.
There may be perfectly logical reasons for it, but St James’ is largely unchanged and a new training ground remains an aspiration. For this team, for this era of players in the here and now, what does Newcastle’s project actually mean? What are they playing for beyond money, pride, themselves or whatever else? Is this a blip, a brief pause? What does Howe point to right now?
Darren Eales, the chief executive, is stepping down due to ill health, but coming after the departures of Amanda Staveley and Mehrdad Ghodoussi, the co-owners, which in turn came after the departure of Dan Ashworth as sporting director — whatever happened to him? — and his subsequent replacement by Paul Mitchell, it means there has been a huge churn at the top of the club. That has an effect.
Whatever else, Staveley and Ghodoussi were very present and very visible. They were brilliant at front-of-house stuff, close to Howe and the team and it felt like they brought a drive, a vision. Newcastle needed that after the cold, aloof Ashley era. But who is selling the vision now? Is anybody explaining it inside the dressing room, let alone to the rest of us?
Newcastle is a black and white city but when it comes to its football club it has traditionally been one or the other; black or white, good or bad, momentum or chaos. Give it 10 days and three brilliant victories and I’ll be singing a different tune but, as things stand, it feels like inconsistency is baked in. They have ignored so many potential turning points already this season, staggering beyond them and into another brick wall.
To get back on track, there has to be a collective will. They have to remember the unity of purpose they surfed on after the takeover. However good they might think they are, players must run to exhaustion every game. Howe must find a way to get past Leicester and Brentford, because that keeps the season alive and quietens the noise. Whatever it means for trading, directors cannot let another window slip by. In the summer, they must sell big and go again.
And above them, the people in charge of it all — PIF — should come out and set the tone. Ultimately, it’s the owners who have the final say on big infrastructure projects, who can press the button, who can explain and then prove that drift is temporary but the vision endures.
(Top photo: CameraSport/Serena Taylor/Newcastle United via Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
