Why Eddie Howe’s shock exit leaves Newcastle in shambles | OneFootball

Once again, Eddie Howe can be bracketed alongside two of Tyneside’s favourite faces. This time, however, it is in less enviable fashion. Sir Bobby Robson and Kevin Keegan left Newcastle suddenly in late summers, decisions seemingly taken at the wrong time plunging them into transition and trouble. At least, unlike a couple of distinguished predecessors, Howe has gone before a season has started and not after a few games.

But it is less than four weeks before it begins, following a 4-1 friendly defeat to Bristol City, when it seems the team Howe built is falling apart. Howe was a transformative and a terrific Newcastle manager, but the danger is his five-year reign comes to be the anomaly in their recent history, a period of achievement surrounded by the underachievement.

Howe did something even Robson and Keegan could not and took a trophy to Tyneside: Newcastle’s first since 1969, their first in English football in seven decades. Go back 17 months, to the day they won the Carabao Cup, and Howe was asked about getting his own statue at St James’ Park. With characteristic modesty, he deflected the questions. Was he, he was asked, a legend? “We don’t put ourselves in that bracket,” he said. “We will let other people decide that when we are long gone.”

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Eddie Howe ended Newcastle’s 70-year wait for a domestic trophy.... (Getty)

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...but leaves with his squad falling apart (PA)

Now he is gone; from Howe’s perspective, there may be a relief that a burden is lifted. His probable replacement, Matthias Jaissle, will inherit a host of problems, few of them created by Howe, many of them making his task increasingly hard in the last year.

Results show the downturn. Newcastle lost six of their last nine league games last season, nine of 17. They were beaten home and away by Sunderland. A Champions League campaign that had been heartening came to an ignominious end with a 7-2 walloping by Barcelona.

Howe had constructed a side with an identity. Yet even as he restored the sense there was something special about Newcastle, perhaps it was not enough for players: both those he had and those he coveted. Newcastle had the tag of the world’s richest club, but they could not spend as such as and lacked the allure that wealth was supposed to bring.

With Howe leaving, it is easy to envisage Bruno Guimaraes going to Arsenal now, a fourth departure of a high-class player in under a year, following Alexander Isak, Anthony Gordon and Sandro Tonali. The combined proceeds will be around £370m; a reminder that Howe often improves players, but also leaving a gaping hole in the side. He could wish Elliot Anderson was still around to occupy the void in midfield, but the PSR-enforced sale of the Geordie in 2024 looks one of the major issues the Newcastle hierarchy have botched in recent years: the delayed departure of Isak, who Howe would probably have rather left earlier, last summer is another case in point, lucrative as it was.

But the departures have been compounded by the lack of arrivals; or not the right ones, anyway, given that Newcastle spent £250m last summer. Until then, Howe had an outstanding record in the transfer market but only Malick Thiaw of the 2025 influx was a success. Then this summer has proved a continuation of last. Elite players have kept turning Newcastle down: Victor Munoz and Johan Manzambi this summer, a host of forwards who would have been a better fit than Nick Woltemade or Yoane Wissa last year. Now, seeing how Newcastle have unravelled, the probability is that Hugo Ekitike, Benjamin Sesko and Joao Pedro do not regret their choices.

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Bruno Guimaraes (left) is set to become Newcastle’s fourth high-class departure in under a year, 12 months on from Alexander Isak’s messy exit (PA Archive)

In the post-mortem of Howe’s regime, the dropped £125m double act of Woltemade and Wissa figure prominently. So does Isak, the man who scored at Wembley against Liverpool to secure that silverware but then provided the beginning of the end when he eyed the exit.

Before then, Howe constructed a formidable side from the rubble he walked into: a club who were still winless in November, who went on to reach two finals, qualify for the Champions League twice, whose best was such that they could beat the top teams.

Howe’s Newcastle were at their best when operating at maximum intensity. They struggled more when they had to play in both England and Europe, partly due to injuries. But even within that, there was still the seminal 4-1 demolition of Paris Saint-Germain, Dan Burn flying through the Tyneside air to head in his goal. Howe was the architect of many a magnificent St James’ Park night, the man from the south coast who became a hero in the north-east.

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Howe brought many a magnificent St James’ Park night to Tyneside (PA Wire)

Now it is up to the men from the Middle East: Jaissle, who has succeeded at Al Ahli, the Saudi Public Investment Fund, the owners who have preferred to keep their counsel, and their representatives at St James’ Park, sporting director Ross Wilson and CEO David Hopkinson. But at times in the last year, it seemed that only Howe was holding Newcastle together. His exit leaves them looking like a shambles.