Newcastle’s players have spent part of the past week helping designers at their new kit sponsors, Adidas, test embryonic footwear designs intended to hit the high street in five years. The question of where Eddie Howe may be in five weeks, let alone five months, has provided the backdrop to the time his team have just spent in pre-season training at the sportswear manufacturer’s European HQ near Nuremberg in southern Germany.
Workers on the extensive campus set in idyllic parkland routinely travel between meetings on the bicycles stationed all over the site and Newcastle’s manager has enjoyed whizzing around its vast acreage on two wheels.
Appearances can be deceptive and the apparently carefree Howe had much to ponder at a moment when he appears high on the Football Association’s shortlist to replace Gareth Southgate as England manager but faces a battle to retain the autonomy over recruitment and training strategy he has enjoyed since taking over at Newcastle in November 2021.
The departure of the former co-owner Amanda Staveley, a key Howe ally, and the installation of Paul Mitchell as director of football and James Bunce as performance director threaten to dilute the amount of control Howe has enjoyed at a club with Saudi Arabian majority ownership.
It explains why, on Friday, he played a political game with the media straight out of the old playbook of one of his St James’ predecessors, Rafael Benítez. Despite playing a pretty straight bat with broadcast journalists, suggesting his loyalties lay with Newcastle rather than England, Howe was rather more equivocal with newspaper reporters, hinting that a potential offer from the FA could become attractive if the club he remained “emotionally invested in” failed to allow him to set “boundaries” in his new relationships with Mitchell and Bunce.
Although he praised both men’s capabilities, Howe will not have enjoyed a recent meeting with the Saudis at a Northumberland hotel when his squad’s extensive injury problems last season were analysed. Injury prevention ranks high among Bunce’s skills and it appears an ownership that, for all its admiration of the 46-year-old’s coaching brilliance, seemingly believes that fitness problems cost the club European qualification and that Howe’s training sessions may require a little modification.
Bunce has previously said he cannot be best friends with managers and has to sometimes hold difficult conversations with them. Those comments go a long way to explaining why Newcastle’s normally very circumspect manager used the leverage afforded by the FA’s interest to indulge in such a blatant power play in Bavaria.
Similarly, when Staveley was running the club, Howe had the final word on player recruitment and his nephew Andy Howe played a significant part in that sphere; his fear now is that Mitchell may reduce that power.
“I absolutely want to stay but it has to be right for me and the club,” said Howe. “There’s no point in me saying I’m happy staying at Newcastle if the dynamic isn’t right. As a new team coming together we have to set our boundaries.”
Earlier in the week, Newcastle’s chief executive, Darren Eales, had talked about the recent personnel changes as enabling the manager to spend “more time on the grass, where Eddie’s at his best” but as Howe put it on Friday: “I’ve made the points I have today because this has to work for Newcastle.
“I have been really happy for two and a half years. I have loved every second of the relationships that I’ve had and the way I’ve been able to work. I think that has brought success. We’re in the flux of change, I can’t say with a definitive answer where that will lead.”
For a man who enjoyed so much control over every sphere at his previous club Bournemouth, that during his early days he sometimes locked up the ground at night and proofread the match programme, the past weeks have proved unsettling.
“Of course I’ve spoken to the Public Investment Fund [about this summer’s events] and will continue to speak to them,” Howe said. “The relationship is good.
“Since PIF have been here, and I want to make this clear, they’ve done some amazing things for the club and they are absolutely going to do some amazing things for it in the future. Everyone should be very excited about what is ahead for Newcastle.”
