In Eddie Howe, Newcastle United have appointed a manager who appears intelligent and has the respect of the players around him. Now the club needs to appoint a CEO to match.
Since the previous chief executive Lee Charnley left last year, minority owner Amanda Staveley and her husband Mehrdad Ghodoussi have fulfilled that role. However, speaking at a Financial Times event earlier this month, Staveley said candidates have been spoken to which suggests an appointment is imminent.
Though the appointment of a new CEO does not stir the heart like a new centre-forward, it is a vital role for a modern football club. The example of Ed Woodward, who stepped down last month after a decade of overseeing the decline of Manchester United, should serve as a warning to anyone who thinks otherwise.
READ MORE: Amanda Staveley on a new chief executive
The first attribute a new CEO at Newcastle United must have is vision. A poor appointee will look at what Manchester City did, at what Chelsea did, at what Liverpool did, and try to replicate that.
A good appointee will assess the football world not as it was but as it is, along with the wider sporting world. Nobody knows what Newcastle United will be in five years or twenty years, but if the money is there, and the political situation does not change that, then a brilliant CEO should build something unique.
Another vital attribute is intelligence. For some reason, some not very bright people seem to be appointed at high levels in football, and it is clear - as it is clear in any workplace - how much of a drain it is on morale when the person making the decisions is as sharp as a doughnut.
The club has appointed an intelligent manager in Eddie Howe, and the new CEO must match that and improve upon the standard set. A club on the cusp of the unknown needs someone in charge who is thinking ahead and communicating clearly, not a weak link.
The new CEO also needs to be a negotiator: someone who understands leverage and its vital role in making a deal. Nobody in football is going to do Newcastle United any favours, quite the opposite in fact, so every deal will be based on leverage rather than favours or begging.
Rival clubs have already shown they are eager to limit Newcastle’s revenue in order to limit their spending, so Newcastle need someone in those Premier League meetings who has planned ahead and made deals outside the room using whatever leverage they can muster. Amanda Staveley also said recently that the club’s wages are about 65% of turnover, which she said was too high, so every transfer deal, no matter how small or urgent, also needs to be worked hard, and again that will need leverage.
The new CEO also needs to front up. One of the reasons Steve Bruce struggled so much when he was manager of Newcastle was that he was the front man for Mike Ashley’s bad decisions.
There is going to be much greater scrutiny of Newcastle United if they climb the table, and those questions about the morality of taking cash from Saudi Arabia are going to get more frequent, more specific and more uncomfortable. The new CEO needs to be public and transparent so that Eddie Howe can get on with the football.
Finally, they also need to be someone with tact. Running a football club amid public scrutiny and public emotion is a minefield., and even more so at Newcastle United, where the new CEO will have to keep the fans and owners onside, but also, as fans of Chelsea now know, politicians and the wider public.
Amanda Staveley has made some missteps, but more or less she has played things carefully: the role of majority owners the Public Investment Fund, renaming the stadium (“St James' belongs to the fans,” she said), the future of the women’s team. Whoever takes over is going to have to navigate even more carefully as the scrutiny increases, but also have some contingency plans for if politics does intervene.
The club appears to be on the cusp of an upwards transformation, and the last time that happened, in the 1990s, it was due to the vision of Sir John Hall. Whichever man or woman takes over now needs to be as rare a personality, and just as sharp.
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