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Newcastle’s sporting director, Ross Wilson, has revealed he began planning at the start of this year for Eddie Howe’s departure. Howe stepped down as manager in late July and the club turned to Matthias Jaissle, who had been identified as the preferred successor.
“Eddie leaving didn’t feel chaotic and it didn’t feel painful,” said Wilson, who arrived on Tyneside from Nottingham Forest. “Eddie would be the first to tell you that. I came here 10 or 11 months ago and I’ve been planning in the background for a managerial change over eight or nine of those months. That doesn’t mean we were always going to go to Matthias, but he was always part of our planning.”
When Wilson began making contingency plans, Howe seemed more likely to be poached than to resign or be dismissed. Yet Newcastle’s 12th-placed finish last season raised questions about his future and, after the sales of Anthony Gordon and Sandro Tonali, Howe decided he wanted out.
“Big respect to Eddie for the job he did for us over a long period of time,” Wilson said. “He did a wonderful job bringing that trophy [the 2025 Carabao Cup]. He’s a club legend, for sure.”
No one had envisaged parting with Howe three weeks before the season. “Clearly the timing wasn’t planned,” Wilson said. “But the reason we could move so quickly was because we’d been preparing for a number of months.
“Eddie’s an exceptionally talented coach and that meant he was probably going to do something else at some point. We had to be prepared for that.”
With Newcastle having entered a settlement agreement with Uefa after breaching European spending rules last season, selling Gordon and Tonali for almost £170m proved essential but Wilson admitted that offloading Bruno Guimarães to Arsenal for £75m was one sale he never wanted to complete.
“There’s no point pretending otherwise: we did not want to lose Bruno Guimarães,” he said. “That was really disappointing. But everything else that happened during the window was planned. That doesn’t mean every single player [who signed] was the number one name on our list. Clearly we were disappointed a couple of times but that’s normal. No club reaches the end of a window getting every target they wanted.”
Wilson has presided over the acquisition of eight players aged 24 and under this summer including Guimarães’s replacement, the £52m midfielder Nico González, signed from Manchester City. They have in common a suitability for the high-intensity pressing game choreographed, in different forms, by Howe and Jaissle.
“I cannot imagine Newcastle United playing a style of football that isn’t aggressive, vertical and attacking,” said Wilson. “For this club to be successful we have to play an attacking, high-press, proactive style and we had to find a coach to do that.”
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Ultimately, all roads led to Jaissle, for whom Newcastle paid £10m to Al-Ahli. “We used our [data] models to identify those coaches who played the type of football we wanted,” said Wilson. “Matthias was the No 1 choice. It was really, really clear.”
Cue what Wilson described as a “busy” summer. “We had the situation with the manager which we dealt with in complete secrecy for two weeks as well as trying to run a transfer window,” he said. “So it was really, really busy. But good fun as well.”
Until this summer Newcastle had resisted selling established players but that stance has changed. “If you want to be successful in the Premier League you have to trade players,” said Wilson. “If you don’t trade you’re going to get stuck.”
Although Jaissle has not been set targets this season, Newcastle’s chief executive, David Hopkinson, remains confident they can disrupt the dominance of the traditional “big six” by 2030. “We’re going to be consistently and credibly competing for those top prizes,” Hopkinson said. “If we’re compliant with the regulatory regime [spending rules] we can compete consistently.”
