Eddie Howe has reason to believe that April really is the cruellest month. This time last year Newcastle’s manager was hospitalised with pneumonia and, 12 months later, he can barely switch on a radio or glance at a newspaper without receiving yet another reminder he is “under pressure”.
As fans and pundits debate whether Cesc Fàbregas, Xabi Alonso, Andoni Iraola, Oliver Glasner or AN Other might perform a superior job, one thing is clear: Howe has six games to reassure Newcastle’s hierarchy that he remains the right man to lead his 14th-placed team through what promises to be a significant summer rebuild.
In order to remain on the right side of European and, to a lesser extent, Premier League spending rules, Newcastle will almost certainly need to sell at least one, and probably two, of Sandro Tonali, Anthony Gordon and Tino Livramento before September. Should, as seems likely, the team fail to qualify for Europe, that trio may all demand to leave regardless.
Whatever happens, inward recruitment needs to be much shrewder than last summer when the £125m raised from the acrimonious sale of Alexander Isak to Liverpool went towards a £220m investment in Nick Woltemade, Yoane Wissa, Anthony Elanga and Jacob Ramsey.
Damningly, all four began on the bench as a Newcastle side that has dropped 25 points from winning positions this season lost 2-1 at Crystal Palace last Sunday. Small wonder Saturday’s meeting with Bournemouth at St James’ Park has assumed unexpected significance. Since leaving the south coast, Howe has never beaten his old club in the league.
Although all the indications are that Newcastle’s board want to be convinced that a change of manager is unnecessary, the sporting director, Ross Wilson, is entitled to wonder not merely if Alonso, Fàbregas and company could repair a defence that has kept three clean sheets in the past 25 Premier League games but how they might utilise Woltemade.
Howe had a very big say in persuading the club’s Saudi Arabian owners to pay Stuttgart a record £69m for the Germany striker last summer but seems peculiarly resistant to the need to reconstruct his team around “the two-metre Messi”.
Newcastle’s manager appears to have decided that the technically accomplished 6ft 6in forward is simply too slow for English football. When Woltemade – who has scored 10 goals for his club this season – plays these days it tends to be deep in midfield.
Yet maybe the real problem is more about position than lack of pace. A forward described by England’s Gordon as “very similar to Harry Kane” is more a No 10 or a 9.5 than a classic No 9 and looks unsuited to the central striker role in Howe’s preferred 4-3-3 formation.
That system – used as the framework for Newcastle’s hallmark hard-pressing, high-intensity, often counterattacking approach – served the manager well during his first four seasons on Tyneside but now seems all too often second guessed by opponents. As one rival coach recently put it: “Eddie Howe never alters much.”
Perhaps it is part of a wider resistance to change. Howe’s loyalty to a largely long-serving coaching staff headed by his assistant, Jason Tindall, arguably creates a barrier to new ideas.
Maybe a certain type of “group think” from that cadre explains the reluctance to switch to a configuration that might not only better accommodate not merely Woltemade and his fellow £55m striker Wissa but help make Newcastle a little bit more assured in possession. In recent months their passing and ball retention has become so poor they rarely control games and tend to “burn out” as the clock passes the 75-minute mark.
Back in 2024 Paul Mitchell, Wilson’s predecessor as sporting director, suggested that Howe needed to “evolve” but that unwelcome piece of advice prefaced a year-long cold war between the pair.
Wilson is a rather less brash personality; can an executive sometimes described as “a Kofi Annan figure” in football circles, convince Howe it might be a good idea to hire a new first-team coach with a challenging vision and high-level European experience?
“Almost all Eddie Howe’s backroom have been with him since Bournemouth,” says the former Newcastle defender turned BBC local radio analyst John Anderson, who believes Howe should remain next season. “They all see things in similar fashion. Sometimes you need a fresh pair of eyes. Sir Alex Ferguson was old school but, every couple of years, he would still bring a new coach with fresh ideas into Manchester United to keep the team evolving. Players become stale hearing the same things week in, week out. I think Eddie Howe needs someone with newer ideas.”
Like Wilson, David Hopkinson, Newcastle’s chief executive, knows he has inherited a manager who enjoys appreciably wider club autonomy and influence over recruitment than most of his Premier League counterparts.
Such power was all very well when two of the past three seasons concluded with Champions League qualification and the Carabao Cup was won last March. Now, though, Saudi owners unimpressed by two defeats to promoted Sunderland this season may be wondering whether it was really wise to permit the manager and his nephew Andy Howe, a senior Newcastle recruitment executive, quite so much say in player trading last summer.
Even if the next six matches result in a restoration of boardroom faith in the 48-year-old’s coaching ability, his chances of celebrating a fifth anniversary in charge at St James’ Park this November may hinge on two things: is Howe willing to relinquish a degree of control in certain spheres and can he learn to start trusting newcomers and accepting alternative perspectives?