by It was already in the first days of June that Eddie Howe and his staff feared that this summer would be ‘a big problem’ for Newcastle United.
The reason was not yet failed purchases, the departure of sports director Paul Mitchell or even Alexander Isak. Or at least just Isak. Newcastle already knew about the ambitions of the Swede to leave for months. Now the same fears about Tino Livramento and Anthony Gordon grew, with the extra concern that any unrest could lead to more agitation in the dressing room. The mood was so ominous that the staff of Howe even asked for potential solutions in football.
It was a huge shift of satisfaction that felt only a few weeks earlier, and the end of a season that was the best in the club in decades. The Carabao Cup closed on a trophy for so long and brought a sense of release around the club. The last day qualification for a second Champions League campaign in three seasons seemed to continue; To encourage everyone and to offer the club the financial insurance to really take on. There was no longer a PSR need to sell stars such as Isak.
Instead there were a large number of other latent problems. Almost everything went wrong, from start to finish and from top to bottom, and especially in transfer negotiations.
The noise around Newcastle on social media no longer sees human rights groups that criticize the Saudi state owners. It is instead jokes and memes, about how comical random was this summer. Newcastle cannot seem to buy what they need because stars want to leave. Even worse, transfer activities seem to end in absurd ways, a bad joke, with the same clou.
If a figure in a rival club enjoyed Quken when it became clear that Benjamin Sesko chose Manchester United: “You can have the most serious owners, but you will still be Newcastle, not Man United”.
That was said with any calamity, but is also an unfair touch. The structure of this Newcastle is not what a progressive club should look like.
That was all too clear from the start of the window, and the departure of Mitchell, because they negotiate transfers without sports director. Mitchell immediately caused friction with Howe on his arrival in 2024, but the most urgent care of the recruitment guru was the “trade model”. He realized how much had to be changed to make PSR compatible in Newcastle, up to the strategy for player profile. The club had to be more agile.
That can be a surprise in view of the success of Newcastle in signing sessions such as Isak, Sandro Tonali and Bruno Guimaeres, but most of them came by paying PSR headroom after the departure of Mike Ashley, the same as every market insight. As it was, Mitchell has not signed anyone at all.
Some sources pass on a new frustration, which is the long time needed to do something. Insiders talk about how an important decision should go through several layers and meetings far above the football side, often back to Riyad. If it related to a transfer -intention, a source complains, Newcastle discovered that rival clubs had stolen ahead in the time it took before they finally all went in.
If such a bureaucracy sounds at odds with this summer’s vacuum, there is actually a strange consistency. PIF has of course actively dealt with concrete financial decisions, because it fits their status like an infinitely rich fund. They are simply not immersed in the minutiae because they are at their remote location. Even players have complained about a lack of visibility of the hierarchy, without a clear umbrella strategy. Former sub-owner Amanda Staveley had many opponents in football, but her personality was a culture.
This can ultimately change with the arrivals of Ross Wilson as sports director and David Hopkinson as Chief Executive, but the current situation has inevitably exacerbated the chaos. Club insiders even made a joke about those who actually said ‘no’ to the first offer of Liverpool for Isak.
Howe and his staff currently have much more power than managers are usually offered by modern clubs and are described as “almost everything run”. Such worries are accentuated by questions about Howe’s persuasiveness outside the training pitch. A number of goals have discovered that they are not fully synchronized with the manager. That happens everywhere, but what strikes this summer is how often it has been mentioned. It is all the more shocking since Howe has done the difficult part to restore the actual football team to Champions League level.
This would be what Saudi Arabia always wanted, the biggest phases. Instead, there are new doubts about the place of the club in that state strategy.
A lot has been made of how PIF governor Yasir Al-Rahalyyan could be decisive in the Isak-Saga, given his geopolitical influence. And yet that comes in the midst of increasing lecture that he has been replaced in the Saudi sports strategy by Turki Alalshikh. The rumors about the Boks Supremo that a club buys – including speculation about Sheffield Wednesday – have not disappeared. They now run hand in hand with claims that the Saudis always just wanted one of the biggest names, in Liverpool or Manchester United.
The economy in Newcastle is certainly a contrast with the bombast around other Saudi projects, from boxing to the World Cup 2034 and the Saudi Pro League project that forms its structure. The strategy now seems to be about bringing everything to the Kingdom, instead of spreading money out.
Those with knowledge of PIF insist that they are fully committed to Newcastle, and that some problems this summer – the bureaucracy, waiting for appointments – simply maintain with a thorough emphasis on healthy governance. In the meantime, club sources have constantly pointed to PSR that limits the investments.
And yet that attitude only makes the lack of action elsewhere inexplicable. Why is the ownership not moved on simple PSR and PR – solutions such as sponsoring the training ground, let alone large projects such as the stadium? There are more delays about announcements there.
Perhaps we see the most striking, we do not see the same praised headlines about investments in the region, an aspect that was repeatedly picked up to justify the very controversial takeover. There are of course still many reasons to resist a state that has a football club, especially in the field of human rights.
And yet, now, unexpectedly in this case, there is another.
There is clearly an inherent risk in the strategy of a club that depends on the economic policy of a state and the broader forces of geopolitics.
It can even play in the Isak -Saga. In a normal situation there would be a strong logic for an upward mobile club to sell Isak. Newcastle could even improve the wider team, as Liverpool did after Philippe Coutinho and Juventus made a habit in the 1990s. They even sold Zinedine Zidane for that purpose.
Except on the one hand, it is possible that the PIF leadership is hung too much pride and status, and what a sale would “say”. On the other hand, selling Isak only works if you have the structure to prepare for this.
Newcastle, as their staff feared early, apparently not. This is certainly not what it should be.
And yet there is still an irony. If you were to take on its own basic conditions this summer, it would not really be that bad. A good side now has the additions of Anthony Elanga and Aaron Ramsdale, with the sale of Sean Longstaff for £ 15 million, amid a promising other working income. And yet, as Howe and his staff intimidate early, almost everything feels a big problem.
