Day one in the job and Eddie Howe arrived at Newcastle United’s training ground while the early birds were still roosting.
Four months into their season, Newcastle were the only Premier League team still without a victory, but a quiet revolution was upon them, rolling in a suitcase containing a change of clothes and a couple of laptops. It was 6.45am on November 9, 2021, and the new head coach’s presence at the club’s Longbenton base was like an alarm bleeping.
By the time the players got there a couple of hours later, a meeting room had been set up and Howe was waiting.
“We were really struggling,” winger Matt Ritchie says. “From the minute he walked in the door, the boys were in the gaffer’s hands because he gave us something. He gave us direction, he gave us certainty, he gave us pure clarity on what we needed to do to be successful.”
This intense — and sometimes insular — man of molecular, granular detail also gave them a presentation board.
“It had two words written on it in big, red, capital letters: HARD WORK,” Ritchie says. “He addressed the elephant in the room; we had no confidence. Work was the only thing that would build it. It wasn’t all of a sudden, bam, we started winning. It was a process of hard work, understanding, repetition, improvement.”
There was, however, a ‘bam’ moment later that morning, one that left players panting and reeling; Howe’s first training session was specific, focused, purpose-driven, exhausting. No gentle introduction or coasting.
Someone who has worked closely with Howe, speaking anonymously to protect relationships — like others throughout this piece — recalls their first conversation with him and thinking afterwards: “’Wow, this is a whole new level. I’ve never met a guy like him’. I thought my previous coaches were diligent, but he is never satisfied. He wants to push you, the players, himself, to heights you never even imagined you could reach.”
For Howe, this was something long in the planning. The previous month, Steve Bruce left Newcastle by mutual consent. The club had new ownership, new belief and new investment, but there was something about the heave and swell of Tyneside that had always appealed to Howe. He would later tell The Athletic that the takeover “was a bonus” and he “would have taken the job anyway because of the fans and the history”.
By the time Howe, out of the game for just over a year after stepping down as Bournemouth manager following their relegation from the Premier League, was interviewed by video call for the vacant position, he knew what he wanted his Newcastle team to look like. He talked about his methodology, the type of player the club should be identifying in the transfer market and how he would develop those already there. He talked about the pathway he saw to keeping Newcastle up. “This is what I will do,” he said.
There were a few people on that call, including Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), Newcastle’s majority owners, and Amanda Staveley, then a co-owner who was effectively running the club. Howe got down to the final two before Newcastle made a clumsy, public approach to Unai Emery, who was then at Villarreal and is now Aston Villa manager. Emery turned them down, Howe accepted.
“He wasn’t what I was expecting at all,” Staveley, who left the club last summer, says of Howe. “He was so professional, he spoke with real eloquence, he showed intelligence and he was measured. He was just such a lovely guy, but he was incredibly well-prepared. It’s hard to interview; if you’re speaking to foreign coaches there can be a bit of a language barrier in certain areas and Eddie was just so far ahead of anyone else.
“You’re thinking, ‘S***, he was so good’, but the worry was Bournemouth had gone down in his previous job and we had a lot of people telling us, ‘He will get your team relegated’. I almost had a sense of shame that we went for anyone else. Ultimately, though, we got it right. We thought if he’d gone all the way to the top with Bournemouth then, with some real support, he could do it at Newcastle. I loved the fact he was so forensic. I mean this in the kindest way, but he’s obsessional.”
Day 1,210 in the job and Howe was at his desk at Longbenton at 6am, not for show but a way of life.
This was last week, when Anthony Gordon’s suspension for three matches after his dismissal for violent conduct against Brighton & Hove Albion had been compounded by the news Lewis Hall would miss the rest of the season through injury. It meant Newcastle would be without their first-choice left side for this Sunday’s Carabao Cup final against champions-elect Liverpool.
Many of the cliches about this compact, one-club city hold true. St James’ Park is a centripetal edifice, looming over everything and everyone. Emotions swing fiercely and one of Howe’s strengths as its football manager is how, in public at least, he does not swing with them. There is rarely ardour on the touchline. From his perspective, the calmer he remains, the easier it is to make clinical decisions, which is not always easy when the volume rises.
Supporters fretted — understandable for a club which has not won a domestic trophy for 70 years — but Howe re-watched matches and training sessions and considered solutions.
“You will never hear Eddie make an excuse,” says Ritchie, who had played for him at Bournemouth across four seasons in three divisions before their Newcastle reunion. “At Bournemouth, we had nothing, so it was: survive with what you’ve got. At Newcastle, it was similar. We were dead and buried when he arrived, so what are you going to create? And he found it. Hard work. It’s so simple.”
Whatever happens at Wembley this weekend, Newcastle will not suffer from a lack of preparation. “He is ridiculously meticulous,” another person who has worked alongside him says. “Everything is planned to the nth degree.”
And if there has been a sense of adversity hanging over the club in recent days, then Howe will use it, just as he has throughout his managerial career. “Everybody wants you to fail,” the person says. “That’s what he thinks.”
Football and the football media are adept at breeding stereotypes.
Newcastle fans have often suffered from this in the past — too damn expectant — and Howe has had it, too. Bournemouth were portrayed as a fairytale; a small club from a genteel resort town on England’s south coast who climbed through the divisions playing their football in a tippy-tappy way, led by their youthful, clean-cut manager. Golly, he was just so nice.
That is the Disney version, but the reality was more Brothers Grimm. Over Howe’s two spells in the dugout, Bournemouth’s rise from the relegation zone of fourth-tier League Two, a 17-point deduction and a transfer embargo to the top half of the Premier League was remarkable by any standards, but it was also a tale of sacrifice. There were plenty of unvarnished episodes, when nice would not cut it.
As a player, Howe came through the youth ranks at Bournemouth. A formative moment came at age 16, when he was told he was being released, but he decided to stay and see out the season. Then there was a change of manager and the new guy, Mel Machin, liked the look of him. Howe was signed to a professional contract. It was a big lesson; fight for everything and never give up.
Howe was a 5ft 10in (178cm) centre-half, never the archetypal lower-league brick s***house, but he was tough and aggressive and his biggest quality (and arguably biggest frailty, given his early retirement through injury), was bravery. Both as a player and coach, with Bournemouth in desperate financial peril, there would be weeks and months when he and his colleagues were not paid. Trouble was always lurking.
When he was named, at 31, caretaker manager at Bournemouth on January 1, 2009 (he had previously been youth-team coach), and with demotion to non-League beckoning, he gave a classic “Us against the world” speech in the changing room, something he genuinely felt and wanted his players to harness.
What is interesting is that he did precisely the same at Newcastle almost 13 years later, although here the context was different.
“The narrative was Saudi and being ‘The richest club in the world’, but we were never that,” someone who was present in the room says. “Eddie talked about how everybody would be laughing at us if we got relegated. He used that a lot. But he also understood Newcastle was a place where you don’t get handed anything to you on a plate.”
This has fed into the club’s identity under Howe, who loved watching Kevin Keegan’s “Entertainers” Newcastle team of the mid-1990s. They played his kind of football, the front-foot attacking, the goals, the individual brilliance, but what he wanted to add was constant running and not a hint of slacking off. His mantra: pass the ball 20 times if it is progressive, but get it forward in three if it’s on.
If Keegan’s Newcastle were everybody’s second-favourite team — a strange concept — Howe’s much-quoted mantra was, “I’m not here to be popular, I’m here to compete.”
Nice? At the right time. Ritchie, who is now playing for Portsmouth in the second-tier Championship, describes him as an “unbelievable man” who gives new fathers in his dressing rooms the John Wooden book Pyramids of Success. In team meetings, he encourages players to tell personal stories to foster intimacy, and during individual sessions, he encourages them to take responsibility. It creates a loyalty.
In public, Howe specialises in emotional control, but his players witness the other side, too. “You have to know when to show kindness and love and when to listen,” one colleague says. “They get to see Eddie’s steel as well.”
At a club which had been stripped back to the core, Staveley was immediately thrust into a close working relationship with Howe. “You have to be very tough to do what he does at the level he does it at,” she says. “He’s relentless and obsessive and some people can be like that and have an awful personality. He doesn’t. He’s very determined to win and very ambitious. Sometimes that can look ugly, but he doesn’t have that side to him.
“I needed him to want it, for the fans, for the people, for us, for himself. You have to be ambitious in today’s market. You can’t be successful unless you really want it for yourself because without that focus and ambition, he wouldn’t want what’s best for the club. At the end of the day, we’re all self-serving. He had to have that.”
Ritchie says something similar.
“At Bournemouth, we all drove forward together and Eddie and Jason (Tindall, his senior assistant then and now), were the spears for that,” he says. “It was, ‘I’m following this guy because he knows where he wants to go’. As a coach, he was as hungry as any player. It was like he was starving.”
“He saves his spiky side for the training ground,” says another person who has worked under Howe. “You can be hauled over the coals if you do something which deviates from what he is trying to achieve, which is ‘everyone together’. He can be really blunt, but sometimes you have to be.”
Blunt is a word used about him at Bournemouth, where Howe rebuilt the club from the inside and ultimately exerted considerable control. He was respected and adored, but could be severe with staff if he felt standards were not being met. They would swap stories — possibly apocryphal — about him handing back departmental reports which had a mistake on the front, saying, “How can I trust anything in this document is correct if you’ve got that wrong?”.
Gone are the days — more or less — of dressing-room scraps or managers hurling teacups at the wall. Motivational techniques are different now and for Howe it is a focus on intensity and standards. “At some clubs I’ve been at, you might go into a passing drill and it’s neither here nor there,” Ritchie says. “At Bournemouth and Newcastle under Eddie and Jase (Tindall) it was, ‘This is work. We’ve started. Don’t misplace a pass, don’t let the drill break down’.
“We’re professional footballers and if you’re on it, concentrating at the right level, then it shouldn’t happen. If passes went astray, they’d be on top of you. It’s a little thing but there’s so much to be said for that because, when it comes to switching on in the moment, being calm, playing with tempo, you take it into a game. You could be brilliant, but he would always want more, demand more from you.”
There was one game at Newcastle when a new player was sent on as a substitute and promptly lost the opponent he was meant to be marking at a set piece. It didn’t lead to a goal, but it did have repercussions; the player was not selected for the next few matches because Howe did not trust him to carry out his exacting instructions.
At the training ground, he is always available but usually in his office, breaking for sessions, meetings and, briefly, lunch. He knows he can’t be everybody’s friend. There is a detachment.
His introductory press conference at Newcastle ended with journalists glancing at each other with mild concern when he suggested politely that it might be helpful to him and his players if there was not too much speculation about incoming transfers. “Good luck with that,” one of them responded, and in that moment you wondered if this wild, flailing and failing club might prove too much for him.
Howe is presented as Newcastle coach in November 2021, alongside new co-owners Mehrdad Ghodoussi and Amanda Staveley (Stu Forster/Getty Images)
Howe has always been misunderstood in this regard. Yes, he is assiduous and he cares about the people he works with, but “there’s that little bit of edge”, a former colleague says.
“It’s not something that spills into arrogance, but he knows he’s good. If he needs to be Nice Guy Eddie, he’ll be Nice Guy Eddie. If he needs to rip someone’s head off, he’ll do it.”
Everybody works.
The Premier League is an elite environment and nobody who thrives there does so without putting the hard yards in. Everybody is looking for a marginal gain. Everybody wants to be the smartest or the fittest. Anybody can get into the office at six in the morning, just as anybody could attempt to run a marathon every day, not that it would help a footballer very much.
Work, as a general principle, is a given.
Howe had the good fortune to arrive at Newcastle amid the glow of the recent takeover. Existence before then had been a sufferance, with Mike Ashley wanting out as owner, Bruce admitting his task was to keep the team “ticking over”, and Ritchie acknowledging that “it felt like we weren’t trying to progress”. To put that another way, everything felt like hard work, so Howe had fertile ground to build on.
Newcastle suddenly had a purpose, which has always been the basis of Howe’s efforts. In his 15 months of unemployment after leaving Bournemouth by mutual consent in August 2020 following the end of that pandemic-extended season, he spent much of his time visiting other clubs and soaking up their methods and also sorting “my training sessions into digital format”. If that was not a quote to fire up the masses, another of his was a bit more like it. “I’m all-in,” he said on day one, and he has been.
Some at Bournemouth felt a sense of relief when Howe left. Not because he was a tyrant — quite the opposite — but because it was like a pressure valve being loosened. And then it quickly became apparent the manager’s intensity and relentlessness was what had driven standards.
“He’s on top of absolutely everything,” says a colleague, which sounds awfully like control-freakery, except that once you are trusted and accepted, Howe is happy to delegate responsibility. “‘There are no limits beyond the limits you put on yourself’, that’s his philosophy.”
Even in an exacting business, Howe takes things to extremes.
“He’s unbelievably driven,” says Staveley. “I think he knew how driven I was too, which helped because he knew we were pushing in the same direction. There’s no point doing it if you’re happy to be 10th. We pushed each other.”
“It all starts with his endeavour,” says Ritchie, and what it looks like is this: in at 6am, a quick circuit in the gym, breakfast, and then down to work in his office. As well as training and team meetings and presentations and individual meetings and meetings with different units of the team, Howe will review every single training session in the afternoon. “We need to fix that,” he will say.
Staff can go home at night — Howe will still be there when they leave — happy in the knowledge a schedule has been laid out for the following day, only to return in the morning to find it has all been torn up with Howe saying, “No, we need to do this now,” meaning different players or coaches will be required.
He will spend hours studying footage of Newcastle’s next opponents, searching for a weakness to exploit, and when it comes to targeting new players he sits through multiple full matches not just clips, looking at the wider context, good play and bad.
If he feels a session or way of working is not having an impact, he will constantly change. “He is absolutely meticulous,” a former colleague says. “If he feels the attention to detail is not there, it’s unacceptable to him.”
Intensity is what Howe wants from his players, but to get there requires stimulation. They have to be engaged and focused, so drills and sessions are all-action rather than stop-start, in order to make the team mentally as well as physically tough.
“You need to be switched on for everything because he only gives one chance,” Jamie Miley, brother of Lewis, who signed for fifth-tier neighbours Hartlepool United from Newcastle in January, says. “He tells you once and then you’re expected to carry it out.”
He is sparing in his praise and insiders describe knowing when he’s not happy because, without him uttering a word, “You can just feel it.”
Everything is practised and honed and practised some more. Tactics grow out of dynamic repetition, in an environment that rewards decision-making. Before training, players will read what the drills for that day are on big screens, with different exercises colour-coded to show how much will be in-possession, how much out of possession, what the purpose is.
“The players are almost brainwashed through osmosis,” says an associate of Howe’s, who points to the example of Miguel Almiron, Bruno Guimaraes and Kieran Trippier working formidably together on Newcastle’s right side in the 2022-23 season where they finished fourth in the Premier League. “Think of that axis. It’s been worked on to such an extent that they’ll be doing it at times when they don’t even know they’re doing it. Nothing is left to chance.”
“The idea is that we turn up on a Saturday how we train all week, with the high intensity he wants from us,” Dan Burn, the centre-half, says. “We’ve really bought into that. It breeds the mentality you want to win games at the top end of the league, to get into cup finals. He leads by example. We all see how professional he is and the amount of time he puts in.”
It is no wonder that some find this pace of work “draining”.
But it is also about the collective, the bond they share, the collaborative work they do and the rewarding feeling of seeing players develop and the team improve, although it rarely stretches to more than that because Howe has so little time to nurture friendships. Those who have worked alongside him describe him as being “on it, all the time” — to the point where they simply do not know how he sustains it.
Nobody ends up more drained than Howe, who carries Newcastle’s weight on his shoulders.
Someone who is close to him says: “The hours everyone works are ridiculous, and Eddie more than anyone. It’s relentless and he is relentless. Sometimes you just think, ‘I need a minute here, I need a breather’. It is all-consuming.”
Nobody at Newcastle would claim that all this effort has not been worth it.
It has brought them initial safety from relegation, then a top-four finish in the Premier League, a return to the Champions League after two decades away and now a second Carabao Cup final in three seasons. These are vivid illustrations of what Howe and those around him have already achieved.
Staveley, who will be at Wembley on Sunday, does not pause for even a beat when asked if appointing Howe was the best decision made during her time at Newcastle. “Oh, of course, yeah,” she says. “He is elite, without a doubt. More than elite. He is super-elite.”
In a region founded on heavy industry, Howe’s dedication to work has found a home.
He rarely allows himself to reflect, particularly on matchdays, but a confidante tells a story about the night of Newcastle’s 2-0 victory over Arsenal in the second leg of their Carabao Cup semi-final at St James’, the result that booked their place in the final. Before kick-off, Wor Flags, the fans’ group, held up a banner in the Gallowgate End, one of their starker efforts, which read: “Get into them.”
Newcastle’s fans had a clear message for their team going into the semi-final second leg against Arsenal (Stu Forster/Getty Images)
“Eddie loved that,” they say. “He was all over it. It actually relaxed him, because it just made him think we would be OK. Get into them: for him, it summed up Newcastle and its identity. We’re at our best when we’re like that, working and fighting for everything.”
Win or lose against Liverpool, nobody will have fought harder or worked harder than Howe. Win or lose, he will be watching the game back at the first opportunity, poring over the little details and demanding better, demanding more, of himself and everyone.
Additional reporting: Chris Waugh
(Top photo: Stu Forster/Getty Images)
