Newcastle Confirm Matthias Jaissle as New Head Coach in £9.5m Deal With Al Ahli

Newcastle United will unveil Matthias Jaissle as their new head coach on Saturday, closing out a search that began the moment Eddie Howe’s five-year reign came to an end this week. Sky Sports News can reveal the club have agreed to pay £9.5m (€11m) in compensation to Saudi side Al Ahli for the 38-year-old German, who will sign a four-year contract at St James’ Park.

The timing was no accident. Newcastle held back their official confirmation of Howe’s exit on Friday, a day after Sky Sports News first revealed he was leaving, specifically so the club could get the Jaissle deal agreed first. The plan now is for Jaissle to meet his new squad in Spain on Saturday, where Newcastle are based at a training camp in La Manga. His first game in charge comes next Saturday, a pre-season friendly against Valencia at the Mestalla.

For a man about to take over a Premier League club, Jaissle arrives with a surprisingly small profile. His only two head coaching jobs to date have come in Austria and Saudi Arabia. In both, he won.

A Career Built Inside the Red Bull System

Jaissle played as a midfielder for Hoffenheim before an early move into coaching took him to Denmark and then into an academy role at Red Bull Salzburg, the club that shaped his footballing education. His first senior head coaching job came at FC Liefering, Salzburg’s feeder side, before he was handed the top job at Red Bull Salzburg itself in the summer of 2021.

He made the most of it. Jaissle won a domestic double in his first season in charge and retained the Austrian Bundesliga title in his second, working with players who would go on to become full internationals, including Karim Adeyemi and Benjamin Sesko. He also took Salzburg into the Champions League, testing his ideas against some of the biggest clubs in Europe before he had turned 36.

In 2023 Jaissle left for Al Ahli in the Saudi Pro League, where he has spent the past three seasons. Last year he won the Saudi Super Cup, played in Hong Kong, and added two straight AFC Champions League titles to his collection along the way.

An Unsettled Squad Waiting for Direction

Jaissle inherits more than a new group of players adjusting to a foreign coach. Arsenal have moved closer to agreeing a deal for Newcastle captain Bruno Guimaraes worth in the region of £80m including add-ons, according to The Times, a sale that would strip Jaissle of his senior leader before he has taken a single training session at St James’ Park. At the same time, Newcastle are pressing ahead with a move for Sporting Braga goalkeeper Lukas Hornicek, according to the Daily Mail, as the club tries to add options between the posts before the Premier League season begins.

None of that will be resolved by the time Jaissle takes his seat in the away dugout at the Mestalla. He arrives at a club still negotiating over its captain and still shopping for a goalkeeper, tasked with turning a squad in flux into something ready for a Premier League season that starts in three weeks.

Losing Guimaraes would be the bigger blow of the two. The Brazilian has worn the armband through Howe’s final seasons and sits at the centre of everything Newcastle try to build from midfield. A club replacing its head coach and its captain inside the same transfer window is not the settled situation any incoming manager wants, and Jaissle will have almost no say in how that particular saga plays out before a ball is kicked under him.

What Jaissle Actually Believes In

Sky Sports interviewed Jaissle in 2023 as part of its Future of Football series, and his answers then offer the clearest guide to what Newcastle are getting. He is a product of the Red Bull coaching school, built around high pressing and direct forward play, but he pushed back on the idea that his football is fixed to one shape.

“You have to develop your game, you have to always make progress,” he said.

Jaissle is open about borrowing ideas from other coaches without copying them outright. “They always have some principles you can see which make sense to include in your philosophy,” he said. “It’s not about copying, exactly, but seeing interesting things, creating your thoughts about it, and then, if it fits, you can bring it into your way of playing.”

That willingness to adapt shows up in how his teams have set up. At Salzburg he favoured a narrow 4-4-2 with wingers cutting inside, the shape Ralf Rangnick made the house style across the Red Bull network of clubs, sending both full backs high and using the front two to stretch defences vertically. At Al Ahli in Saudi Arabia, he shifted toward a 4-2-3-1 that built play through a back three or a back two with five in the next line, patterns that are now common across the Premier League as clubs look for extra numbers in midfield when they have the ball without giving up defensive cover.

The switch between systems says something about how Jaissle works. Rather than importing one rigid method into a new country and hoping the players fit it, he changed his approach at Al Ahli to suit the squad Saudi football gave him, then reverted to explaining that change in terms of principles rather than diagrams. Newcastle’s players, many of whom spent last season working under Howe’s own possession-based approach, will be watching closely to see which version of Jaissle turns up at St James’ Park.

Jaissle insists the formation itself is close to beside the point. “It is not about formations that much,” he said. “It is more how you want to play, how you want to attack, how you want to defend. If you understand that and the players understand that, tactically you are much more flexible and the formation is not that important.”

He also expects his players to carry more of the tactical load than earlier generations did. “These days the players are more and more involved in tactical things,” he said. “Every coach and every club works with principles, so every player has to know a lot of things, tactically, in each phase of the game. I think that’s a big change.”

A Squad Meeting Him Halfway

Jaissle will not get a normal introduction to his new club. Rather than a first day at Newcastle’s training base on Tyneside, he will meet his players in Spain, walking into a group already partway through pre-season conditioning at La Manga. A week later, at the Mestalla, he takes charge of his first match without a home crowd behind him and without much time to work with any new arrivals.

That fits the pattern of his career so far. Jaissle has built both of his previous jobs from a standing start, in leagues far removed from the scrutiny that comes with the Premier League, and left both with a league title on the shelf. Newcastle’s hierarchy will want that pattern to hold a third time, even with the futures of Guimaraes and other senior players still unresolved around him.

There is also the question of scale. Salzburg and Al Ahli are both clubs built to win their domestic leagues most seasons, with resources far ahead of most of their rivals. Newcastle occupy a different kind of pressure entirely, competing in the most watched league in the world against clubs spending far more than anything Jaissle has managed against before. The compensation fee and the four-year contract suggest Newcastle’s ownership sees him as a long-term appointment rather than a short-term fix, giving him room that many of his Premier League peers are never afforded after a difficult opening season.

Jaissle’s task now starts on a training pitch in Spain rather than on the grass he knows at St James’ Park. He will introduce himself to a group of players still absorbing Howe’s exit, some of whom could be gone from the club by the time the transfer window shuts, and try to build enough understanding in a week to take his new side through a friendly in Valencia.

For now, the only certainty is the date. Saturday brings the unveiling. Next Saturday, in Valencia, brings the first real test of whether Jaissle’s methods travel to English football the way they did in Austria and Saudi Arabia.

There is an obvious symmetry in how Jaissle’s biggest jobs have started. He walked into Red Bull Salzburg as a young coach with a point to prove and left with a double and a retained title. He walked into Al Ahli as an outsider taking charge in a league building its own reputation and left with back to back continental crowns. Newcastle is a bigger stage than either, with less patience attached to it, but the compensation fee alone shows how highly the club rates the same qualities that worked twice before.

WRITTEN BY

Jarrod

Jarrod Partridge is the Founder of Futbol Chronicle and an accredited journalist with over 30 years of experience following international football. A member of the AIPS International Sports Press Association, Jarrod has covered matches at stadiums around the world, bringing first-hand insight to every match report, player profile, and tactical analysis he writes.

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