Eddie Howe Leaves Newcastle After Five Years That Ended a 70-Year Trophy Drought

Eddie Howe’s last words as Newcastle United head coach came after a 4-1 pre-season defeat to Championship side Bristol City on Wednesday night. By Thursday morning, he had left the club altogether.

The 48-year-old stepped down from his role with immediate effect, a decision reached following discussions with Newcastle’s hierarchy over the previous 48 hours. He had first raised the idea of leaving weeks earlier, and the call was entirely his own to make.

Newcastle’s Premier League opener at home to Liverpool falls on August 23. Howe’s exit lands roughly three and a half weeks out from that fixture, a timeline that has already forced the club to move fast on a replacement. For a manager who ended a 70-year wait for a trophy and took Newcastle back into Europe’s elite competition twice, the manner of the goodbye, a routine pre-season friendly against a Championship club, felt almost anticlimactic.

A Decision Howe Made Himself

The seeds of the decision were planted after Newcastle’s defeat to Fulham on the final day of last season, when Howe questioned whether the team needed fresh energy. Talks with the club followed two days later, and everyone left the room believing he would stay on. He told the club and reporters he was all in.

Howe then took a family holiday. He came back for pre-season and raised the same point again. Time away had given him space to think, and he had concluded he had taken Newcastle as far as he could.

The transfer business Newcastle conducted this summer was not the reason for his exit. Publicly, Howe backed the club’s recruitment. Privately, he understood the campaign ahead carried real risk, and he was exhausted after nearly five years in the job. Selling two first-team regulars and a difficult conversation with his own captain added to the strain rather than caused it.

Health played its part too. Howe was hospitalised with pneumonia in April 2025 and, by his own admission at the time, never fully returned to 100 percent afterwards. Reporters at a pre-season friendly against Gateshead noticed he looked weary. Multiple senior figures at the club asked him to reconsider, but he was upfront that his mind was made up.

Newcastle asked him to stay in place until a replacement was ready, and Howe agreed. For more than two weeks, the club carried on as normal in public while working behind the scenes to find his successor. The news of his exit did not come as a shock inside St James’ Park.

A Squad Rebuilt Around Him as He Departs

Newcastle’s summer business left Howe facing a squad in transition just as he was stepping away from it. Sandro Tonali left for Tottenham in a club-record £100m deal, and Anthony Gordon joined Barcelona for £70m, with the two sales banking a combined £170m. That followed last summer’s departure of Alexander Isak, sold to Liverpool for a British-record £125m.

In their place, Newcastle brought in younger, less proven talent: winger Bazoumana Toure, 20, arrived from Hoffenheim for £42m; midfielder Sean Steur, 18, joined from Ajax for £23m; and goalkeeper Ewen Jaouen, 20, signed from Reims for £18.5m. Howe said publicly he backed the strategy and that everyone at the club was aligned behind it.

Newcastle also missed out on a player they wanted. Johan Manzambi chose a move to Aston Villa instead, a blow both to the head coach and to a recruitment plan already under strain.

Guimaraes Left in Limbo

Captain Bruno Guimaraes has told Newcastle he would like to leave for Arsenal, who remain interested in signing him. Howe would not offer assurances over his future in his final appearance as boss, though he pointed out the player is not fully in control of the situation either.

The Guimaraes situation was only the latest example of a summer of outgoings. Howe had already sanctioned the sale of Alexander Isak to Liverpool for a British transfer record of £125m last year, and this summer saw Sandro Tonali and Anthony Gordon leave for a combined £170m. Jamie Carragher praised the job Howe had done at Newcastle but said on Sky Sports that the head coach had looked like he had run out of energy, a view that echoed private concerns at boardroom level about how thin the squad had become behind the headline arrivals.

Asked directly about Guimaraes on Wednesday night, Howe said: “Assurances – I don’t think you can push too hard for those. I think I’ve said many times you want players that are committed. Bruno’s always been committed here. His training performances, his game performances, have been outstanding. Every time he’s worn the shirt, he’s played with the fans by his side. I’d love to see that continue.”

He went further on why Newcastle want to keep their captain: “I think we want to keep all of our best players. They’re so valuable, and as I said numerous times, there aren’t many of them, and to get them and develop them is so difficult. So when you have them, you want to keep them. And Bruno’s very much in that category; he’s an outstanding player.”

On whether the transfer saga had turned into a distraction, Howe added: “Any distraction, if it’s not healthy, is unhealthy. So, yeah. But we’re not in control of that. And to some degree, I don’t think Bruno’s in control of that either. What will be, will be. We can’t control the forces that are at play here, we’ve just got to make sure that when Bruno comes back, we look after him and he trains well, which I’m sure he will do. And he makes a difference as he always has done.”

A Successor Already Lined Up

Newcastle had been working on Howe’s replacement quietly for weeks, and Matthias Jaissle is the man they have settled on. The 38-year-old German is currently in charge of Al Ahli in Saudi Arabia, a club owned, like Newcastle, by the Public Investment Fund. Jaissle guided Al Ahli to back-to-back AFC Champions League titles and won consecutive Austrian Bundesliga titles in an earlier spell at Red Bull Salzburg, a resume that persuaded Wilson he was the right man to continue Howe’s high energy approach. Talks are at an advanced stage, and the club hope to have him in place within days.

Jaissle previously spent two seasons at RB Salzburg, winning the league and reaching the Champions League knockout stages, before moving to Al Ahli in 2023. There he led the club to back-to-back AFC Champions League titles. He is regarded as an energetic, front-foot coach whose style is not far removed from Howe’s, which should ease the transition for the players he inherits.

Jaissle is expected to link up with the squad at their pre-season training camp in La Manga once his appointment is confirmed, giving him barely three weeks to prepare a rebuilt squad for the visit of Liverpool.

Sporting director Ross Wilson has a history of turning to coaches from the Red Bull coaching pipeline, having appointed Ralf Hasenhuttl at Southampton earlier in his career, and his recommendation is understood to be behind the move for Jaissle. Questions have been raised over whether the two clubs’ shared PIF ownership played a part in the decision, but those close to the process say the opposite is closer to the truth: Jaissle’s departure actually leaves Al Ahli, another PIF-owned club, without a manager of their own.

Howe’s Legacy at St James’ Park

Howe leaves as one of Newcastle’s most significant managers of the modern era. He delivered the League Cup in 2025, ending a 70-year wait for a major domestic trophy and sending an open-top bus through Newcastle in front of 300,000 supporters. He guided the club into the Champions League twice, including a 4-1 win over Paris Saint-Germain, and took Newcastle further in that competition last season than in any previous campaign.

The final full season told a different story. Newcastle finished 12th in the Premier League, losing 17 of their 38 matches, a record that sits uneasily alongside the cup runs and European nights. It helps explain why Howe, in his own quiet way, had already decided the job had become too much to carry alone. Former Arsenal and England striker Jay Bothroyd warned on Sky Sports that Newcastle could find themselves in a relegation battle next season without the head coach who had steadied the club through five years of growth, a blunt assessment of how much the squad still leans on the structure Howe built.

Even so, his final public words as head coach carried no trace of regret. “Every day I’m in charge of Newcastle is a great day,” he said the night before his exit. In the wake of Kevin Keegan’s death, supporters have started to speak of Howe in the same breath as the man who once told him, on taking the job, that he was accepting the best role in football. Howe leaves having lived up to that billing. The timing of his departure suggests the job finally caught up with him too.