Claims of Newcastle United owners replacing Eddie Howe challenged

Back in February 2022, only three months after starting the Newcastle United job, there were media claims that Eddie Howe would be replaced in the summer (2022) by Jose Mourinho.

We got to late May 2022, the end of the season after NUFC had managed the third best form in the Premier League in the second half of the season, yet Rio Ferdinand claimed it was only a matter of time before Eddie Howe would be replaced by Unai Emery or some other ‘big name manager’.

Only in December 2022, a journalist ran a story claiming he ‘knew’ that the Newcastle United owners were already making plans to bring in a ‘big name manager’ in the future to replace Eddie Howe, with Jurgen Klopp mentioned as a supposed possibility down the line. At the time Newcastle were second in the Premier League.

Maybe the best (worst!!!) of all, was Stan Collymore coming out with this only days ago…

“I know Eddie Howe is doing an absolutely phenomenal job there but if the Magpies do qualify for the Champions League, I’m sure the owners will at least have the conversation about sacking him and bringing someone else in with pre-established European pedigree.

“I think it’d be incredibly naive of Newcastle United’s owners to not consider sacking Howe if they qualified for the Champions League.”

Well, one thing for sure.

If the Newcastle United owners did do such a thing, the media would have an absolute field day / pile on.

Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if Stan Collymore was the first one to then put out a very angry column in a newspaper, or wherever will have him these days, declaring how it was an absolute disgrace that after qualifying for the Champions League, the Newcastle United owners had sacked Eddie Howe!

So the reasoning is, that if Eddie Howe can take Newcastle United from what looked certain relegation to a Champions League place a year and a half later, the sensible thing would be to sack him?

So instead, the reasoning of Stan Collymore and others, is that the ‘not naive’ decision would be to replace Eddie Howe with a big name manager, somebody who already has some kind of track record in European competitions.

The way they go on, you would think that managing in the Premier League, the most competitive and difficult in the world, is somehow easy compared to playing generally weaker teams in European competitions. History has shown that the most difficult thing for English clubs in the Premier League era, when it comes to enjoying success in the Champions League, is actually qualifying for the CL in the first place, by getting into the PL top four. Look at Leicester and their one season of Champions League football, got to the last eight and very unlucky not to make the semi-finals.

The ‘experts’ make competing in the Champions League sound like a near impossibility unless you have been there before.  You would think that any manager new to the Champions League, had to learn perfect Arabic or Mandarin in a few weeks, or else ve a certain failure.

There is another comparison that is very relevant.

By the age of 38, Eddie Howe had taken Bournemouth from the very verge of dropping into non-league, all the way through the divisions, right up to promotion in 2015 to the Premier League.

So following the logic of Stan Collymore and others, the ‘not naive’ thing would have been to then reward Eddie Howe with the sack and then replace him with some out of work manager who had formerly worked in the Premier League, such as Steve Bruce, Sam Allardyce, Alan Pardew, Steve McClaren, John Carver…

That is also the relevant thing with the claims of replacing Eddie Howe if Newcastle qualified for the Champions League. Going for somebody with past experience, even though almost certainly they are out of work after having…failed.

Nobody would ever make the breakthrough, if the job specification stated ‘Only those with relevant Champions League experience need apply…’

I think what it comes down to is that the ‘experts’ are claiming either the previous experience needed line, or somebody who is a ‘big name’, as in, who was very successful as a player. The number of top successful managers now, who were also top successful players previously, is minimal.

Just to round this up, I would give you two examples who would no doubt be suggested by the likes of Stan Collymore and others as credible replacements for Eddie Howe, if he made the mistake of taking Newcastle United into Champions League qualification.

Thomas Tuchel and Mauricio Pochettino.

They are two (out of work) big name managers who have Champions League experience.

The thing is though, you aren’t born a big name manager with Champions League experience.

Everybody starts from somewhere that isn’t as manager of a big club that is already in the Champions League. That is with the exception of a very very small number of big name players who have been catapulted straight into these jobs.

For 14 years Thomas Tuchel managed the youth team at Stuttgart, then reserves at Augsburg, then first team manager at Mainz. That then at last followed by a couple of years at Borussia Dortmund, a couple at PSG, then less than two years at Chelsea where he actually won the Champions League, only to be sacked little more than a year later. Ironically, the new Chelsea owners going in exactly the opposite direction to Stan Collymore and the other ‘experts’, sacking a CL winner to bring in Graham Potter.

With Mauricio Pochettino, he did three years with Espanyol and then a year at Southampton where he finished eighth in the PL, on the strength of that Tottenham took him on and he took a team who had finished sixth in 2013/14, to fifth the following year and then top four the next four seasons and a Champions League final, before he headed to PSG, replacing Thomas Tuchel!

If you look at Eddie Howe and his achievements before getting the Newcastle United job, I think you can safely say his track record more than matches what either Tuchel or Pochettino did before they started managing in the Champions League.

To take such a small club as Bournemouth all the way through the divisions by the age of 38, then for them to survive season after season in the top tier, before in their fifth PL season very unlucky to go down.

Eddie Howe has done an unbelievable job at Newcastle United and this is just the start.