Eddie Howe isn't celebrating Paul Mitchell's exit. Uncertainty is a team-killer

New York Times

29-05-2025

'My job is to get us in five years' time to our ambition,' Paul Mitchell said, not long after his appointment as Newcastle United's sporting director. 'We have to be smarter, more intelligent.' By the time he leaves his post, at the end of June, Mitchell will have lasted barely one of those years.
In June 2022, when Dan Ashworth began work as Newcastle's sporting director after four months of gardening leave at Brighton & Hove Albion, he spoke about 'helping the club to grow and achieve long-term success'. Twenty months later, he was again tending his beautiful roses and waiting to join Manchester United.
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For Newcastle and sporting directors, long-term is very much the wrong term.
Mitchell's role was '90 per cent recruitment', according to Darren Eales, the chief executive, which by the very blunt metric of actually buying first-team players, makes his tenure 100 per cent unsuccessful, so far at least — Mitchell has another month to shift that dial and the club are pushing to get transfers done.
Ashworth, said Mehrdad Ghodoussi — who, along with Amanda Staveley, his wife, initially ran Newcastle post-takeover and were minority owners — would be a 'key hire, the person that drives the football operation, who creates the structure. It's like building a house: if you don't have the right foundations, it will fall down.' To continue that analogy, Ashworth left with the roof not yet fitted and the cement still wet.
There is another theme here, too. Over the space of 16 months, Mitchell, Ashworth, Ghodoussi and Staveley will all have departed and so, too, will Eales, who arrived on Tyneside two months after Ashworth and who announced last September that he had been diagnosed with a chronic form of blood cancer. They are all pivotal figures, responsible for running the club, buying players, setting budgets or setting the tone and much else besides.
On the pitch, Eddie Howe's team was a model of excellence and stability for the second-half of the season just ended, winning the club's first domestic trophy for 70 years and qualifying for the Champions League. Above him in the boardroom, it has been constant churn.
Does this churn matter? Given the Carabao Cup win, a pair of Wembley finals over two years, playing in Europe's leading club competition for two seasons out of three, and successive league finishes of fourth, seventh and fifth, arguably not at all. Who cares what the suits are doing when Howe has discovered alchemy?
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Yet this — categorically — would not be a theory Howe himself subscribes to and those who have portrayed Mitchell's rapid exit as some kind of victory have called it wrong. There was no celebrating. What Howe wants is new players as quickly as possible and his immediate concern was about the knock-on effects of losing the man whose role was supposed to be '90 per cent recruitment'.
Howe said as much on Sunday after Newcastle's place in the Champions League next season was cemented. 'Speed is key for us and I've reiterated that many times internally because we have to be dynamic,' he said. 'We have to be ready to complete things very, very quickly because good players don't hang around for long.'
Newcastle have not signed a first-team-ready player for three consecutive transfer windows. Last summer, they sold Elliot Anderson, who had been earmarked for a significant role, to Nottingham Forest to help balance the books. They also sold Yankuba Minteh, who his since made 32 Premier League appearances for Brighton as a right-winger, a position Howe has wanted to reinforce for years.
In January, they trimmed more fat they didn't really have, selling Miguel Almiron back to Atlanta United and allowing Lloyd Kelly to join Juventus, initially on loan but with an obligation to buy. In financial terms, those deals were necessary and represented decent business, but in football terms, which is what Howe cares about, it left his squad desperately shallow.
After all that, they now have headroom under the Premier League's profit and sustainability rules (PSR). They have scope for manoeuvre — and a good thing too, because the squad needs a significant refresh. Howe wants a goalkeeper, a right-winger, a centre-half and potentially a forward. Targets have been deliberated over and fixed upon.
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What he doesn't need is confusion or delay. In his leaving statement, Mitchell said 'the club is in a fantastic position to continue building', but the architect left with Ashworth's defection and now the contractors and engineers are going too. When it comes to the bigger-picture stuff, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), Newcastle's majority owners, are notoriously slow to move, and an interim structure needs to be capable of swift decisions. The club say it will be, but judgement can only be deferred.
Mitchell's departure, in tandem with Eales — and at least partially caused by it, given their long-standing relationship — means a second consecutive summer of upheaval for Newcastle and Howe who, at this stage, has no inkling of who he will be reporting to next season and who his immediate boss will be. This feels sub-optimal.
Football and football people crave certainty. Players want to know precisely what their roles are and to look around their dressing-room knowing team-mates feel the same. Managers want to know what to expect from their players and feel confident that tactical instructions will be carried out. From above, they want authority and backing. Uncertainty is a team-killer.
When Staveley and Ghodoussi left Newcastle last July, Howe lost two huge allies and advocates. The three of them had worked closely together in the early days post-takeover, forging a tight, intimate relationship and he was kept informed of everything, good or bad. They left a vacuum. Newcastle felt like less of a family and more corporate. When Mitchell arrived, Howe was given scant notice.
If that was bruising, then Mitchell's forthright, brusque personality and desire to make his own mark at Newcastle did not help the healing process. 'It was the wrong attitude to come in with,' an associate of Howe said, speaking on condition of anonymity. 'If the club was really at a low point then you could understand that idea of changing everything. It didn't need that. It just needed a bit of support.'
After the PSR shambles, when Newcastle held negotiations with Liverpool over selling Anthony Gordon, Chelsea enquired about Alexander Isak, and after Mitchell led a long, fruitless pursuit of Crystal Palace's Marc Guehi, Newcastle's dressing-room was rife with uncertainty. Every player knew they had a price. With no quality additions, they were less convinced about Newcastle's ambitions. Howe felt less certain in his relationships. He was less clear about what the club's vision was, so how could he persuade his players?
In a sport of marginal gains, Newcastle began the season a few percentage points off. They were inconsistent, either nabbing results while not playing well or playing better but proving incapable of seeing games out. With no reinforcements and little support network, it was left to Howe and his backroom team to shake players out of it. It meant months of introspection and effort.
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'No one fully understands apart from Eddie and his staff just how difficult this season has been,' the associate said. 'Things could have gone very differently.' This was the byproduct of uncertainty.
In the meantime, Howe and Mitchell muddled along. They were not stags butting heads. The early tension had first been around personality and then transfers and with Newcastle unable or unwilling to buy anybody, transfers were largely irrelevant. They were never going to be close mates, but Howe put his head down and got on with it.
Perhaps that tension would have flared up again this summer. Perhaps Mitchell's expertise and experience would have come to the fore and everyone would have been delighted. Perhaps his legacy will turn out to be the 'fantastic position', he spoke about and Newcastle will get their deals done, which is the minimum Howe deserves after a truly transformational season.
Howe has delivered an elite performance. Newcastle's team operated at an elite level for six months, showing what they are capable of. Their marketing and commercial departments are getting there after long years of shrivelled ambition, but in terms of infrastructure and facilities they are not yet an elite club.
'That's what we want to be,' Howe said when The Athletic put these points to him last weekend. 'That's what we're desperate to continue to be. But if I answer that with a definitive yes, I'm not sure it would be wise. I'll let you judge. But we crave that, we want that. Now my summer will be focused purely on trying to make us stronger and better for every challenge we're going to face.'
But now he will also have to focus on forging new partnerships, with Eales' replacement and Mitchell's, whatever their job descriptions are and whatever the new structure is. Once again, there will be different people who are tasked with running Newcastle or who are instrumental in shaping what Newcastle should be, either as a squad or as a club.
To a certain extent, Howe knew what he would be getting with Mitchell: a headache. Now he doesn't know again. In part, this is to do with circumstances. In an ideal world, a CEO would appoint the sporting director who would seek out the best fit as manager, but at Newcastle they did it the other way around. Equally, nobody could have predicted Eales' illness and, after this extraordinary and rewarding season, he must now belatedly take care of himself and his family.
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To return to the start, there will be no winner from Mitchell's departure if, come August, Howe looks around his dressing room and again sees uncertainty flicker in his players' eyes. And to borrow again from Ghodoussi's analogy, if building a club is really like building a house, do Newcastle yet have the 'right foundations'? Or are they once more being knocked down in order to start over?
One thing is certain: their master craftsman cannot be expected to keep picking up the pieces.