Eddie Howe leaves Newcastle by choice, with Jaissle lined up to replace him
Eddie Howe told Newcastle on Thursday that he wants a break from coaching, ending a five-year spell that delivered the club’s first domestic trophy since 1955. Al Ahli’s Matthias Jaissle is set to take over.
Jul 30, 2026
Eddie Howe has left Newcastle United, and the part that will take longest to sink in on Tyneside is that nobody pushed him. Howe told the club on Thursday he was going, with three and a half weeks left before the Premier League season opens at St James’ Park. Sky Sports News reported that the decision was entirely his and that the hierarchy spent 48 hours trying to talk him out of it.
He wants a break from coaching. After nearly five years in a job that took Newcastle from the bottom three to a Wembley trophy and back down to mid-table, that is not a difficult thing to understand.
A 4-1 at Ashton Gate, and a squad that keeps shrinking
The last match Howe took charge of was a pre-season friendly at Bristol City on Wednesday, which Newcastle lost 4-1. Sam Greenwood’s free-kick put the Championship side ahead, Lorent Tolaj and Max Bird added to it, Harvey Barnes pulled one back late and Sven Botman turned the fourth into his own net. Pre-season results are worth very little in isolation. This one looked like a team that had lost its shape and several of its best players in the same window.
Sandro Tonali went to Tottenham for £100 million. Anthony Gordon went to Barcelona for £69.3 million. Bruno Guimaraes, the captain, has been pushing for a move to Arsenal, and Howe was left doing press conferences about a player he clearly wanted to keep and had no power to keep. Newcastle have spent again this summer, but a rebuild in the middle of a window is a hard thing to sell to a manager who has already done one rebuild at the same club.
What he actually did there
Howe took the job in November 2021 with Newcastle in the relegation places and a takeover barely a month old. He leaves with 231 games behind him: 116 wins, 43 draws, 72 defeats, a win rate right around half.
The headline is Wembley in March 2025, when Dan Burn’s header and an Alexander Isak finish beat Liverpool 2-1 and ended a wait for a domestic trophy that went back to 1955. Seventy years. He also got Newcastle into the Champions League twice, which for a club relegated to the Championship twice in the preceding 15 years was not a small thing.
Then came last season: 12th, 14 wins from 38, 17 defeats. Howe stayed through it when plenty of managers with his CV would have gone looking for something easier. He has chosen the summer instead.
Jaissle, and the shortest possible path to a replacement
Newcastle already know who they want. Matthias Jaissle, currently at Al Ahli, has an agreement in principle to take over, and the reason it has moved this quickly is not hard to spot: Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund owns a controlling stake in Newcastle and runs Al Ahli too. The 38-year-old German won back-to-back Austrian titles and a cup at Red Bull Salzburg before moving to Saudi Arabia in 2023, and he has won the AFC Champions League in each of the last two seasons.
He would arrive with a strong record, a pressing style Newcastle’s recruitment has been built around, and roughly three weeks to prepare a reshaped squad for Liverpool at home on 23 August. Kieran McKenna and Antonio Conte have also been mentioned. Whoever takes it inherits a job that Howe made considerably harder by making it look, for a while, easy.