Electric is how Eddie Howe describes the atmosphere he expects at St James’ Park tonight. First home game of the season, Bank Holiday Monday, under the floodlights and Newcastle United will have the pent-up emotions of a city behind them: their frustration unleashed not upon Alexander Isak this time, but Liverpool.
All summer long a sense of indignation has brewed and bubbled on Tyneside. This could be the night it boils over. Isak’s actions — spurning Newcastle and their supporters’ adoration, turning his back on his manager and team-mates as he agitates for a transfer — have caused anger. Liverpool, whom Isak is set on joining, will feel the brunt of that resentment.
It promises to be box-office stuff for broadcasters in a Premier League where, on the pitch at least, modern football can be a little too convivial for some tastes. With Isak insisting he will not play for Newcastle again, with Liverpool’s interest very much still alive, the prospect of these two clubs trading blows on the pitch, a week before the transfer window closes, is tantalising.
What the television cameras are unlikely to capture is what happens behind the scenes. They will be there on the touchline when Newcastle manager Howe greets his opposite number Arne Slot, but they will not be in the boardroom when the Liverpool delegation arrives and the atmosphere turns cold. There remains the chance of a deal for Isak in the next seven days if Liverpool agree to meet the £150million ($202.9m) valuation and Newcastle can sign at least one forward as a replacement, but the mood between the two clubs at executive level is tense in the extreme.
Caught in the middle is Howe, not just because he has to inspire Newcastle to use all the energy around the game correctly — “harness that, use it, but not be reckless with it”, he said at Friday’s pre-match news conference — but because Liverpool’s pursuit of Isak, which has so unsettled his club, has been driven by two men he has long counted as friends, dating back more than 20 years to his time as a player at Portsmouth in the early 2000s.
Howe has had much to ponder this summer (Stu Forster/Getty Images)
Liverpool’s sporting director, Richard Hughes, was a team-mate of Howe’s at Portsmouth and later played under him at Bournemouth before joining the club’s recruitment team and rising to the role of sporting director.
The odd high-profile failure, such as an ill-fated deal to sign winger Jordon Ibe from Liverpool, brought external criticism — much of it directed at Howe — but Bournemouth’s recruitment earned far more respect within the game, with Dominic Solanke, Nathan Ake, Aaron Ramsdale, Tyrone Mings and Arnaut Danjuma among those acquired by Hughes and then sold on for handsome profits, a process that has continued with this summer’s sales of Illia Zabarnyi to Paris Saint-Germain and Milos Kerkez to Liverpool.
Howe and Hughes were more than just colleagues. At Bournemouth, and in the years since Howe’s departure in 2020, they have remained, in the words of one former colleague, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation, “incredibly tight”.
Rather than the friction that exists in so many relationships between coaches and sporting directors — as was the case, to varying degrees, between Howe and Dan Ashworth and Paul Mitchell at Newcastle — the Howe-Hughes dynamic was defined by total trust and a shared vision.
Michael Edwards, the chief executive of football for Liverpool’s owner Fenway Sports Group, was at Portsmouth in the 2000s, where his work as an analyst attracted more interest from Howe and Hughes than from some of the coaching staff. A bond developed at Portsmouth between the trio and others such as David Woodfine, another analyst, and centre-forward Mark Burchill, who are now at Liverpool as, respectively, assistant sporting director and head of technical scouting.
That has added to the intrigue surrounding Liverpool’s pursuit of Isak. Some have speculated whether a deal might be facilitated by the longstanding relationship between Howe and Liverpool’s executive team. But if any such thoughts existed earlier in the summer, they have long since faded as the weeks have passed and the acrimony between the two clubs has grown.
Howe was asked on Friday whether Isak’s future had become “personal” for him, given his relationships with some of those in authority at Liverpool. “It’s not personal. It’s professional,” he said. “It’s about Alex the player and us as a football team and our football club. What other football clubs do is irrelevant to me.”
He was asked what he thought of the nature of Liverpool’s pursuit, whether he felt they had unsettled Isak or in any way been complicit in his actions. “I don’t think that’s for me to comment on,” he said. “I can only comment on our conduct and how we conduct ourselves as a football club. I’ve got nothing to say about any other club.”
Hughes is a former team-mate of Howe’s from their playing days (Catherine Ivill – AMA/Getty Images)
Some of those close to Howe suggest he has felt more aggrieved than he has been willing to let on publicly. One source, again speaking on the condition of anonymity, says this summer’s events have caused a “a certain degree of animosity” and a loss of trust. There is a view within St James’ Park that Howe has been “disrespected”.
The sense of grievance at Newcastle relates not just to the Isak saga but to Liverpool’s signing of Hugo Ekitike from Eintracht Frankfurt last month and even to the Merseyside club’s interest in Anthony Gordon last summer. If the Gordon story was short-lived, some of the ill feelings have grown as the months have passed.
Newcastle thought they were in pole position to sign Ekitike in mid-July — perhaps, they claimed otherwise at the time, with the intention of him replacing Isak rather than playing alongside him — only for Liverpool to beat them to his signature. That was a blow from which Newcastle, having been beaten to deals to sign Liam Delap, Joao Pedro and Bryan Mbeumo (and later beaten by Manchester United to a deal for Benjamin Sesko), have not recovered in the transfer market when it comes to signing a striker.
At Liverpool, there is a sense of confusion at this narrative and at subsequent suggestions from the Newcastle end that, by signing Ekitike, they had scuppered their chances of getting Isak. Ekitike was established as a Liverpool target and, in a summer in which they have sold Luis Diaz and Darwin Nunez as well as lost Diogo Jota in tragic circumstances, it was never a question of simply targeting one new player for their forward line. It was not, as some have suggested, a power play or a misguided attempt to bully Newcastle into selling Isak.
There is bemusement at Liverpool at the idea that they have acted improperly by not following up with a second bid since an opening £110million bid was rejected more than three weeks ago. Newcastle referred in a statement last week to the “conditions for a sale” not having been met. Liverpool interpreted that as a reference to Newcastle’s need to sign a replacement rather than simply matching Isak’s asking price.
One of the difficulties for Newcastle is that all of this has came at a time when, despite having won the Carabao Cup last season and qualified for the Champions League, they are vulnerable: with their chief executive Darren Eales serving his notice while attending to health issues and Mitchell having departed by mutual consent after just one season as sporting director.
As The Athletic discussed here, in a piece reflecting on the circumstances that had brought about Isak’s disillusionment, Newcastle’s progress on the pitch, under Howe’s management, has far outstripped the pace of improvement off the pitch since a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund bought the club in late 2021.
Ekitike was a target for Newcastle (Liverpool FC/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
New appointments are in the pipeline, with Ross Wilson expected to arrive from Nottingham Forest as sporting director, but in the meantime Newcastle are at risk — and Liverpool have been unapologetic in trying to exploit that.
The contrast with Liverpool’s setup — Edwards, Hughes, Woodfine and others — is stark, as is the difference such a structure can make when it comes to vision and executing a strategy. As much as Howe might feel bruised by the way his old friends have tried to capitalise on issues at Newcastle, he might privately wish he had people like Edwards and Hughes in his corner there rather than working for a rival.
More recently, when Edwards and Hughes teamed up at Liverpool last year, their most urgent task was to find a successor for outgoing manager Jurgen Klopp. Howe’s name was briefly discussed early on and it was only on the basis of other factors — such as the strength of their previous association, which might have been held against him, and the difficulty of trying to extricate from Newcastle — that he was discounted from the process that ended with the appointment of Slot.
But the battle lines in the Isak saga have Howe in direct opposition to his old friends. He is on one side along with Jason Tindall, Stephen Purches, Simon Weatherstone and Dan Hodges, who were among his backroom team at Bournemouth, as well as his nephew Andy Howe, who has worked in the recruitment team at both clubs; on the other side are Edwards, Hughes, Woodfine and Burchill, who, despite their shared history with Howe, are not intent on making his life any easier.
Howe is still talking about the possibility of holding on to Isak and reintegrating him into the Newcastle squad. He said last week the saga would “come to an end pretty quickly”. He has said this summer that the situation with Isak is not irretrievable because “the word ‘irretrievable’ is not really in my dictionary”.
It will be fascinating to see where those old friendships lie when the transfer window closes and when, one way or another, the dust settles on the Isak saga. Right now, friendship is the last thing on anyone’s mind.
(Design: Eamonn Dalton; Getty Images)
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