Newcastle’s solid start can’t mask Eddie Howe’s uneasy truce with hierarchy | Newcastle United

Eddie and Paul are at war. Eddie might be leaving for England. But wait, Paul is about to leave. No, never mind, it looks like they’ve called a truce and it’ll be all laughs at Wolves on Sunday.

Things have been nothing if not confusing at Newcastle of late, but the latest turn of events, a rapprochement between manager Eddie Howe and sporting director Paul Mitchell, seems genuine. At the moment, everyone is on their best behavior and trying to figure out the best way to sign Marc Guéhi from Crystal Palace in January.

Mitchell’s failure to sign the England centre-back became a thorn in his side, doubling his first transfer window at St James’ Park. As Palace chairman Steve Parish played harder and harder, Mitchell’s camp snapped that Howe’s intransigence dictated that other viable targets were being overlooked, but the manager’s entourage suggested the opposite.

When the transfer window closed, Newcastle’s only outfield signings were defender Lloyd Kelly, a free agent from Bournemouth, and William Osula, a raw “project” forward bought from Sheffield United for £10m. Howe ended up with five goalkeepers, but Greek Odysseas Vlachodimos has yet to feature in a matchday squad and would appear an unwanted signing from Nottingham Forest in late June.

Mitchell was not there when Newcastle’s board scrambled to raise the £60m needed to meet profitability and sustainability rules and avoid potential points deductions. Vlachodimos proved to be the counterpart in the £30m deal that brought Elliot Anderson to Forest.

On the heels of a tough June, Newcastle’s former co-owners Amanda Staveley and her husband, Mehrdad Ghodoussi, abruptly departed. Suggestions that Darren Eales, the chief executive, had informed the majority of the Saudi owners that there were too many decision-makers on Tyneside have not been denied, but whatever the truth, Howe lost two key allies.

Given that the manager had been informed of Mitchell’s appointment less than 48 hours before his appointment and Eales had indicated that Howe should concentrate on coaching ‘on the grass’, Gareth Southgate’s resignation as England manager seemed timely.

Howe likes to limit his interaction with the media to formally staged press conferences and unlike several Newcastle predecessors, most notably Rafael Benítez, who regularly warned journalists that “all football is a lie”, he never gives off-the-record briefings.

Yet in July, reporters from the North East were invited to the training camp in southern Germany, where the manager expressed deep concern about the new ‘relationships’ and the prospect of Mitchell and Newcastle’s new performance director and injury prevention specialist, James Bunce, encroaching on his extensive autonomy.

It made for some explosive headlines, but Howe indicated he would prefer to stay on Tyneside, despite keeping his options open by keeping open the possibility of a bid from the Football Association.

Given that the 46-year-old is a fiercely private individual who doesn’t give trust lightly, he probably knows that he might struggle with some of the more public demands of the English job. Moreover, despite failing to bring in a high-calibre centre-back and right winger this summer, the backbone of Newcastle’s first XI remains very strong. Most Premier League managers can only dream of a first-choice midfield of Sandro Tonali, Bruno Guimarães and Joelinton complemented by Alexander Isak at centre-forward.

Nevertheless, just as Lee Carsley is on a trial period to assess whether he should have the interim aspect of his England managerial title removed, Howe was clearly testing his relationships with Mitchell and Bunce. What the Saudis made of his outburst is unknown, but given that every decision at Newcastle has to be approved in Riyadh, it is clear that they were not prepared to pay Guehi £70m to appease the manager.

Fast forward to early September and Newcastle’s failure to spend big in the summer almost certainly led to Mitchell’s call for a partially off-record 90-minute press conference. Credit to him for stepping out of the shadows and dealing with the media in a way that was commonplace in his previous job at Monaco, but this is rare in the opaque world of English football.

Perhaps Mitchell had been ordered to speak out by Newcastle chairman Yasir al-Rumayyan and the rest of the Saudi delegation who attended the perhaps fortunate 2-1 home win over Tottenham.

Rumayyan and co resembled Ofsted inspectors called in to conduct an urgent check on school discipline, but Mitchell’s desire for openness saw the sports director contradict himself during an extraordinary afternoon in the windowless confines of Sir Bobby Robson’s suite at St James’ Park.

At one point, his suggestion that he was “not worried” about the FA trying to sign Howe made it seem as if he was trying to get rid of a perhaps demanding manager, but Mitchell famously did not mean it that way. Much of his conversation revolved around a clear determination to build a relationship with a manager with whom he was “over-communicating” in hours of evening phone conversations, as the pair attempted to forge a rapport despite inevitable creative tensions.

Less positive was Mitchell’s claim that it was still ‘early days’ between them, which hardly suggested a natural connection, let alone positive chemistry. Meanwhile, Howe’s earlier insistence that he was no longer fully aware of transfer activity seemed downright baffling.

Mitchell is said to have been unwilling to make an implicit criticism of his predecessor, Dan Ashworth, when he suggested that Newcastle had overpaid for players since taking over and that they needed to get better at selling experienced professionals while widening their recruitment net.

Considering that Ashworth bought Yankuba Minteh for £6m last summer and the winger’s value more than quintupled when he was sold to Brighton for £33m in June, which seems harsh. Staveley and co should certainly be commended for securing the signatures of Guimarães and Sven Botman for around £35m apiece.

Howe, however, may have been more concerned about the deconstruction of a recruitment department in which his cousin Andy Howe plays a key role. And that’s without even mentioning Bunce’s oversight of training sessions, which perhaps highlighted a slight philosophical clash in the way he and Mitchell envisage playing the team as they try to avoid the injuries that derailed last season’s ambitions of European qualification.

Newcastle go to Wolves with seven points from three games but have completed the fewest passes and have the worst accuracy in the Premier League.

A manager who enjoyed considerable autonomy in his previous job at Bournemouth will no doubt have been irritated when Mitchell said his head coach was smart enough to “evolve”, but for now the truce holds and Howe is expected to preach unity at his press conference on Friday.

Despite Carsley’s strong start in the England manager’s tracksuit, the English Football Association’s executives will undoubtedly be waiting to see what happens.