Learning from Simeone helped set Howe on the road towards Newcastle
The favourite to take charge at St James’ Park used his time since leaving Bournemouth to pick the game’s leading minds
It is not a perfect metric but the adage that you can best measure a manager’s worth by the state of a club at the beginning and end of their tenure remains as reliable as any.
And when Eddie Howe became Bournemouth manager in January 2009, they were 23rd in League Two, 10 points adrift of safety and fighting not just for their Football League survival but their very existence as a club.
When he left 11 years later, Bournemouth were exiting the Premier League following five straight seasons in the top flight, three promotions and easily the greatest era in the club’s history.
Yes, the fairy tale did not have the ending he wanted, but the bottom line is that Newcastle United would be getting a 43-year-old manager of vast, if often understated, substance.
His use of the 15 months since leaving Bournemouth has been instructive.
There have been no media interviews. No self-promotion. No getting his name linked with any enticing vacancy.
Howe has instead utilised his first sustained break from playing or managing for a combination of family time and the chance to prepare for his managerial return. This has meant looking back as well as forward. And so Howe has spent a sizeable part of the past year reflecting on what he did right and what he did wrong at Bournemouth, particularly in that painful final season. That has meant rewatching their matches and reassessing the training sessions, of which all were carefully logged, to better understand how his players reacted to what he had been trying to achieve. Howe has his own football philosophy document and, in also watching plenty of football, he has been constantly updating his own attacking vision for the game.
He has taken time to visit other clubs and understand how they work, notably Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid. The Argentine coach has proved himself one of the masters of adaptation, taking on the big two in Spain with a distinctive style of play that has yielded great success, including two league titles. Howe also visited another Madrid club, Rayo Vallecano, who were promoted last season to La Liga. At Vallecano he has encountered a different kind of coach, albeit one whose journey is similar to his own. Andoni Iraola, 39, briefly a Spain international in his playing days, not only has got Vallecano promoted from the second tier but the club, who have spent more time out of the top flight over their history, are currently sixth in La Liga – vastly outperforming their budget. Two days were also spent at Liverpool, including a meeting with the architect of the club’s golden recruitment era, technical director Michael Edwards. Howe recognises that recruitment will be critical for Newcastle and he will also know that it was an area which faltered to some extent towards the end of his Bournemouth tenure.
At Liverpool he also met Alex Inglethorpe, the club’s academy director. He wanted to understand how the club have overhauled their structure over the past decade to a level that is allowing them to overcome the financial disadvantages and compete so consistently with Manchester City.
He has already spent long hours assessing the Newcastle players and there would be immediate familiar faces in Callum Wilson, Ryan Fraser and Matt Ritchie, three players whose careers he has already influenced hugely.
There would be risks, of course, on all sides. Howe’s only previous job outside of Dorset – just under two years at Burnley – was not the failure that is occasionally presented but certainly a time when he struggled to inspire the sort of improvement that Bournemouth fans had come to expect. The wider backdrop was also the most difficult personal period of his life following the death of his mother Anne.
He felt a need to return to Dorset in 2012 and the people he knew best. Yet the legacy he left at Burnley was strong. He signed Ben Mee, now club captain and one of the most important Burnley players of the Sean Dyche era. Also from Manchester City’s development teams, Howe signed Kieran Trippier, now an England regular and occasional captain. The combined cost of those two was around £600,000. Another future England international, Danny Ings, arrived from Bournemouth for just £1 million.
Back at Bournemouth he was able to shape the club almost completely in his own image. The staff around him, headed by his assistant Jason Tindall, and numerous other exteam-mates were hand-picked. Some will follow him to Newcastle.
Harry Redknapp would say that football fandom got progressively more laid-back as you travelled along the south coast between Portsmouth and Bournemouth via Southampton and there can be no doubt that Howe would be operating under a scrutiny at Newcastle that he has never previously known.
He is said to be excited by the prospect and would certainly attempt to deal with all the outside noise by simply focusing on improving the team. The experience of working previously with Maxim
Demin at Bournemouth, hardly a conventional owner, would also stand him in good stead.
The hope must be that Newcastle’s new Saudi Arabian owners, represented in England by Amanda Staveley, now give him the autonomy to shape the club in his image and the time for change to take hold.
Howe has often spoken about how his mother instilled in him a work ethic that, even by the obsessional standards of football managers, is all-consuming and that he thinks about her before every game.
He has an eclectic range of influences and can talk with as much passion about what he learnt in a dressing room with Tony Pulis and Sean O’driscoll at Bournemouth as time spent studying managers such as Brendan Rodgers and Arsene Wenger, or the legendary basketball coach John Wooden. Like Wooden, Howe is most fascinated by the process and the compound impact of relentlessly high-quality training and preparation.
“There’s a lot of worry in the world,” he once said. “The reality is that it’s all about the preparation. You hope then that the result takes care of itself in the knowledge that you have done everything in your power to produce the best performance.”