How Eddie Howe found the formula to lead Newcastle back into the elite

Gary Neville pointed to the floor. “I really feel Newcastle could go like that,” said the Sky Sports pundit, explaining that fifth place was, almost certainly, the very best Eddie Howe’s side could hope for this season.

It was early March and, if Neville’s comments irritated St James’ Park season-ticket holders, they could at least reflect that he had modified his stance since 2015. “Does any top player now want to go and live in Newcastle?” queried the former Manchester United and England right-back in a newspaper column speculating that England’s north-east was “being eased off football’s map” and heading for “irrelevance”.

Neville had evidently bought into the received wisdom that London’s economic might dictated that, bar a couple of oases in Manchester and Merseyside, the game’s power base was drifting inexorably southwards.

If he might have been a little puzzled when, in January 2022, the Brazil midfielder Bruno Guimarães chose Newcastle over Arsenal and told journalists that “we’re going to be a big power in world football”, Neville could not have remotely imagined Howe’s team earning themselves a top-four Premier League place as early as May 2023.

No one expected the game-changing corrective delivered by the purchase of Newcastle in 2021 by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund to kick in quite so quickly. Mike Ashley, the previous unloved and largely disengaged owner, had spent more than a decade trying to sell the club, prompting regular choruses of “it’s too far north” from London-based analysts.

Saudi’s PIF does not make healthy profits from investing in assorted worldwide projects by subscribing to such assumptions. Tellingly, it knew all about 2007 and the decision of their neighbours in the United Arab