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Jaissle

Blood Before Badge: The Case for Jacob Murphy
Nine years old, wedged between his father and his twin brother under the St James’ Park floodlights, Jacob Murphy watched Alan Shearer and Gary Speed put Newcastle two goals up on PSV Eindhoven in a UEFA Cup night in April 2004. He didn’t grow up round the corner. He was born in Wembley, in the shadow of a stadium he wouldn’t play at for Newcastle for another twenty-one years. But his mother is from Birtley, his father from Ashington, and the rest of the family scattered across Gateshead — a Geordie bloodline exported to London that never once considered following anyone else. Shearer, to the boy in the crowd that night, was simply “a God.” Laurent Robert, a left winger with a wand of a left foot, was one he “loved to watch.”
That’s the inheritance Jacob Murphy carries onto the pitch every time he pulls on the number 23 shirt, and it’s worth remembering on the mornings after a bad one — because there have been a few of those lately, and the discourse has been short on patience and shorter on memory.
On song, he offers very good crosses
The long way home
Murphy and his twin, Josh, joined Norwich City’s academy at eleven. What followed wasn’t a fast track. Six different loan spells scattered him across the lower leagues — Swindon, Southend, Blackpool, Scunthorpe, Colchester, Coventry — the unglamorous apprenticeship of a young pro finding his level the hard way, a long way from Carrow Road and further still from Tyneside. By the time Norwich made him a first-team regular in 2016/17, ten goals and a Championship promotion push had put him on Newcastle’s radar. Rafa Benítez wanted him. Murphy, by his own admission, wanted it so badly he told his club he was ready to walk if the move didn’t happen.
It did, for £12.5 million in July 2017, and what he said that day still reads as unmistakably sincere rather than the standard-issue platitude of a unveiling presser: “wearing the Newcastle badge on my chest — I couldn’t think of anything better.” Photographs of him as a boy in a Newcastle shirt went round the club’s social channels within hours. This was never going to be just another transfer for him.
We know when he is happy
It also wasn’t a smooth ride from there. Two further loans followed — West Brom, then Sheffield Wednesday — as Newcastle worked out what they had. Josh Murphy, reflecting on his brother’s career years later, didn’t dress it up: three years ago, he said, Jacob was “not really a fan favourite,” a fringe figure some had quietly written off. What changed wasn’t luck. It was, in Josh’s words, hard work, resilience, and refusing to stop turning up. By 2024/25, the winger written off a few seasons earlier was one of the first names on Eddie Howe’s team sheet, and comfortably the best form of his career: eight Premier League goals, twelve assists, a campaign as good as almost anyone’s outside the very top bracket of the division.
“Cone”-gate
It built to Wembley. On 16 March 2025, seventy years of hurt since Newcastle’s last domestic trophy, Murphy flicked on the knockdown that Alexander Isak finished for Newcastle’s second in a 2-1 win over Liverpool that finally ended it — Dan Burn’s opener, met from a Kieran Trippier corner, had come just before the break. The boy who’d watched Shearer under those floodlights had just played his part in the goal that sealed the club’s first domestic silverware in seventy years. Whatever else gets written about him this season, that afternoon happened, and it happened because of him.
He had a key role for the Cup
Why the money was turned down
This summer, Nottingham Forest came calling — first £10 million, then £15 million, both bids on a 31-year-old entering the final year of his contract. On paper, for a club navigating the Premier League’s financial rules as carefully as Newcastle are, that’s the kind of offer a lot of boards wave through without a second thought. Newcastle’s board said no. Twice.
Matthias Jaissle, explaining the decision, didn’t hedge: this was a “well-balanced squad,” one with players who still had “potential to do even better.” That’s not the language of a manager stuck with a player he can’t shift. It’s the language of a manager who looked at a rebuild stripped of Anthony Gordon, Bruno Guimarães and Sandro Tonali in a single summer, looked at a dressing room suddenly filled with faces in their early twenties, and decided the last thing that squad needed was to lose one of the few voices who actually remembers what winning at this club feels like. Murphy is the longest-serving player at Newcastle United. Nobody else in that dressing room has worn the shirt longer, carried the armband on the days he’s been asked to, or has a Wembley winner’s medal to show a nineteen-year-old teammate what the standard actually looks like. That’s not sentiment. That’s squad-building. Jaissle valued it enough to twice tell Forest that Murphy wasn’t walking out the door for their money, and the winger’s own response to the upheaval of this summer was not the sound of a man biding his time until the exit — he called the new manager’s methods “awesome” and talked about a philosophy of intensity that was “already ingrained in the Newcastle DNA.” That isn’t the language of somebody counting down the days.
One bad night at Elland Road doesn’t rewrite nine years
Then came Leeds. A heavy defeat, a poor collective performance, and Murphy — thrown in from the start in the Premier League for the first time this season — had an evening he’ll want to forget. Nobody’s pretending otherwise, least of all him; he was among the players who apologised to supporters afterwards. But turn that single, difficult hour on a night when the entire team was taken apart into some kind of verdict on where Jacob Murphy is as a footballer, and you’ve lost the plot entirely.
This is a player who has already answered the question of what he does when written off. He did it once, coming back from the margins to become one of the first names on the team sheet under Howe. The idea that one poor cameo in a stinker of a collective performance, on a night the whole side capitulated, somehow undoes that — or undoes nine years of service, a boyhood dream fulfilled, and a role in ending a seventy-year wait — doesn’t hold up to a moment’s scrutiny. Newcastle’s supporters have watched this player long enough to know the difference between a genuine decline and a bad night in a bad team performance. Leeds was the latter. Treating it as the former says more about the appetite for a quick verdict than it does about Jacob Murphy.
The longest serving player still in the squad
What he is now
He isn’t first-choice any more, and there’s no point pretending he is — Anthony Elanga has cemented himself as first choice on the right, and that’s simply squad management in a rebuilt attacking line, not some judgement on Murphy’s ability. But rationed minutes and a fringe role are not the same thing as being surplus to requirements. When he’s been given the platform this season — in the cups, in pre-season — he’s delivered performances that suggest the level hasn’t gone anywhere, even if the opportunities have narrowed. He remains one of the most experienced players in a Newcastle dressing room that has been rebuilt around players closer to twenty than thirty, precisely the kind of head a young squad needs in the room when things go wrong, as they did at Elland Road.
Go back to that nine-year-old under the floodlights, watching Shearer and Speed with his dad and his brother, already dreaming of a badge he wouldn’t wear for another thirteen years. He got there. He stayed there through loan spells and lean years and a rebuild that could easily have moved him on for a tidy £15 million this summer. He played his part in the Wembley goal that ended seventy years of waiting. That’s not a résumé you discard over one bad hour at Elland Road. It’s one that’s earned this club’s patience, and its faith — the same faith he showed in it, long before anyone here had heard his name.
Love him, or hate him? What is your fondest memory of Jacob Murphy? Join the conversation on X @mytoonarmy #NUFC
Sep 16, 2026
The Numbers Catch Up
On Friday, I warned that Newcastle were surviving on moments they hadn’t earned. On Monday night, Elland Road presented the invoice.
Two minutes and forty-two seconds. That’s all the time that passed between Lewis Miley turning Ao Tanaka’s speculative strike into an own goal and Jayden Bogle wheeling away to celebrate a second, and by the time both had gone in, something had already changed in the away end. Not panic, not yet. Something closer to recognition — the sinking, specific feeling of watching a pattern you’d been warned about arrive right on schedule.
Because this was not bad luck. This was the bill coming due.
The Bill Comes Due
On Friday, previewing this fixture, I made a simple observation: Matthias Jaissle’s Newcastle were not out-playing anyone. They were out-scoring the chances they created — through Anthony Elanga’s pace, through moments of individual brilliance, through a goalkeeper standing on his head when required — while the underlying picture told a different story almost every week. Second-best by expected goals at Liverpool. Second-best at Bournemouth, even with the majority of the ball. Somehow still winning at Tottenham despite the numbers favouring Roberto De Zerbi’s side. Five games unbeaten, built on moments rather than method.
Jaissle, tough night
DCL, he scored against us – again
Leeds simply did what nobody else this season had managed: they turned the volume of chances Newcastle concede into an actual scoreline. By full time, Daniel Farke’s side had generated more than double the expected goals of their visitors and scored four times from it — clinical where Newcastle had spent a month being fortunate. It is, when the whole season is weighed rather than one midweek result, exactly the correction that was overdue. Newcastle came into Monday night averaging more shots against than any side in the division. Nobody had made them pay for it. Leeds did, inside thirty-four minutes, and the manner of it — a shot that took two Newcastle touches to find the net, a header that cannoned in off a defender’s shoulder rather than beating Hornícek cleanly — carried the specific cruelty of a team whose luck has simply run out rather than one that’s been torn apart tactically.
A Number Nine Who Never Arrived
If Newcastle needed a spark to drag them back into a game slipping away, they didn’t have one up front. Matias Fernández-Pardo started up front, and spent the night rotating the central striker’s role with Yoane Wissa — more often the furthest man forward than in behind him — without it changing much. Fifty-seven minutes without a shot, a chance created, or a telling touch anywhere near the Leeds box: still visibly building up his match sharpness after a stop-start start to life in England, and unable to latch onto anything played in his direction. This column’s predicted XI on Friday had Joe Willock starting in the front three instead, flagged as the sharper option even then. Jaissle went the other way, and the eye test backed up the original call. Fernández-Pardo was withdrawn on 57 minutes for his ineffectiveness, and Newcastle looked a sharper, better-connected side once Willock was on the pitch — a shot that clipped the crossbar, another straight at Trafford, both arriving after the game was already beyond saving but both proof of the ball-carrying control that had gone missing from kick-off.
Off with a concussion injury
Two Different Games
There were, in truth, two matches here. The first half was as one-sided as the scoreline eventually suggested — Leeds pouring forward with pace and purpose, Newcastle unable to get out of their own half without giving the ball straight back. The second told a different story, and it’s worth telling properly rather than dismissed as garbage time. Once the contest was safely out of reach, Farke’s players naturally eased off the accelerator — fresh legs from the bench, a settling into defensive shape rather than a relentless chase for a fifth. And into that space, Newcastle finally started playing like themselves. The long punts forward that Leeds’ back three had been reading and cutting out all evening gave way to something more patient — the ball kept on the ground, moved through midfield rather than launched over it, Newcastle actually holding spells of possession for the first time all night. It bought them a goal. Harvey Barnes worked the ball wide to the overlapping Tino Livramento, and Livramento’s deflected cross fell for Bazoumana Touré to finish confidently in the game’s closing minute — a goal built from patience rather than desperation, even if it arrived three goals too late to mean anything for the result.
Steur’s Night
In the middle of all this was an eighteen-year-old handed a Premier League audition with no warning at all, just not on the terms he’d have chosen. Sean Steur was still warming up on the touchline when Nico González went down clutching his face early in the first half, and by the nineteenth minute he was being sent on cold, ahead of more experienced options still sat on the bench, into a Premier League away fixture that had already started to turn hostile. Fifteen minutes later, a slow, unhurried pass out from the back went straight to a Leeds shirt, and the move that followed ended with Bogle’s name on the second goal. It was a genuine mistake, and a costly one.
But it’s worth saying plainly what Steur did next, because it’s the part of the night easiest to overlook: he didn’t hide. No further mistakes, no further lapses — just seventy-one minutes of a teenager doing his job brought on earlier than planned, competing for the ball and getting through the rest of the match without incident. That’s not nothing. Thrown into the deep end with no notice, on the night his new club’s unbeaten start fell apart around him, he still had the character to see it through rather than shrink from it. Newcastle will need players who respond exactly like that a great deal more before this season is finished.
What Has to Change
The fix isn’t complicated to name, even if it’s harder to execute. Newcastle’s press is built to win the ball high and hurt teams in transition, and when it works — as it mostly has through four games — it papers over a defence that’s more porous underneath than the results have suggested. Leeds simply had the physicality to play through it: hold the ball under pressure, draw Newcastle’s midfield out of shape, and exploit the space Jaissle’s vertical system leaves in behind once the first line of pressing is beaten. Against a team built for exactly that fight, it finally cost them. The system doesn’t need tearing up — it kept Newcastle unbeaten in five games across all competitions coming into Monday — but it needs either a more disciplined holding presence shielding the back four, or the willingness to sit a little deeper against sides set up to punish an open pitch.
Bamba, played well in the short time he had
The selection call in the number ten role is the more immediately fixable problem. Fernández-Pardo is a talented forward still finding his feet in England; Leeds marked him tightly rather than sitting off, and the ball into him was mostly high and hopeful — easy pickings for taller, more physical defenders — rather than anything played to feet. Newcastle rushed it in the first half rather than waiting for the right pass, and the faster they went, the worse it got. Starting him ahead of a player who’d arguably earned the shirt already looks like the wrong call in hindsight. Willock carries the ball into midfield himself rather than waiting for it to arrive over the top, which sidesteps the service problem entirely.
The harder problem is depth through the middle. González’s head knock left Jaissle sending on an eighteen-year-old, and while Steur held up better than the circumstances deserved, a squad with genuine ambitions needs recognised cover in that position that isn’t an emergency introduction. Jacob Ramsey picked up a knock in the warm-up and was never a viable option either, Jaissle confirmed afterwards — Aladji Bamba was also on the bench, fit and available — the likelier explanation is that Steur’s match fitness at this stage of the season simply outstripped his.
Jaissle called it “difficult to digest” afterwards, and he was right to. But it’s also, for what it’s worth, not the first setback of his coaching career. Newcastle’s own reset starts this Saturday, at home to Hull City — a considerably more forgiving proposition than Elland Road on a Monday night, and exactly the kind of fixture where the fundamentals Jaissle admitted were missing can be rebuilt in front of a St James’ Park crowd still willing to be won over. Coventry away in October follows, but that’s a conversation for another week. Jaissle has been here before, if not on this exact patch of English grass, and he’s answered it well before. There’s no reason, on the evidence of his career rather than one bad night, to expect anything different this time.
Newcastle’s worst performance of the season so far? Is this the wake up call we deserve? Join the conversation on X @mytoonarmy #NUFC
Sep 15, 2026
The Magic Was Real. So Is What Broke It.
Allan Saint-Maximin gave Newcastle three years of pure theatre before his body started handing in its notice. Tracing the highs, the damage, and why the honest way back to St James’ Park now runs through the boardroom, not the touchline.
St James’ Park, 19 May 2021. Seventy minutes on the clock against Sheffield United, and Allan Saint-Maximin has already gone past his marker fifteen times. Fifteen. Not attempted — completed. Somewhere in Spain that same season, Lionel Messi is doing the exact same number to Celta Vigo, and for one weekend the Frenchman from Châtenay-Malabry sits statistically level with the best footballer on the planet. Then, with twenty minutes still to play and the crowd fully drunk on him, he pulls up. Hamstring. Helped off. Season, in effect, over.
That single afternoon is Saint-Maximin’s entire Newcastle story compressed into ninety minutes: genius that made grown men on the Gallowgate forget themselves, followed immediately by a body that couldn’t cash the cheques his feet kept writing.
The Boy Who Made Losing Feel Like Something
He arrived from Nice in August 2019 for a reported £16m, into a Newcastle side that Steve Bruce had inherited mid-collapse and Mike Ashley had starved for a decade. Nobody was going to Europe. Nobody was buying replica shirts out of hope. What Saint-Maximin gave that team, from almost his first involvement, was the one thing relegation-adjacent football rarely offers: a reason to actually watch. By November of his debut season, BBC Sport’s Opta data had him leading the entire Premier League in yards gained per carry — 12.17 metres from 125 attempts, more than a full metre clear of Marcus Rashford in second — and he was doing it from fewer carries than anyone else near him, which told you everything about the efficiency of the theft.
It never really stopped. Across 2021 he set the Premier League’s all-time single-season record for completed dribbles — 143 of them — a mark that still stands. He top-scored Newcastle’s chance-creation charts in seasons the team barely had the ball. Fans who’d watched years of hoofball under Ashley got a winger who picked the ball up in his own half, looked up, and simply decided the six players between him and goal weren’t going to matter. He gave to foodbanks. He handed shirts and boots to kids at the gates without being asked by the club’s press office. Supporters who met him in the street came away with stories, not selfies. Long before Eddie Howe or Amanda Staveley, Saint-Maximin was the only reason some Newcastle fans had to renew.
Then the club actually got good, and the arithmetic of a modern Premier League squad turned against him. As Howe built a side capable of finishing fourth and reaching a domestic cup final, competition for a starting shirt intensified and Saint-Maximin’s appearances thinned out — twenty-five outings in his final campaign, only twelve as a starter, a return of one goal and five assists that undersold a player still creating 31 chances despite barely ever completing ninety consecutive minutes. Financial Fair Play needed selling assets. Saint-Maximin, sellable and Saudi-attractive, was the obvious name. Newcastle moved him to Al-Ahli in July 2023 for £23m, closing a four-season, 124-appearance, 13-goal chapter that fans still talk about with more affection than the numbers alone would justify.
ASM lit up the crowd every time
Six Clubs, Three Years, and a Body Running Out of Road
What has happened since should sober up even the most sentimental corner of the Gallowgate.
Al-Ahli got two seasons out of him, most of it sporadic. Within a year they’d loaned him to Fenerbahçe, where he managed 20 appearances and 4 goals before returning to Jeddah — only to be sold on almost immediately, this time to Club América in Liga MX for a fee in the region of €10.3m in August 2025. That deal barely survived six months. By February 2026 he was a free agent again, walking into Lens for the back half of the French season on nothing more than a short-term arrangement.
And here, briefly, the old magic flickered. Thirteen appearances, four goals, three assists, a Coupe de France winner’s medal, and a runners-up finish in Ligue 1 — genuinely his best sustained form since leaving Tyneside. Lens wanted him to stay. He didn’t. Instead he signed for Charlotte FC in Major League Soccer over the summer, his eleventh senior club, arriving as the replacement for the departing Wilfried Zaha. He’s currently on two assists from four starts and two substitute appearances this MLS season, a tidy 7.38 average rating.
Al-Ahli, Fenerbahçe, Al-Ahli again, Club América, Lens, Charlotte. Six clubs, three continents, three years. That is not the CV of a footballer chasing his ceiling. It’s the CV of one being moved along, again and again, by clubs that wanted the name more than they could keep using the player.
What the Injury List Actually Says
Here is the part the highlight reels never show you. Pull Saint-Maximin’s medical file and it reads less like a footballer’s career and more like an ongoing negotiation with his own hamstrings.
Three separate thigh strains inside his first four months in England. Ankle trouble that cost him most of December 2019. Calf, groin, and thigh injuries recurring through 2020, 2021 and 2022 with a regularity that stopped being bad luck and became a pattern. A knee problem in February 2023, followed two months later by the thigh injury that effectively ended his final Newcastle season before the Al-Ahli sale went through. And the pattern hasn’t broken since he left — if anything it has deepened. An unspecified injury in January 2025. Illness in February. A serious lay-off running from late April to late July 2025, nearly three months, landing right in the window before his move to Club América. A groin injury barely weeks into life in Mexico that October. Illness again in November. Another calf issue flaring almost exactly as he arrived at Lens in February 2026.
Injuries has ravaged his career
That Sheffield United afternoon wasn’t an outlier. It was the rule, dressed up as a highlight. Saint-Maximin turns 30 in March. The body that made him magic has been sending the same message for the better part of a decade, and the message has never changed: this cannot be sustained at full throttle indefinitely.
Why There’s No Jersey Waiting
Here’s the twist most supporters have missed entirely: Saint-Maximin has already played for Matthias Jaissle. The German walked into Al-Ahli twenty-four hours after Saint-Maximin signed there in 2023, and the two spent a season together, guiding the newly promoted club to third in the Saudi Pro League alongside Riyad Mahrez and Roberto Firmino. By Saint-Maximin’s own account, it’s a relationship built on real respect — he’s called Jaissle a coach with the quality to go all the way to the top. So the question of whether he’d fit Jaissle’s Newcastle isn’t hypothetical speculation. It’s already been field-tested, for one season, in Jeddah.
But the Jaissle that Saint-Maximin knew was building a functional Saudi Pro League project from nothing. The Jaissle now at St James’ Park is running something far more specific: a high-intensity, ball-oriented swarm press built on the Red Bull pathway, players collapsing on the ball the instant possession is lost rather than retreating into shape. “I want stress on the opponent as soon as possible,” is how Jaissle himself has described it — verticality through central channels, a narrow 4-4-2 diamond or 4-3-1-2, collective pressing triggers drilled on the training ground until they’re instinct.
That is not, and was never, Saint-Maximin’s game. His gift is individual — manufacturing a yard of space from nothing, running at defenders in isolation, doing damage as a soloist. Howe spent four years trying to sand a defensive shape onto that talent and only ever half-succeeded. Jaissle’s system doesn’t have room to half-succeed with a winger; it needs pressing triggers who function as part of a unit, executed by players with fresher legs than a decade of soft-tissue damage leaves you with.
And even setting the system aside, there’s no vacancy. Newcastle head into 2026-27 with Harvey Barnes, Anthony Elanga and Jacob Murphy established in wide areas, plus the summer arrivals of Bazoumana Toure and the positionally flexible Matias Fernandez-Pardo — five options, all built for exactly the running demands Jaissle requires, all of them younger than Saint-Maximin is now. There’s no squad number free, let alone a place in the XI.
The Role That’s Actually There
None of which means Newcastle is finished with him, or he with Newcastle. It just means the next chapter shouldn’t be written in boots.
This a club with genuine form on this. Bobby Moncur, the last captain to lift a major trophy for Newcastle, has spent years as a club ambassador. When PIF’s takeover happened in 2021, Alan Shearer was approached within days about an informal ambassadorial role, advising the new ownership on how to rebuild the bridge between boardroom and terrace. John Beresford has spent years turning up for the club’s community and charity work simply because, in his own words, it’s always worth showing his face. Newcastle doesn’t just tolerate its former players sticking around — it actively leans on them.
Saint-Maximin is arguably a more natural fit for that world than any of them. He is one of the most recognisable, socially fluent personalities to wear the shirt this century, a player whose bond with supporters was built on foodbank visits and gate-side generosity rather than manufactured content. He has now played professionally in England, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Mexico, France and the United States — a genuinely global footprint most ambassadors would need a marketing budget to fake. And there’s a tidy symmetry sitting underneath all of it: Saint-Maximin already has a real relationship with Jaissle, and with Al-Ahli, a club that sits under the same PIF ownership umbrella as Newcastle itself. For a club with obvious global ambitions, a figure who’s lived inside both ends of that ownership structure and is still adored on Tyneside is not a hard case to make.
He said it himself, just this week, to the BBC: Newcastle remains his dream club, the one he watches every single match of, the one he stayed loyal to when he didn’t have to. That devotion doesn’t need a first-team squad number to mean something. It needs a phone call, a contract with fan engagement and Foundation work written into it, and a fixture list built around home matchdays rather than pre-season fitness tests.
The magic was real. Nobody who was in the ground for that Sheffield United performance needs convincing of that. But so was the toll it took, appearance by appearance, injury by injury, across a decade that has now scattered him across four continents chasing a version of himself that isn’t coming back as a player. The good news is that Newcastle has never needed him to be that version to want him around. It just needs to offer him a different shirt to wear.
If you agree that shirt should exist, say so. We’ve started a petition calling on Newcastle United to give Allan Saint-Maximin a formal ambassadorial role once his playing career ends — the same recognition the club has already extended to the likes of Bobby Moncur and Alan Shearer. Add your name to the petition here.
Sep 12, 2026
Running on Fumes: Jaissle and Farke Collide at Elland Road
Monday night, under the lights at Elland Road, two head coaches who have never met will discover exactly how little separates their unbeaten records from something far shakier — and for one of them, the margin for error is a good deal thinner than the table suggests.
Matthias Jaissle brings Newcastle south on the back of five games without defeat, a start good enough to quiet most of the noise around a summer that stripped his midfield of its heartbeat, but nowhere near long enough to have settled anything. He replaced a manager who delivered Newcastle their first major trophy in 70 years and took them into the Champions League — Eddie Howe left an inheritance, not just a vacancy — and five points from a possible nine in the league, none of it won with any real control of a match, is the kind of start that buys patience rather than earns conviction. Daniel Farke’s Leeds, meanwhile, remain unbeaten in three Premier League outings, a record that reads better than almost anything they’ve actually produced on the pitch. Both managers have banked points nobody would call fully deserved. Only one of them is doing it under a fanbase still working out whether he’s the right man for the job.
Two Identities, One Shared Debt
Jaissle’s Newcastle is built to be recognisable at a distance — high, aggressive, vertical the moment possession turns over. It’s the football he learned at Red Bull Salzburg, transplanted onto Tyneside with barely any run-in: six days from Eddie Howe’s exit to Jaissle’s appointment, and a pre-season to reshape a squad that had just lost Bruno Guimarães, Sandro Tonali and Anthony Gordon. The early evidence backs the reputation up in patches and undercuts it in others. Newcastle have finished second-best by expected goals in every Premier League match so far, regardless of who actually held the ball — well behind Liverpool’s control at St James’ Park (39 per cent possession, outshot 13-27), matching Tottenham’s calmer spells away from home despite winning, and even with 58 per cent of the ball themselves against Bournemouth. They won at Tottenham with the numbers actually favouring Roberto De Zerbi’s side, 1.12 expected goals to Newcastle’s 0.72, and they salvaged draws against Liverpool and Bournemouth from losing underlying positions in both.
The pattern is unmistakable: Newcastle are not out-playing anyone. They are out-scoring the chances they create, through Anthony Elanga’s pace, Yoane Wissa’s knack for the audacious finish, Joe Willock arriving late into the box like he’s been shot from somewhere behind the play. And when they have conceded, it hasn’t mattered who was controlling the game — a stoppage-time penalty against Liverpool, an early strike and an own goal inside 35 minutes against Bournemouth, two goals shipped even in their most convincing ninety minutes of the season, the 3-2 EFL Cup win over West Brom. Clean sheets at Tottenham and away at Millwall show the lapses aren’t constant, but Jaissle’s Newcastle live and die by moments. So far, more have gone their way than not.
None of that has cost Jaissle anything yet, because Newcastle haven’t lost. It will start to cost him the moment they do. Five games unbeaten is a number, not a verdict, and a below-par performance away at a side plenty inside St James’ Park would expect Newcastle to beat with something to spare is exactly the kind of result that turns “work in progress” into a question mark.
Farke’s Leeds tell an oddly similar story wearing a different shirt. The reputation, forged in a 100-point Championship title win built on control and a stingy defence, suggests a team that dictates. The season so far suggests otherwise. Leeds have lost the expected-goals battle in every single Premier League fixture: shaded 0.65 to 0.49 by a Nottingham Forest side that hit the post and carried the greater threat throughout an opening-day win settled only by Anton Stach’s free-kick; outshot 22 to 12 by Brentford before Dominic Calvert-Lewin rescued a point with 11 minutes left; out-possessed two-to-one by Brighton, who registered 20 shots to Leeds’ 10 despite Jayden Bogle’s early goal giving Farke’s side an hour to hold onto a lead they hadn’t remotely earned. Even in the one match Leeds’ underlying numbers actually favoured them — last Wednesday’s Carabao Cup exit at Chelsea, where their expected-goals total of 2.70 topped the home side’s 2.36 — they still contrived to concede four times in twelve second-half minutes and lose 6-3.
Sean Longstaff, ex-Newcastle lad
Farke has his own word for it. Reflecting on Stamford Bridge, he called it “a bit unlike us to concede so many goals,” pointing to squad rotation as the culprit. The Brentford and Brighton evidence suggests a deeper habit: Leeds this season have spent long stretches without the ball, surviving on resilience, individual quality in the final third, and Farke’s evident skill at organising a deep block, rather than the control that made his name.
The Lights, the Noise, and the Kids
Farke has never met Jaissle, and said as much this week — but not before invoking the man Jaissle replaced. Howe, he said, “has left a legacy over there” that’s never easy for a successor to follow. It’s a pointed thing for an opposing manager to volunteer about someone he’s never worked opposite, and it lands squarely on the question Newcastle’s own support is still weighing up: whether five unbeaten games are early proof Jaissle is that successor, or just a soft run of fixtures dressed up as one. Farke still expects Newcastle dangerous on the break, with genuine pace up top, whatever the verdict on their new manager. Anthony Elanga is among the quickest wide players in the division, and £51million summer signing Matias Fernandez-Pardo — still working his way to full match fitness after two substitute cameos — may be faster still. There’s a tension in that for Farke, though. Sitting off, as Leeds did away at Brighton and Brentford, actually compresses the space in behind rather than opening it — a deep block denies exactly the running lanes Elanga and Fernandez-Pardo want to attack. The bigger danger is the alternative: roared forward by a crowd Farke has spent weeks trying to energise, if Elland Road pushes his back three higher up the pitch than they’ve dared go away from home, that’s when the gaps appear and Newcastle’s pace becomes genuinely dangerous.
The atmosphere is the other variable neither manager can fully account for. Farke has spent much of this season talking about turning Elland Road into a fortress, and this is only the second home Premier League match of his side’s campaign, after a 1-1 draw with Brentford. Jaissle, for his part, has already clocked the size of the occasion: Newcastle “need to match” the atmosphere, he said this week, aware that a raucous Monday night under the Elland Road floodlights is a different proposition to anything his side has faced away from home this season — Tottenham included.
Wissa to score again?
Youth may end up mattering more than either manager would like to admit. Newcastle’s rebuild has pushed some unusually inexperienced names into first-team responsibility earlier than planned: Lukáš Horníček, a summer arrival from Braga, has started ahead of the more experienced Nick Pope in goal; Lewis Miley, an academy product who has started every Premier League match so far in central midfield, has been earmarked by Jaissle as his emergency cover at right-back should Amar Dedić’s hamstring knock rule him out; Lewis Hall has become close to undroppable at left-back, praised by Jaissle this week as a player he’s “in love with.” None of that is a weakness by default, but a Monday-night away trip to a hostile, promotion-adjacent crowd is exactly the kind of fixture that tests inexperience in ways a home draw with Bournemouth doesn’t.
Predicted Line-ups
Leeds United (3-4-2-1): Trafford; Justin, Elvedi, Muharemović; Bogle, Ampadu, Tanaka, Gudmundsson; Stach, Okafor; Calvert-Lewin
Joe Rodon remains sidelined, with Farke confirming no fresh fitness concerns beyond that, so expect continuity from the back three that started at Brighton. Harry Wilson and Brenden Aaronson offer alternatives in the two attacking-midfield berths, but Okafor’s directness alongside Stach’s range has been the preferred pairing behind Calvert-Lewin, whose willingness to occupy centre-backs has been a quiet feature of Leeds’ start.
Newcastle United (4-2-3-1): Horníček; Dedić, Thiaw, Botman, Hall; González, Miley; Elanga, Willock, Barnes; Wissa
Dedić’s hamstring is described as not serious, but it remains a genuine call for matchday; if he doesn’t make it, Miley shifts to right-back and Sean Steur or Jacob Ramsey comes into central midfield. Fernandez-Pardo, with almost a full training week behind him for the first time since his arrival, is the standout option from the bench rather than a starter, with Jaissle suggesting a decision may not come until matchday itself.
Prediction
Two sides that have spent September being bailed out by moments rather than method feels like a fixture settled by exactly that: a moment. Leeds’ home advantage and set-piece threat — Stach’s dead-ball quality, Muharemović’s aerial presence — argue for a goal at the right end early. Newcastle’s directness, and the chance that a fortress-minded Elland Road pushes Leeds higher up the pitch than they’ve managed away from home, argues for the sting on the counter that’s rescued Jaissle three times already this season.
Call it 2-1 to Newcastle. Anthony Elanga to score again on the break, Yoane Wissa to add a second from a move that starts deep and ends fast, and Dominic Calvert-Lewin — who has found the net in each of his last two starts — to give Leeds something to hold onto without quite completing the comeback.
Whoever wins it, neither side leaves Elland Road with their underlying numbers fixed — but only one of these two men needs the result more than the process. Farke has a title medal and a promotion campaign to point to when patience wears thin. Jaissle, five games into English football, has a good story and not much else. Monday won’t settle that argument either way, but it’s the first fixture this season where the story alone might not be enough. That conversation continues at Hull for Newcastle next weekend, and against Crystal Palace for Leeds the day before — two more low-key tests of whether either team can start controlling matches instead of surviving them.
Two unbeaten teams – who will walk away the winner? Do you feel Jaissle has had a good start to the season? Join the conversation on X @mytoonarmy #NUFC
Sep 12, 2026
Same Word, Different Club
Eddie Howe pressed high. Matthias Jaissle presses high. Look at the team sheet from Bournemouth away, though, and barely a name in the back six was signed to do it — and yet four games into a manager’s reign that started three weeks before kickoff, Newcastle haven’t lost. The mechanics behind it are better watched than paraphrased at second hand. Amar Dedić’s underlap, Malick Thiaw stepping out of defence, Yoane Wissa going missing from his own penalty box on purpose — it’s all in here.

An excellent video by James Lawrence Allcott
What the breakdown doesn’t quite spell out is the more interesting story sitting underneath it. Howe’s press and Jaissle’s press share a word and almost nothing else.
Howe’s version was control dressed up as aggression. Newcastle invited sides onto them, went long to Nick Woltemade’s head, and committed bodies sideways to force possession backwards until the opposition ran out of ideas. The press was there to slow the game down and keep the risk low — chaos as a last resort, not a first instinct.
Jaissle’s press is chaos by design. Lukáš Horníček holding the ball live through a goal kick isn’t caution, it’s bait — an invitation for the opposition to commit numbers forward so Newcastle can play straight through the gap that creates. Wissa dropping into midfield isn’t a forward being wasted, it’s a refusal to leave a defender anything to mark on the last line. Where Howe’s Newcastle wanted the game slow, Jaissle’s wants it live, gambling the first phase of buildup to win space further up the pitch.
Both call it pressing. What’s actually happened is that Jaissle has imported the high-octane transition football that built his reputation at Red Bull Salzburg — though it might be less of a graft than it looks. If Ross Wilson already knew Howe’s exit was coming, with the succession held quiet until Jaissle’s name was secured, then Dedić, Horníček and González were never recruited to play someone else’s football. They were recruited for this. Either way, four unbeaten games are still four unbeaten games — worth watching, not yet worth crowning.
Because the honest answer is nobody knows yet whether it holds. A back six built around four summer arrivals aged 24 and under can bait a Bournemouth press in September, on a ground where the home side wants to play into Newcastle’s hands anyway. Whether the same approach survives a run through sides who won’t oblige — who sit off, protect their box, and dare Newcastle to break them down without the chaos to hide behind — is the actual question.
Same word: press. Different football club. We’re about to find out which one wins.
What do you think of Jaissle-ball after the first 5 games of the new regime? How long will it be before others figure out how to beat it? Join the conversation on X @mytoonarmy #NUFC
Sep 11, 2026