What will Matthias Jaissle bring to Newcastle United?

A data-led look at what the young German coach will bring to the post-Howe era at St James' Park.

Well. Not how I saw pre-season going.

A few days ago I put a marker down on Bluesky: if Bruno followed Gordon and Tonali out of the door, and after we swung and missed on Munoz and Manzambi, Howe would seriously weigh up whether he still wanted the job.

My reasoning was not complicated: a.) I’d heard that there was a chance Howe would walk if we sold Bruno, and b.) our transfers across the summer were about to ask the Newcastle United faithful to be patient with our new group of raw, young signings under a manager where patience was in short supply. Something had to give. Now it has.

How did we get to this point?

I am not going to relitigate the rights and wrongs of it, because both the Howe In and Howe Out crowd will feel the benefit of not arguing about that anymore, and I would rather look forward. However, I do think we need to take stock of how we got to this point.

Having joined in the middle of a relegation scrap, Howe leaves Newcastle in far better health than he found us, and he broke a 70-year wait for a domestic trophy while he was at it. Sure, he spent money, but he was also the chief architect of everything good that followed, and he did that against uneven leadership from above. When PIF let Staveley gamble on the sale of Bruno Guimaraes to solve the looming PSR issues, it was a mess that cost us Ashworth (who disagreed with the approach), Minteh and Anderson and forced us into putting Isak and Gordon on the table. That lack of oversight burst the bubble, and momentum has been slipping away since.

With the appointment of Howe, the same owners won the lottery with their first appointment. They’ve leaned on Howe whenever they were too slow to build the departments above and around him that should have been taking more off of his plate, in the same way that happens at every other credible club in the Premier League. Managers with too much control rarely end well. Even Klopp’s Liverpool wobbled when he had too much influence over recruitment. PIF always had the power to step in. They just never put the guardrails up around a manager whose obsessive, workaholic streak needed to be focused on what he was best at. They no longer have that shield; they cannot rely on Howe to fill in the gaps; they need to be better day-to-day custodians. Rant over. It’s time to talk about what comes next.

This brings me to the name on everyone’s lips: Matthias Jaissle. And in a funny way, the man picked to replace Howe fits right in with the rest of our summer. He is relatively untested in the glare of a top-five league, and he is about to find out, just like our new signings, whether he has the tools for the intensity of the Premier League.

The Rangnick disciple at Salzburg

Jaissle is 38 and a Rangnick man to his bones. Rangnick signed him as a player, brought him into the Red Bull coaching machine after a knee injury ended his playing days at 26, and moved him up through the Salzburg academy, into Liefering, and then the Salzburg first team at 33. Ask him to sum up his football, and he does not dress it up. “I want stress on the opponent as soon as possible,” he told The Athletic. “And when we win the ball, I want to go as quickly as possible towards the opponent’s goal. I’m very vertical.” Press hard, win it back early, go forward fast.

At Salzburg, he ran the playbook which is in the Red Bull Group’s DNA. He set up in a 4-1-2-1-2 diamond for 97% of his minutes in 2022/23, whether level, ahead or behind.

This was a coach conforming to a system mandated from above rather than bending it, leaning into the young, sell-on squad that the entire Red Bull model is built around. He won back-to-back titles and took the club to its first-ever Champions League knockout stage, with creditable group-stage draws against Chelsea and Milan.

Jaissle’s Evolution during his stint in Saudi Arabia

During his time at Al-Ahli, Jaissle has shown flexibility as he came to terms with more tactical freedom and a different type of squad. He won back-to-back AFC Champions League titles out there, beating Kawasaki Frontale in 2025 and Machida Zelvia this April, coaching a room of Firmino, Mahrez, Kessie, Toney and Galeno across his time in the Middle East. And in his own words, that mix of a star-laden squad and sitting deeper in continental games “forced me to become much more flexible, to think much more game-to-game about formation, how and when to press.”

When you compare his Al-Ahli side’s 🔵 style of play numbers next to Howe’s Newcastle 🔴, there is a significant amount of stylistic overlap, which should help ease the transition between the two bosses.

The high-press shot counts are almost identical, 3.6 a game for Al-Ahli against 3.7 for Newcastle. The defensive line sits at a near-identical height. The volume of aggressive defending is the same. The major differences - aside from the relative player/league strengths - are around counter-attacks and shots generated/conceded: Al-Ahli gave up 0.77 a game, Newcastle 1.22. Jaissle’s style is meaningfully harder to hit on the break, whereas Howe’s attacking style relies a little more on generating shots on the counter (1.21 per 90) than Jaissle (0.91).

The frustrations with Howe, and whether Jaissle answers them

1. Tactical flexibility. The loudest one. Fans often felt that Howe let too many games drift without a plan beyond a like-for-like sub. Jaissle at Al-Ahli has shown real flexibility: a 4-2-3-1 as his base when the game is level, more compact shapes to protect a lead, and two up top when he is chasing. Howe obviously did this during games, but his 4-3-3 really dominated his time at the club and had become stale.

2. Too easy to play through out of possession. Another recurring complaint with Howe was that we were too easy to play through in midfield. Compared against their own leagues, Newcastle's soft spots were in the central zones just outside and inside the box - something that was exacerbated whenever the team was tired. Jaissle’s Al-Ahli side’s strongest area is precisely that patch in front of goal. Pair that with the lower counter-attacking shots conceded, and you get a coach who guards the space in front of his back line more carefully.

Albeit in the weaker league, Jaissle has managed this without dialling the aggression down, because those high-press numbers, remember, match Howe's almost exactly. Whether he can correct this theme at Newcastle with the available personnel is something to watch in the early weeks of the season.

3. Too many attacks broke down in possession and too many crosses. Another issue at Howe’s Newcastle was that we struggled to break lines centrally through the middle if the ball was not at Bruno's feet, and over time we became too reliant on crossing to lever open a deep block.

In buildup, Jaissle’s Al Ahli team started attacks short from the back, worked the ball up the left, and got into the final third mostly through quick central passing with the odd long switch as a release valve.

Once the ball is in attacking areas, we see some more differences between Howe’s and Jaissle’s approach. Over Howe’s time at Newcastle, there was an increasing reliance on crosses from deep to open up set defences.

Al-Ahli’s is tighter, worked through the two half-spaces beside the box and the middle.

This approach scales across the attack of both teams. Using Hudl Statsbomb’s new phases of play model, we can now break down the % across the pitch where each team plays in transition. While the headline number isn’t all that different, there’s a marked difference in very central areas.

While the relative strength of the competition between the EPL and Saudi Pro League is something to keep in mind, with more easy games in the latter, it’s worth watching out for in the early weeks/months of the season.

Though Newcastle’s attack took a real step back after the loss of Isak and trying to fit Woltemade into a role that didn’t suit his style, Jaissle’s style relied more heavily on transitions, with 37% of Al-Ahli’s open-play xG against 28% of Newcastle’s.

The obvious catch with everything, which I alluded to a few times, is that the level of opposition coaching, athletes and players Jaissle has faced in Austria and Saudi Arabia sits a level below what is coming. But over his time at Al Ahli, the gap between xG for and conceded was pretty stable and genuinely encouraging for Newcastle fans.

There was some xG overperformance at both ends of the pitch, but considering he was managing one of the top sides in the Saudi Pro League, this is normal really.

How does our current squad fit?

Whenever you swap out a manager, they typically want different qualities in their players to the previous person in the post. Given the stylistic overlap between Jaissle and Howe, I’m hopeful the transition won’t take too much time. The two men want the ball won high, the line pushed up, and the game played forward quickly. A squad drilled in those habits is not starting from scratch, and the principles carry over. That is the upside of hiring someone whose footballing ideas are aligned with how we have been playing.

The genuine question is whether Jaissle can extract more from Nick Woltemade. Jaissle, at least at his last club, played with a 10 in that 4-2-3-1. So on paper there is a role for Nick as the man off the front, or leading the line himself, with Osula and Wissa the more traditional number 9s. But we have no real idea how Jaissle will actually set this team up once he takes control. That is guesswork, and anyone telling you otherwise is filling in blanks. What I will say is this: finding a way to get the most out of the investments in Woltemade and Wissa while ensuring Osula’s development doesn’t stall is the puzzle that will define his early tenure more than any pressing trigger or build-up pattern.

Conclusions

Some readers might wonder why I’ve not delved too heavily into specific video examples yet. Right now, I don’t think it adds a bundle to the conversation and would rather focus that effort once we see exactly how Jaissle lines his Newcastle up, especially seeing as he’s been so flexible in Saudi Arabia. What I would say is that I personally took a lot of value from listening to Neel at the Transfer Flow talk about Jaissle. You can watch that below:

What I would say is that Jaissle feels like an exciting bet for Newcastle United, but one that comes with a heavy risk. The step up to the strength of the Premier League will be a real test of his skills, and I’m expecting some messy days in the early months of his tenure. His appointment really mirrors our recruitment so far this summer: high potential but lacking in proven experience. So, like every one of our new recruits this summer, Jaissle is going to need support, patience and understanding while we feel our way into a new identity. Because whatever comes next, the man he’s replacing really understood the city and the region, raised the bar about what fans expect and broke that trophy drought. It’s a tough act to follow, so let’s back the new man in the dugout with everything we have. HWTL.