Newcastle’s positive spin will soon meet brutal reality of Premier League

Luke EdwardsFri, August 7, 2026 at 12:00 PM UTC

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Newcastle’s squad has been shorn of Anthony Gordon, Sandro Tonali and Bruno Guimaraes this summer - Serena Taylor/Getty Images

It has been a turbulent summer for Ross Wilson, Newcastle United’s sporting director, who managed the sale of three star players and lost Eddie Howe, who was instrumental in persuading him to take the job.

Positivity, though, is not in short supply when Wilson holds a conversation. While others have painted a gloomy, depressing picture of where the club finds itself under its Saudi Arabian owners, Wilson has remained calm. No, that is not quite right, Wilson has remained tirelessly upbeat. It is one of the reasons he has connected strongly with David Hopkinson, the club’s chief executive, whose default setting is “relentless positivity”.

According to Newcastle’s former captain Alan Shearer, they are going to get a “reality check” during a “very challenging season” when the talking stops and the action starts in a fortnight’s time.

Shearer fears the loss of so many key players in a short space of time severely weakens the team and is dubious of the idea that you can lose senior stars and replace them with promising youngsters and live up to previous success.

Shearer said: “If it was all about selling your best players every season then replenishing the club with young ones, everyone would do that. Newcastle have a lot of work to do.”

‘The word I keep using is alignment’

Wilson, though, makes no apology for the decisions made this summer. There have been some difficult ones, particularly the sale of captain Bruno Guimaraes to Arsenal for £75m, which was at least £10m less than they hoped.

But Newcastle had little choice than to reach a compromise with Arsenal once the player repeated he wanted to leave.

“We’re trying to create a model that works for us,” said Wilson from Newcastle’s pre-season training camp in La Manga before Saturday’s friendly against Valencia. “I say that with utmost respect for what has gone before.

“We have to build a model here that can compete, win, that works for us and doesn’t lead us to have to sell players we don’t want to sell and lead to Uefa sanctions.

“We’re trying to build a model across our men’s first team, our academy, through our women’s team. The word I’ve tried to use more than any other is ‘alignment’ right through the club.”

Ross Wilson with Lukas Hornicek, the goalkeeper signed from Braga this summer - Getty Images/Serena Taylor

Only time will tell whether positive thoughts and energy, a crushing work ethic and an “anything is possible” attitude really can power Newcastle towards their 2030 goal of becoming one of Europe’s elite clubs.

Both Wilson and Hopkinson are convinced it can and seem to enjoy brushing off the pessimists – of which this correspondent often is after 25 years covering the club’s rise and falls – as well as those who mock or abuse when assessing what has happened at Newcastle.

A brief recap: In the last 12 months, Newcastle have sold four of their best players (Alexander Isak, Anthony Gordon, Sandro Tonali and captain Guimaraes) who won the club’s first domestic trophy in 70 years in 2025 and twice qualified for the Champions League.

They have been fined £5.15m for breaching Uefa’s spending rules and signed up for football’s equivalent of a repayment plan to avoid further punishment. Furthermore, the revenue gap between themselves and the “big six” English clubs is still measured in hundreds of millions rather than tens.

The project, to the outside eye, is floundering. Progress has stalled. The team finished 12th last season under Howe, the club’s most successful manager of the modern era.

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Wilson, though, is convinced the man he tracked, identified and chased to become his replacement, Matthias Jaissle, will prove he can take the club to an even higher level.

A word that keeps being used about Jaissle is “special”. Newcastle’s hierarchy believe they have secured the services of a manager who will soon be recognised in the elite tier of European managers.

‘It was not our plan to sell Bruno this summer’

We shall see how this view of the 38-year-old survives contact with a brutal and relentless Premier League campaign. But two weeks before the first game of the season at home to Liverpool, Wilson wanted to explain the unpopular sale of Guimaraes.

“We didn’t want to sell Bruno,” said Wilson, who got his first football director’s role at Falkirk in his early 20s. “It wasn’t in the plan. He’s our captain, he was very important to us and the debate over his price...it’s a world-record fee for a [midfielder] of his age.

“What we had to weigh up was, very respectfully from Bruno with his behaviour towards us, very emotionally, he effectively told us he wanted to leave. That doesn’t mean he can go, but it plays a part in our thinking when we hit a certain number [in negotiations]. But there’s no point saying it was part of our strategy and in our thinking this summer – it wasn’t.

“But we have to be flexible and react to things that happen. It might have been in our plan to sign one player, but we didn’t get him so we move on to another. We can only be honest about that. We’d love Bruno to be in our squad this summer but I’m sure there are other clubs that have lost players that wish they were in their squads.

“It’s the world we live in, we had to adapt, we had to react. Having such an important player leave is disappointing but having a really important player who doesn’t want to play here – he’s honest about that – it was the only decision we could make.”

Newcastle must move on without a player they rarely seemed to win without under Howe. They must hope this poor record without their former talisman has no bearing on Jaissle. The German, though, has already admitted this is going to be a “transition season” given the level of upheaval.

Matthias Jaissle meets journalists, including our esteemed correspondent in the green - Serena Taylor/Getty ImagesFull-back, wide forward and midfield experience on wishlist

Patience, you suspect, will be needed. Whether he and Newcastle get it, will largely depend on the mood of the fanbase which has become used to long domestic cup runs, finals, even a trophy, along with European football. Talk of intense training sessions and signing exciting young players will not carry much weight when we get into the gruelling winter months if results are poor.

Wilson knows the squad needs a lot of work. Before the window closes, Newcastle need at least one full-back, an experienced replacement for Guimaraes and either another full-back or a wide forward depending on Jaissle’s assessment.

The pressure is on, but Newcastle, having failed to land either Victor Muñoz or Johan Manzambi when their interest became public this summer, are trying to move with stealth.

The likes of Al-Hilal’s Ruben Neves, Borussia Dortmund’s Felix Nmencha, Stuttgart’s Angelo Stiller and Porto’s Victor Froholdt have all been ruled out when Telegraph Sport has asked about the interest in those players.

Croatia midfielder Luka Su&ccaroni&cacute is an interesting option. The Real Sociedad star has worked with Jaissle at Red Bull Salzburg and has played a lot of football for a 23-year-old.

“We want to strengthen the squad,” added Wilson. “We’ve already strengthened, we wanted to have a clear stamp on the window as to what our identity looked like, we wanted to re-energise and refresh it and we can feel it now in a big way. The new coach can feel it in a different way because he didn’t work with the players we had before.

“We want to add more. The support of the [owners] is there. Matthias wants to assess what we have. He’s been doing that for some time now and we’re aligned on what we want to do. What we also don’t want to do is make any mistakes by jumping to do something we don’t really want to tick a box. We’re active in the market.”

They need to be.

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Source: “AOL Sports”