Newcastle’s sporting director Ross Wilson has said the club was preparing for Eddie Howe’s departure as manager for up to nine months.
Wilson, who joined Newcastle in October from Nottingham Forest, said Howe’s exit this July wasn’t “chaotic” or “painful” as the club had been laying plans for his successor for some time.
He said: “Clearly the timing wasn’t planned. But the reason we could move so quickly was because we’d been preparing for a number of months.
“Eddie’s an exceptionally talented coach and that meant he was probably going to do something else at some point. We had to be prepared for that.”
Howe stepped down in July after a disappointing 12th-place finish in the Premier League, with the Englishman deciding he was ready for a break after five years on Tyneside. He was replaced by former Red Bull Salzburg and Al-Ahli manager Matthias Jaissle.
Wilson said: “Eddie leaving didn’t feel chaotic and it didn’t feel painful. Eddie would be the first to tell you that.
“I came here 10 or 11 months ago and I’ve been planning in the background for a managerial change over eight or nine of those months. That doesn’t mean we were always going to go to Matthias, but he was always part of our planning.”
It has been a turbulent summer for the Magpies, who saw several key players leave as well as the manager. Anthony Gordon, Sandro Tonali and Bruno Guimaraes all departed, with Wilson conceding the latter’s departure to Arsenal for £75m was one they wanted to avoid.
“There’s no point pretending otherwise: we did not want to lose Bruno Guimaraes,” he said. “That was really disappointing. But everything else that happened during the window was planned.
“ That doesn’t mean every single player [who the club signed] was the number one name on our list. Clearly we were disappointed a couple of times but that’s normal. No club reaches the end of a window getting every target they wanted.”
