Jose Mourinho vs Eddie Howe: The Future of Newcastle United
Jose Mourinho’s name has a habit of finding the hottest seat in any room. Right now, that seat is on Tyneside.
Newcastle United, Carabao Cup winners in 2025 and recent regulars at Europe’s top table, have slumped into the bottom half of the Premier League. When that happens in a club with new money, a new profile and old expectations, the manager’s name starts to shake. Eddie Howe is feeling that tremor, and the whispers have already leapt to the loudest possible replacement: Mourinho at St James’ Park.
It would be a spectacular collision of ideas.
Mourinho the winner vs Newcastle the entertainers
Mourinho is 63 now, but the image hasn’t softened: prowling the touchline, needling in press conferences, building that familiar “us against the world” bunker around his players. His CV still does most of the talking – multiple Premier League titles, multiple Champions League crowns, a career built on the simple creed that winning is all that matters.
How you cross the line doesn’t bother him. Cross it. Collect the medals. Move on.
That outlook has seduced some of Europe’s biggest institutions. Chelsea, Inter, Real Madrid, Manchester United, Tottenham. Now he is at Benfica, back in Portugal, and the expectation there is automatic: be up there, because in that league only three clubs ever really are. His name continues to swirl around Real Madrid as well. Even at this stage of his career, the gravitational pull remains.
Yet on Tyneside, the debate isn’t about his record. It’s about his football.
Chris Waddle, who knows the club and the city from his days in black and white, doesn’t question Mourinho’s pedigree for a second. Speaking to GOAL on behalf of Genting Casino, he cut straight to the fault line.
“I'm not going to say Mourinho is a bad manager, he's won nearly everything in the game,” Waddle said. That part is not up for discussion. The issue, in his eyes, is whether Newcastle can accept what usually comes with that success.
“I just think that if you're winning, people will put up with it. But with Newcastle, you've got to win by entertaining. And let's be perfectly honest, Jose Mourinho over the years has not been an entertaining manager.”
There it is. The clash between a city that craves front-foot football and a coach who has built an empire on control, caution and ruthless efficiency.
The Tottenham warning
The warning signs, Waddle argues, are already written in Premier League history. Tottenham tried it.
“Tottenham tried it with him. Tottenham brought him in. We know he's a great manager, but he wasn't Tottenham style and Tottenham didn't like it. Tottenham got rid.”
The pattern is familiar. If Mourinho delivers top-four finishes and deep cup runs, the noise dies down. “If he's top four in the league and he's still in the cups, they'll put up with it. They'll say he's great,” Waddle said. The moment the results dip, the conversation shifts instantly to aesthetics.
“If he's not, then they'll turn on the football style - not happy, don't like it, it's boring, he's going to get all that.”
It becomes a binary choice that Mourinho himself has long embraced. “If you say to Jose Mourinho, ‘do you entertain?’ He’ll say, ‘no, I win trophies’,” Waddle added. “Do you want to win trophies or do you want to entertain? Unfortunately, there's a lot of clubs like Tottenham, Newcastle, who want both.”
That is the crux of the Newcastle question. This is a fanbase that sings about glory, but also about the way you chase it.
“I'm not just talking about Jose Mourinho, he's a fantastic manager, I'm not having a pop at him,” Waddle stressed. “I think he's a great manager, what he achieves is phenomenal, but certain clubs want to be attracted to a certain style of football, and that is not Jose Mourinho's thing.”
Howe and the “Newcastle way”
While Mourinho’s name hovers, Howe is still the man in the dugout, the coach who led Newcastle back into the Champions League and ended a 70-year wait for a domestic trophy with that League Cup triumph.
The irony is that Waddle believes Howe embodies what Newcastle should be.
“I like Eddie Howe,” he said. For Waddle, it’s about a lineage of attacking intent that runs through the club’s modern history. “I played there in the 80s, we played attacking football, front foot with Arthur Cox. We got promotion with Kevin Keegan playing on the front foot and they loved it - as Kevin Keegan said! Kevin Keegan, when he came back, wanted to play the same way because he knew what the fans wanted.”
Newcastle supporters don’t just remember that era; they measure everything against it. The managers who drifted away from that approach, Waddle recalls, never truly connected.
“There have been a lot of managers since then who the fans didn't take to because of their style of play. Eddie Howe plays the Newcastle way. If there is a Newcastle way. I like Eddie Howe.”
The recent slide, in his view, has context. The Champions League campaign stretched a still-developing squad. The club felt the familiar strain of balancing Europe and the league.
“Won the League Cup a couple of years ago. They've had a bad run. The Champions League did take its toll on Newcastle's squad. It's proved that two or three years ago when they got in the Champions League - the league form always falters.”
The solution, Waddle insists, is not a reset in the dugout, but reinforcement on the pitch.
“Eddie Howe needs backing, he needs new players. There's a lot of old players there. There's some players who don't want to be there by the looks of it. Eddie needs to clear the decks and get five or six new players in. Whether he can or not, I don't know. But he needs at least five or six new players to freshen up that Geordie team.”
A defining choice
Strip it all back and Newcastle face a stark decision.
Do they double down on a coach who has tried to marry ambition with attacking football, and give him the squad depth to sustain it? Or do they invite one of the game’s great serial winners into a stadium that still idolises the romance of Keegan’s “Entertainers”?
Trophies or thrills? Or can this club, with its new resources and old soul, really demand both?
The answer will shape more than just the next season. It will define what Newcastle United want to be in this new era – a ruthless winning machine in Mourinho’s image, or a side that chases glory the hard way, on the front foot, with Howe still at the helm.
