Paul Mitchell’s 12 months as Newcastle United’s sporting director can be characterised by blunt words, consequences and contradictions.
Mitchell is a straight-talker. Plenty of people inside St James’ Park found this no-nonsense approach to be liberating, particularly in a business that has more than its fair share of “bull**** bingo”, as put by one senior figure, who, like others quoted in this piece, was speaking anonymously to protect relationships.
Initially at least, Eddie Howe reeled back from it. To Newcastle’s head coach, Mitchell’s candour was a wrecking ball, threatening damage to the “family atmosphere” created during Amanda Staveley’s spell as director and part-owner, where decision-making was intimate and intense. By contrast, Mitchell was all alpha-male swagger.
Plenty, too, appreciated Mitchell’s easy communication — formal monthly catch-ups with heads of department, but also regular calls and messages, checking in, offering support and trust, allowing those under him the freedom to do their jobs. His “empowerment” of staff is mentioned frequently.
Yet Mitchell’s one big public intervention proved disastrous, certainly in terms of perception, when, in an interview with reporters last year, he asked whether Newcastle’s recruitment had been “fit for purpose in the modern game”. It prompted fury among people close to Howe and threatened more destabilisation.
Strengths were also weaknesses.
On his watch, there were no first-XI signings, described as “90 per cent” of his remit by Darren Eales, the outgoing chief executive, albeit his final fortnight in post brought a flurry of activity, enquiries and bids. Yet with Mitchell transitioning out, this was now orchestrated by Andy Howe, Newcastle’s assistant head of recruitment and Eddie’s nephew.
On Mitchell’s watch, there was also everything: Newcastle’s first domestic silverware for 70 years and a return to the Champions League after finishing fifth in the Premier League.
Some would argue that one happened despite the other, that the Carabao Cup win at Wembley was solely the triumph of Howe and his players. Others insist Mitchell’s “fingerprints are on the trophy”, pointing to the arrival of James Bunce as performance manager, the lack of injuries, a willingness to “push boundaries” in the search for improvement in a landscape now governed by the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules (PSR).
Frugality in the transfer market — imposed, not willing — meant sustainability became a driving factor of Mitchell’s tenure. Players have departed over the past 12 months, weakening Howe’s squad, but Newcastle are now a club of winners with the financial strength to go again and with an increasingly professional women’s operation. As Mitchell departs, they are healthier… sort of.
Ultimately, it is an unfinished story. Mitchell spoke of a three-to-five-year plan but leaves inside one, with no big signings, no new training ground and no multi-club ownership structure established, even if there have been developments on all fronts. The majority of the calls he has made have been strategic, so the fruits may not be apparent for years.
If sporting directors are supposed to be “long-term club and cultural architects”, then, like Dan Ashworth before him, Mitchell goes with the building work unfinished and with a sense of uncertainty about what happens next.
One top-level source praised Mitchell’s impressive staff appointments, his calmness in a high-pressure role, the way he dealt with Newcastle’s owners and the sales he made, which have benefited Newcastle’s bottom line, yet their overall conclusion is self-evident. “He was not there long enough to do more,” they said.
A narrative emerged in some quarters that the club led Mitchell’s exit, yet it was the 43-year-old who decided to leave. Newcastle’s owners responded by proposing alternative posts and, according to multiple sources, Mitchell’s positive relationship with the hierarchy remains intact.
Mitchell viewed his position as intrinsically connected to Eales, who brought him to the club at the start of July and then announced two months later he had been diagnosed with a chronic form of blood cancer. Eales, too, will be leaving soon. The long term quickly became the short term, which is not to say Mitchell has had no impact.
One of Mitchell’s first and most important acts was to appoint Bunce, and there has been widespread praise for the performance director’s impact. Newcastle fielded the joint-second-fewest players (24) and made the second-fewest starting-XI changes (51) in the Premier League across the 2024-25 season.
Howe’s ability to extract so much from a small group was made possible by Newcastle boasting one of the top flight’s best injury records — a dramatic improvement on the nadir of the previous campaign — while still producing physical-output figures among the highest in the division, according to their own data.
The effectiveness of Bunce’s performance operation — any lingering disharmony between departments following the fallout from the previous year’s injury crisis was patched up — also had a knock-on effect for Mitchell’s attempts to reshape Newcastle’s PSR situation.
The January sales of Miguel Almiron and Lloyd Kelly for fees that could rise to a combined £31million ($42.5m) created decent headroom for the summer following three successive windows without acquisitions.
Another intended consequence of the January sales, from Mitchell’s perspective at least, was greater first-team opportunities being granted to academy graduates.
Trevan Sanusi made his debut in the FA Cup in January, then Sean Neave, the forward, and Leo Shahar, the right-back, trained full-time with the senior squad from February to cover for the departed Almiron and Kelly. All three youngsters were 17 at the time but have since turned 18.
In this landscape of financial limitation, Mitchell accelerated what Newcastle refer to internally as the “emerging talents” programme.
The sales of Yankuba Minteh and Elliot Anderson rescued Newcastle from a PSR blackhole a year ago and the hope is that summer signings Antonio Cordero and Vakhtang Salia will bring rewards down the line, either by breaking into the first team or being sold for a profit. Park Seung-soo — should he complete a move from K-League 2 side Suwon Bluewings — also shows the increased worldwide scope for youth recruitment that Mitchell has introduced.
Mitchell championed the recruitment of talented youngsters down through the age groups, with Newcastle’s academy now boasting a record number of internationals, from under-14s through to the under-21s.
Just as vitally, Mitchell has recognised that the academy is thriving under Steve Harper’s leadership and has provided a platform for the club’s former goalkeeper to get on with his job.
This was a theme. Another person who worked with Mitchell says, “I didn’t need to ask his permission for everything. It was about keeping him up to date. If he thought something was a crap idea he would tell me, but he was also comfortable with me saying, ‘I’m not sure about that’. It was empowerment. He gave me the comfort to know I could just crack on with things. That’s a skill.”
The growth of Newcastle’s women’s team has continued under Mitchell, who poured resources into the squad for their first Championship campaign and formed a strong bond with Becky Langley, the manager.
A director of performance and recruitment and analysis staff were hired, while the appointment of the club’s first standalone women’s director of football — Grace Williams is set to arrive from Crystal Palace, as The Athletic revealed last month — is designed to expedite their rise to the Women’s Super League.
There has been an increased use of data and AI throughout the footballing operation, including how Newcastle identify prospective loan clubs for players or potential recruits from global markets, especially when it comes to playing-style similarities and in the performance and medical departments.
There has been a “huge amount” of preparatory work on the multi-club model, visiting and talking to prospective partners in other countries.
Infrastructure investment has also taken place, with Mitchell working closely with Brad Miller, Newcastle’s chief operating officer, even if much of the money has been directed towards interim upgrades.
At their Benton training ground, Newcastle are expanding into the car park, adding 1,350 square metres of office and meeting space. The changing rooms are being renovated at the academy and improvements have been made at Kingston Park, where the women’s team play.
A state-of-the-art training ground remains a concept, although Mitchell has visited potential sites within the city’s boundaries. Much of his focus has been on the potential configuration between the men’s and women’s teams and the academy, and whether they can be housed within the same or separate venues. Three to five years is the latest soft timescale, though with planning permission yet to be lodged, that may prove ambitious.
Those delays cannot be laid at Mitchell’s door. Pretty much everybody who works at Newcastle comes to understand the slow pace at which Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), the club’s majority owners, reaches its “process-driven” decisions. “It takes an eternity to do anything,” one source says.
In retrospect, Eales did Mitchell few favours with his “90 per cent recruitment” line. Mitchell’s appointment had come as a shock to Eddie Howe, who received little advance notice, and there was immediate pressure on the sporting director to deliver signings after arriving midway through a transfer window.
Mitchell did not comprehend the scale of Newcastle’s problems with PSR when he took the job, either. “He inherited a position which was impossible to navigate,” a colleague says.
The sales of Anderson and Minteh ensured (marginal) compliance for the previous three-year cycle, but they had not solved the issue. Mitchell spent far longer studying cash-flow models with Simon Capper, the chief financial officer, than he envisaged, having to account for every contract renewal and every transfer decision, from youth to senior recruitment.
When Mitchell led an ultimately futile month-long pursuit of Crystal Palace defender Marc Guehi last August — something he later claimed was part of a “predetermined strategy” — it meant that, beyond the £10m acquisition of William Osula from Sheffield United, he failed to bring in a signing for Howe’s squad.
The summer left Howe bruised. Staveley had been a fervent ally who kept him informed of everything happening at Newcastle. Now he was at arm’s length. After the PSR shambles, uncertainty lingered in his dressing room. Mitchell was forthright, brusque, keen to make his mark. “It was the wrong attitude to come in with,” an associate of Howe told The Athletic recently. “If the club were really at a low point, then you could understand that idea of changing everything. It didn’t need that. It just needed a bit of support.”
Their relationship began strained and then eased, albeit the lack of incoming transfer activity meant it was rarely tested.
The irony here is that others at Newcastle found Mitchell a far easier man to work with; direct and challenging, yes, but also eager to delegate and offer support.
There was no first-XI addition in January, either, though that was signposted from the autumn. Mitchell — with at least some buy-in from Howe — believed Newcastle were better served selling fringe players and bolstering the PSR position, given the unavailability of long-term targets for reasonable fees. The rationale was that this would prevent unwanted sales by June 30, that it would give Newcastle greater ability to resist offers for their key players, such as Alexander Isak, and ensure a (relatively) healthy summer kitty.
“Sustainability” became the buzzword internally, with Mitchell adamant that the “trading model” required tweaking long-term.
What Eales and Mitchell had attempted to communicate during their separate interviews was that while Newcastle had an excellent post-takeover transfer hit record, financially, they had overstretched themselves. The ownership was adamant it could never go three straight trading periods without a first-XI signing again.
Extracting a fee rising to £20m for Kelly, who had started only four league games after joining on a free from Bournemouth, underlines Mitchell’s negotiating skills.
As someone close to Mitchell says, the timing of his departure is “bittersweet”. Newcastle are trophy-winners, a Champions League club with a great manager, a great team and with scope to make a splash in the market.
Yet they do not have a sporting director, a new CEO is still to be appointed, and they have not signed a senior player, all of which means the uncertainty of a year ago has returned in a different guise. There are big-picture questions: who sets the strategy? What kind of club do they want to be?
Unlike 12 months ago — and, in part because of Mitchell — Newcastle are good to go. Which direction they go in is now somebody else’s responsibility.
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