Is Newcastle's recent downturn The Peter Principle in action again?
Is Eddie Howe under pressure? Well, he is until results improve, but at the same time he isn't until he is. And by that time, it's often too late.
Of all the ways in which we’ve been able to measure the decline of Newcastle United in recent weeks, the return to St James Park of Christiano Woodnaldo was probably among the least expected and the most on the nose. That Wood became the star of the show for Nottingham Forest’s 3-1 Boxing Day win there was the end of year plot twist that few, if anybody, would have expected, yet at the same time another home defeat for a team that has been starting to come apart at the seams for a few weeks now felt wholly predictable.
It is inevitable that fatigue has to be factored in, when discussing this relatively sudden downturn. Six extra matches in the Champions League group stages were always going to have an effect at a club which, as we can now all see, didn’t add enough depth to take this extra workload into account. But at the same time, it doesn’t quite feel like a complete response to place all the blame for this on tiredness and injuries.
After all, Newcastle aren’t the only team to have had a horrible time of things with injuries this season. That now seems to be a common issue for clubs as an inevitable side-effect of the squeezing of the football calendar, the greater pace at which the game is played, and the ‘let it go’ attitude that has been employed by Premier League match officials over the last couple of seasons.
And it’s worth looking back to the start of the season, when three defeats in their first four games were almost excused by the fact that they came against Manchester City, Liverpool and Brighton. That little run was a tough way to start the season—and the benefit of hindsight now affords a far more glowing assessment of their opening day 5-1 win against Aston Villa than it got at the time—but as this season has progressed it has increasingly felt as though there are no teams in the Premier League which are without flaws, and that this run of three rapid-fire losses was a spell from which they should have taken something.
It’s reasonable to say that they have had their fair share of bad luck, this season. A Champions League group stage draw which pitted them against Borussia Dortmund, PSG and Milan was a tough, tough draw. Losing Sander Tonali after just eight Premier League appearances following his £55m transfer from Milan to a lengthy ban for betting was a punishment for Newcastle over behaviour that they had nothing to do with whatsoever.
But even these two matters have two sides to them. The Premier League’s vast financial heft means that English clubs, no matter how little experience they may have in a competition, can never truly be considered ‘underdogs’ any more. And even in the case of Tonali, while Newcastle can hardly be held responsible for the player’s behaviour before he joined their club, it’s worth asking how this matter didn’t seem to come up before they paid an extremely large amount of money indeed for him.
The nature of the team’s recent decline certainly asks questions concerning whether manager Eddie Howe has smacked headfirst into The Peter Principle, the management concept which observes that people within hierarchical organisations tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence", meaning that employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
This is the ‘glass ceiling’ that we hear so much about in football. Howe is a highly thought of coach, but does his skillset include what will be required if he is to stay in the job beyond the end of this season? Considering how poor their recent run has been, his ongoing employment is an early test of the patience of the owners. Since beating Arsenal at the start of November, their only league wins have come against Chaos Chelsea, a Manchester United team who seem unable to decide whether they’re a decent football team or not, and Fulham, who’d scored 15 goals in the four matches they’d played prior to travelling to Tyneside but who haven’t scored a single one since.
And the defeats have been chastening. Bournemouth and Everton put five goals past them without reply between them. Spurs, who’d been emerging from a deep sleep of their own, beat them 4-1. Chaos Chelsea put them out of the Carabao Cup on penalty kicks. And their last two defeats, at Luton Town and at home against Nottingham Forest, came against two teams that they surely would have expected to beat at any point since the Saudis bought their club.
There is little clamour from the supporters of the club for him to be replaced, although a few boos were audible upon the blowing of the final whistle at St James’ Park on Boxing Day. There doesn’t seem to be much on the part of the club either. There have been few of the familiar tremors that we might normally expect to feel, were Bin Salman preparing the ejector seat and fiery pit for the manager. And this isn’t exactly surprising. After all, what is Newcastle’s target for the season? Who is available that would be an automatic upgrade? And how would this integrate with any plans for the January transfer window?
Because this window is the obvious fix in a football world which is always fixated on The Next Big Thing. But it’s seldom as easy as ‘spend a lot of money in the new year and spend the second half of the season reaping the rewards’. The January transfer window seldom offers value, and other clubs with a reputation for spending big money also find themselves in something of a pickle at the moment, so competition for the sort of players that can propel a club in an upward trajectory from mid-table are likely to be at a premium. Manchester United are under new quarter-ownership. Chelsea act as though FFP considerations are perpetually for another day.
Their forthcoming fixtures don’t offer a great deal of consolation, either. Their next match is away to Liverpool, who only lost once in the first half of their league season, Manchester City, who’ve been patchy in the league of late but may have been re-energised by being crowned Champions of the World after destroying Fluminense in the World Cup Cup final, and Aston Villa, who’ve stalled a little over Christmas but had leapt into the top four at the end of a year which ends with them recognisable to the team which had wheezed into 2023 under Steven Gerrard.
And packed into the middle of that little lot is an FA Cup trip to Sunderland, who at the time of writing sit in the Championship play-off places and who are likely to feel that they have a somewhat urgent point to prove in putting one over their newly-minted local rivals. Losing to them would represent the end of another year’s dreaming of ending a 55-year run without a major trophy. Losing that match would be about more than mere ‘bragging rights’ alone. To do so may bring about a change in perspectives among both supporters and those running the club.