In poor Nick: Howe's task to save a struggling season

Newcastle are going well in the Champions League but their flagging Premier League campaign is indicative of the raft of issues in Eddie Howe's new-look team

- Richard Jolly

There are plenty of barometers of the Premier League’s strength.

One of the more ridiculous is to say the sixth-best team in Europe are only the 14th finest in England. It can be a quirk of autumnal tables: with trips to Marseille and Paris Saint-Germain to come, Newcastle may not finish sixth in the initial phase of the Champions League, even if an Aston Villa-style surge to the quarterfinals does not seem utterly implausible. Nor, in all probability, will a side who finished fifth in England last season end up quite as low. There are precedents for their initial stumbles: Newcastle were 12th in early December in 2024. They showed a slow start can be no impediment to Champions League qualification.

And yet these are unusually troubled times on Tyneside. Newcastle could cite the fixture list, with six away games in their first 11, with the two home defeats to last season's top two, each coming cruelly late in injury time after spirited showings. Yet more recent memories are of strangely supine performances at West Ham and Brentford, twice leading and yet losing 3-1. They beat Athletic Bilbao in between and have booked another Carabao Cup quarterfinal place but it has nevertheless entered the ranks of the worrying starts.

There is a £125m mitigating factor. Perhaps Alexander Isak's ability to destabilise seasons extends from Tyneside to Merseyside via Sweden. Certainly, his absence is reflected in Newcastle's meagre return of 11 goals in 11 games; two seasons ago, they only finished seventh but still struck 85 times in 38.