Matthias Jaissle takes charge of a competitive match in English football for the first time on Sunday, at home to Liverpool, in a stadium he will have first walked into a fortnight before kick-off. He was confirmed as Newcastle United's head coach on 5 August, 18 days before the fixture, on a four-year contract that cost £9.5m in compensation to Al-Ahli. He has spent most of the time since being told, at length and in public, how badly this is likely to go.
He has noticed. "Everyone is somehow against us or do not think we can play a good role in the Premier League," he said this week. "We will try to convince them in a different way that we are able to." Asked separately whether his team were being underestimated, he was blunter: "I don't know how they rank us or how they rank me. To be honest, with all the respect, I don't care."
What he inherited
Newcastle finished 12th last season on 49 points, with 14 wins and 17 defeats and a goal difference of minus two. The table understates where it went wrong. They took 32 of those points at St James' Park and lost there seven times, and the first of those home defeats came on 25 August 2025, against Liverpool, 3-2. The ground that had been the foundation of everything Eddie Howe built stopped being one.