Stephen Warnock: Newcastle's Turbulent Summer After Howe's Exit

Eddie Howe’s exit from Newcastle United was not an inevitable end to a cycle, but a choice that lit the fuse on a turbulent summer at St James’ Park. That is how former Liverpool defender Stephen Warnock sees it.

Since the close of the 2025-26 season, Newcastle have lost three pillars of Howe’s project: Anthony Gordon to Barcelona, Sandro Tonali to Tottenham and Bruno Guimaraes to Arsenal. The spine that helped drag the club back into the Champions League places has been ripped out in a few short months.

Turning Point

For Warnock, the turning point came before any of those sales.

“Newcastle were the ones who chose to get rid of their manager this summer, in my opinion,” he said on BBC Radio 5 Live’s Monday Night Club. “They pushed Eddie Howe and gave him a decision to make.”

Warnock painted a picture of a manager boxed in just when he needed backing most.

“If you don’t back your manager, they will be sitting there thinking: ‘Well, hang about, I need money to strengthen here and you are tying my hands around my back,’” he said. “The club didn’t need to do that, they left him with a decision to make about his future at the club.”

Departures

Then came the departures. Gordon gone. Tonali gone. Guimaraes gone. For some, it looked like a club forced into painful sales to balance the books. Warnock does not buy that.

“Do people really think they didn’t want to lose Sandro Tonali and Bruno Guimaraes?” he asked. “Because I think they absolutely would’ve taken £100m. These haven’t been forced decisions.”

Across the studio, The Observer’s Rory Smith saw the same summer from a different angle. He admired how Newcastle have tried to steady themselves amid the churn, even if he felt the club had been dragged into a scenario it never planned for.

“What Newcastle have done, amid all of the change, has been really impressive, but it is reactive to a situation they maybe wouldn’t have chosen to be in at the start of summer,” Smith said.

On one key point, though, he pushed back hard against Warnock’s view.

“I disagree that they wanted to sell Tonali or Guimaraes,” he added. “If they could have kept those two players, they would have.”

So Newcastle head into a new season stripped of their manager and three of their most influential players, caught between a former defender accusing the hierarchy of calculated risk and a leading journalist arguing they are scrambling to adapt.

The decisions have been made. The question now is what kind of Newcastle emerges from the other side of this reset.