the times | Thursday November 11 2021 2GM 77
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Howe revealed that he had not
spoken to the Saudi owners about their
long-term vision for the club.
“No, I have spoken to Amanda,” he
said, “but we have not gone into details
or been seeking assurances for two or
three or four years’ time, because it’s
not relevant at this moment. There
might come a time — I hope there does
— when we have that conversation
about the long-term vision, but it is not
now.”
Howe did say he intended to move
his family up to the north east in Janu-
ary. He insisted there had been no con-
versations about whom the club would
attempt to sign in January, no move-Michael Edwards has confirmed that he
will leave his role as Liverpool’s sporting
director at the end of the season.
Edwards has been hugely successful
in helping to transform Liverpool,
alongside the manager, Jürgen Klopp,
through clever recruitment and player
sales. He will be replaced by Julian
Ward, who was appointed assistant
sporting director in December last year.
Liverpool’s owner, Fenway Sports
Group (FSG), has made repeated
attempts to persuade Edwards to stay
but after a decade at Anfield he has
opted to move on. Mike Gordon, the
FSG president, acknowledged that it
was “disappointing to be losing” some-
one with Edwards’s acumen.
In an open letter to fans, Edwards, 42,
said: “I had always planned to cap my
time at the club to a max of ten years.
I’ve loved working here, but I am a big
Liverpool to lose transfer mastermind
believer in change. That’s how I believe
businesses/football clubs stay ahead;
you need to evolve and at the heart of
this kind of process is always people.
That evolution has always been central
to Liverpool’s history.”
It is understood that Edwards, who
joined Liverpool from Tottenham
Hotspur in 2011, does not have another
job lined up and he will not be moving
to Newcastle United, where his close
friend Eddie Howe is head coach.
Edwards is unlikely to be short of
offers, with Liverpool’s recruitment
under him key to the revival of the club’s
fortunes. The success of their signings
since 2016 has been extraordinary, with
the likes of Mohamed Salah, Sadio
Mané and Andrew Robertson all prov-
ing bargain buys and the more expen-
sive deals for Virgil van Dijk and
Alisson Becker regarded as money well
spent. Edwards has also excelled as a
negotiator in player sales, allowing Liv-
erpool to be successful while operatingwithin FSG’s self-sustaining ownership
model. The sale of Philippe Coutinho
for £142 million to Barcelona in 2018
showed Edwards’s ability to get the best
deal possible and in effect paid for Van
Dijk and Alisson. Liverpool’s net spend
under Klopp is about £140 million.
The Liverpool manager has admitted
that he was indebted to his recruitment
team, including Edwards, for pushing
the merits of Salah in the summer of- A new contract for Salah, whose
deal expires in 2023, remains important
and, if the situation is not resolved
before the end of the season, it will
become one of Ward’s first tasks. The
delay has been due to a difference in
valuation between what Liverpool are
prepared to pay Salah and what the
Egyptian and his agent are seeking.
Ward has long been regarded
internally as the best person to succeed
Edwards after joining Liverpool from
Manchester City in 2012 as the scouting
manager for Spain and Portugal.
Paul Joyce
Northern Football Correspondent
Snubbed charity in plea over
shirt rules for Boxing Day
by a handful of top-flight clubs that
were contacted by Shelter, but insisted
it would be against the rules. A spokes-
man said: “Clubs are entitled to support
charitable causes, provided it is in com-
pliance with Premier League rules.”
Top-flight clubs can support good
causes on their shirts for one match a
season by swapping their sponsor’s logo
for “charitable messaging”.
Osama Bhutta, director of cam-
paigns at Shelter, said: “We want to use
the power of football this Christmas to
raise awareness of homelessness and
what we can do to fight it. Since the start
of the pandemic more than 180,000
households have been made homeless.
That’s why we have been speaking to
people across football to launch #No-
HomeKit, a campaign to show support
for those without a safe home today.”
Allow players to take a stand, page 33The homelessness charity Shelter is to
make a renewed effort to persuade the
Premier League to waive its rules to
allow clubs playing at home on Boxing
Day to wear away kits, pointing out that
the EFL has agreed to allow the switch.
The Premier League blocked a
request from home clubs to wear their
away kits on December 26, to promote
awareness of Shelter’s campaign, on the
grounds it would breach league rules.
However, the EFL is allowing the move,
even though its rules state the “home”
kit registered by each club must be
worn for all home matches in a season.
Shelter said: “We don’t understand
why the Premier League cannot do the
same, given many EFL clubs playing at
home will be wearing away kits now.”
The Premier League was approachedMartyn Zieglerknows from his time at Liverpool, and
more are planned in the expectation of
a deal being finalised.
Gerrard had been targeted to join
Villa’s backroom staff in 2017 when
Steve Bruce was the manager but chose
instead to cut his teeth in charge of
Liverpool Under-18. He moved to
Rangers in 2018 where he overhauled a
There was a lone voice yester-
day evening on the steps of the
entrance to the Milburn Stand
at St James’ Park to serenade
the new head coach of
Newcastle United. “There’s
only one Eddie Howe!” the fan,
in a Newcastle strip from the
1990s, bellowed out in song.
As Howe exited the stadium
for the first time since signing
his 2½-year contract, a gaggle
of schoolchildren bristled
with excitement at their good
fortune. They got their selfies
with Howe but in total there
were no more than 20 people
there.
It felt such a jarring contrast to
five weeks ago when Newcastle
had become the football club with
the world’s richest owners, after
their £305 million takeover. Then,
thousands partied into the night in
the shadows of the statues of Sir
Bobby Robson and Alan Shearer.
This time there were not enough
people for Howe to pick two teams.
He eventually slipped away into a
Tyneside night in a waiting car.
When Amanda Staveley walked out
at Jesmond Dene House on October
7 at the end of a four-year pursuit of
the club to declare the 14-year occupan-
cy of Mike Ashley had ended, she
vowed Newcastle would be conquering
Europe in five to ten years. It was bullish
and it enraptured Tyneside.
By contrast, in his first official
address since succeeding Steve Bruce,
Howe painted a different picture, rarely
looking beyond Brentford, the club’s
next fixture, and certainly no further
than the nine games he has to face
before the transfer window opens.
Clubs such as Paris Saint-Germain will
clearly have to wait.
Three times Howe refused to be
drawn on the human rights record of
Saudi Arabia, whose public investment
fund (PIF) now own 80 per cent of the
club.
“For me this was a football decision
and I am absolutely delighted to be
manager of Newcastle and that is my
focus,” he said in response. “My focus is
football, running the team and manag-
ing the players — that’s all I am here to
talk about. That’s all I am going to
concern myself with.”Howe begins new era at
Newcastle with a whimper
ment on a technical director or a direct-
or of football, key areas in which the
club do not have staff.
“Success now is staying in
the Premier League,” Howe
said. “There will be some
bumps along the road. It’s not
going to be smooth. It’s going
to be a real challenge. We
know how difficult it is. We
have a big gap already to catch
teams above us.”
Howe addressed the thorny
issue of Unai Emery, whom the
club had expected to appoint as
head coach. The former Ar-
senal manager, now in charge
at the Spanish club Villarreal,
made a late U-turn, which
opened the door for Howe.
“When you interview you
don’t know how it’s gone,” he
said. “I was reading stuff in the
media almost to see where
things were going to go. I was not
getting a steer but naturally I
was delighted and so pleased
when things turned to me. I feel
honoured and privileged, it’s an
incredible moment in my life.
I’m absolutely confident we can
stay up but I make no promises.”
He then responded to the
possibility of other clubs, still
upset at the completion of the Newcas-
tle takeover, refusing to do business in
January when the transfer window
opens.
“The last thing I want to talk about is
January,” he said. “I won’t say it’s not in
my thoughts, there is certain work you
have to do and every club prepares for
transfer windows and loads of ‘what if’
situations.
“But my thought is to get the best out
of the players we have here now. When
I see all these reports linking Newcastle
with this player and that player, it
doesn’t do any good for the players who
are here reading that. We have to be
united as a football club, from top to
bottom.”
With that, it was to the pitch, where
he posed for pictures with a Newcastle
strip for barely a minute, before the
most low-key of exits.
The club moved from gestures and
declarations to pragmatism yesterday.
They didn’t sound like the richest foot-
ball club in the world any more. They
sounded like what they are, a club in
deep trouble.Martin Hardy Bruce enjoys the cricket
d s m t g w w hin
I
sp
upsetattALAN HARVEY/SNSHowe, flanked by directors Mehrdad
Ghodoussi and Amanda Staveley,
made a low-key start to life at
Newcastle, top. Steve Bruce, Howe’s
predecessor as head coach, was
in the crowd watching England’s
defeat by New Zealand in the T20
World Cup semi-final in Abu Dhabi.th
s
b
g
to
k
h
teis
c h s a m oGerrard on the touchline in
the Europa League and,
inset, lifting the Champions
League trophy as Liverpool
captain in 2005Purslow in talks with Rangers
club that had been beaten 4-0 and 5-0 by
their rivals, Celtic, in the weeks before
his arrival. His first game in charge of
Villa would be at home to Brighton &
Hove Albion on November 20, with an
emotional return to Anfield to face
Liverpool scheduled for December 11.
Gerrard’s backroom staff at Rangers
— Gary McAllister, Michael Beale,
Tommy Culshaw and Jordan Milsom
— are expected to follow him to Villa.continued from back