Jose Mourinho to Newcastle please: His passive-aggressive whingeing is perfect for the Toon

It’s fair to say Eddie Howe will have had better Tuesday mornings. Joelinton ruled out for the season and then the big one: Jose Mourinho finally sacked by Roma and free to commit full time to looming over the beleaguered Newcastle boss. It’s also massively, unnecessarily cold and we can only assume even more so in Newcastle.

Mourinho’s Roma reign descended into the now-familiar tale of passive-aggressive sniping and gaslighting, grumblings about players, blame-shifting and ultimately the complete breakdown of the relationship between manager, bosses, fans and players, with a club left in a bewildered and unhappy mess.

It is a tale as old as time. Mourinho has answered none of the questions that dogged him after his most recent spells at Tottenham, Manchester United and Chelsea but instead reinforced the same old tropes. A manager who can no longer coax consistent top-level performances from a squad week in, week out but can still on occasion rekindle the old fire and raise his and their game for knockout games, a manager whose use of negging as a motivational tactic simply doesn’t work on modern players and whose tactics are outdated and have been overtaken over the last two decades by younger, more progressive coaches.

That really should be that for Mourinho as a top-tier coach. No elite European club, or one with aspirations in that direction, should touch him now. The logical next steps for the erstwhile Special One would now appear to be international football or the Saudi coin.

READ: Sacked Jose Mourinho above Jurgen Klopp in our top 10 Premier League managers list

But that’s not what we want to happen. We want Newcastle to sack Eddie Howe and replace him with Mourinho. What’s even better is that we do think there is a genuine possibility they might do this.

To be absolutely clear, this is what we want Newcastle to do, not what we think they should do. Newcastle fans should be appalled at the prospect and our strong advice to them would be not to be charmed or won over by the idea of Mourinho. It is an idea long tattered and faded by the passage of time. Do not under any circumstances give your club even the vaguest hint of an idea that you might be okay with or even supportive of it as an idea.

For the rest of us, though? Absolutely Newcastle should do it. The Barclays is, quite simply, far more Barclays with Mourinho gaslighting his way around the place. And is there a better place in Our League for him to be doing that right now than Newcastle? No, there is not. Unless – and again we can’t stress this enough – you are connected in any way with Newcastle or are in any way invested in their being successful. This is absolutely not about that.

One of the key reasons why Mourinho to Newcastle is so appealing is that Newcastle are currently in an illogical and indefensible funk about the rules meaning they’re not allowed to simply buy the league. There are myriad valid concerns about money and ownership structures and competitiveness in football and all the rest of it, but Newcastle’s is no noble crusade to level the playing field. They want to level their competitors.

Just as rants about officials from Arteta or Klopp or whoever are never about the greater good but always self-interest, so too Newcastle’s current supposedly altruistic quest for fairness/being allowed to spend as much as they want on the players they want and crush all opposition at their feet.

Now, Eddie Howe in the year 2024 is very clearly a better and more viable football coach than Jose Mourinho. His methods are more conducive to long-term progress, more agreeable to current players and more likely to succeed in a game that has changed enormously since Mourinho was last a consistently successful boss.

But is Eddie Howe a better frontman for a crusade of illogical, incoherent, unsupportable whingeing about the sheer unfairness of something outside his control that is preventing him securing the world domination he craves and deserves? Not even a contest, is it?

Mourinho might have been left behind in almost every other aspect of football management, but he can still do passive-aggressive post-match complaining with the very best of them. Just imagine him after another narrow defeat, another player lost to injury, dark mentions of Manchester City but for some reason absolutely none of Chelsea. He’d be in his element. Our League would have one of its most compelling main characters back.

Sure, it’d soon get boring again but the good news – and this really is good news for everyone, including Newcastle fans – is that it would all be over within a couple of years anyway.

Come on, Newcastle, you know what needs to be done. Bring him home.