Matthias Jaissle may be the unexpected answer to Newcastle's summer of chaos

Newcastle United are losing their manager, their captain and, in the past year, their best players. On the surface, it looks like a club falling apart. Yet beneath the chaos, there is a quiet confidence that this is the painful but necessary start of something different. Eddie Howe's resignation on Thursday sent shockwaves through the fanbase, especially because he had been speaking publicly about his pride in the job just 12 hours earlier, after a 4-1 pre-season loss to Bristol City. Within the club, however, the move had been building for weeks. Howe returned from his break unsure he had the energy for the scale of change required on Tyneside, and he agreed to stay only until a successor was found. Newcastle had already seen Alexander Isak force a record transfer to Liverpool last summer, leaving a team that never quite recovered and finished 12th. Sandro Tonali and Anthony Gordon were then sold for a combined fee of more than €180 million. Now captain Bruno Guimaraes has told the club he wants to join Arsenal, with a €90 million move expected in the coming days. If that happens, every member of the core that once made Newcastle dangerous will be gone. The difference this time is the structure around the club. A chief executive and sporting director have been in place for months, planning for a summer of change. What they did not plan for was Howe's departure and the Guimaraes saga. The failed pursuits of Benjamin Sesko, James Trafford and Victor Munoz forced Newcastle to reinvent their approach. Now their business is done quietly, with Ewen Jaouen, Bazoumana Toure, Sean Steur and Aladji Bamba - who some see as the long-term replacement for Guimaraes - arriving before anyone realised deals were close. Into that space steps Matthias Jaissle. The 38-year-old is in advanced talks to leave Al-Ahli and become Newcastle's next head coach, and his profile fits the new model: young, ambitious, with an intense, front-foot style and back-to-back Austrian league titles from his time at Red Bull Salzburg. Some will read this as the end of the Saudi-backed project. Newcastle's answer is that it is a new phase - and Jaissle is meant to define it. This may not be the project that promised so much a year ago, but it could be the one that finally has a clear identity.