Emotional Newcastle exit was ‘more difficult’ than leaving Liverpool for man Eddie Howe ‘loved’

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Newcastle United lost coach analyst Mark Leyland to the City Football Group earlier this summer and it certainly was not an easy decision for the former Liverpool man to move on

Mark Leyland has admitted that it was ‘more difficult’ to leave Newcastle United than depart boyhood club Liverpool because the Magpies were ‘just getting started’.

Leyland spent 18 months at Newcastle as the club’s coach analyst and played his own unseen role in the black-and-whites’ transformation in that time. It fell to Leyland, for instance, to lead analysis sessions with the squad and break down information for Eddie Howe on the opposition’s strengths and weaknesses.

Leyland was a valued figure, who Howe ‘loved to bits’, and it was rather telling that the Scouser was prepared to leave his role as Liverpool’s post-match analyst to reunite with the Newcastle head coach after previously working with him at Burnley.

However, Leyland left Newcastle earlier this summer to take up a new role as head of coaching methodology at the City Football Group. This post enabled Leyland to return to the North West to be with his young family, but exiting Newcastle was far from an easy decision.

“Leaving Newcastle was probably more difficult than leaving Liverpool because I felt we had just started the process,” he told the Training Ground Guru podcast. “We were just getting started and my relationship with the coaching staff was improving daily. I was understanding more and more what the manager wanted from me.

“I was getting to a process where we were starting to work more efficiently and more effectively. It was a really difficult one.

“I’ve got three young children now. I decided to leave because it was a strain. The job was all consuming. It was seven days a week. Despite being at home some days, the workload was still 10, 12 hours a day.

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“It was probably more challenging than I imagined it to be as someone who has been local in the North West my whole life. Newcastle was an unbelievable city, but it was just something I found incredibly difficult and it probably affected my ability to perform my job to the level that I would have liked.”

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