Matthias Jaissle Tactics At Newcastle United 2026/2027: What Can His Al Ahli Evolution Teach Us About The Magpies Mission? – Data Analysis

Who Is Matthias Jaissle?

After almost five years in charge at St. James’ Park, Eddie Howe left his post as Newcastle United manager, leaving the door open for Matthias Jaissle to make the step up from Al Ahli in the Saudi Pro League to the Premier League. 

The Newcastle job will be 38-year-old Jaissle’s fourth in professional football management. 

The German coach came through the Red Bull school, managing FC Liefering in 2021 and Red Bull Salzburg from 2021 to 2023 before leaving the energy drink manufacturer’s formidable football eco-system and taking on a completely different challenge away from the European spotlight with Al Ahli following their promotion to the Saudi Pro League for the 2023/2024 campaign. 

At Red Bull Salzburg, Jaissle’s style of play was a variant of what you might associate with being typical Red Bull football. 

The aggression, counterpressing and verticality were there, but his team was also distinguished by particularly intricate patterns of play and positional rotations during all possession phases. 

Rotations and counter-movements were commonplace as Jaissle’s side sought to manipulate opponents and create pathways for progression. 

Over the past three seasons, Jaissle has overseen a significant tactical evolution of his Al Ahli project, just as Eddie Howe’s Newcastle, too, have evolved. 

This Eddie Howe at Newcastle United and Matthias Jaissle at Al Ahli data analysis examines how the two coaches moulded their respective projects over the past three seasons, comparing and contrasting the two in order to outline how we expect Matthias Jaissle to approach his Newcastle United rebuild, because that’s exactly the task he’ll have at hand. 

A year ago, Alexander Isak was a major departure from St. James’ Park, which the club had obviously not wanted to see happen.

This summer, further staples of the current Newcastle squad have left in Anthony Gordon, Sandro Tonali and Bruno Guimarães, while Lewis Hall’s future also remains uncertain if reports are to be believed.

Jaissle is not expected to come in and compete for the Premier League straight away; this will be a process.

Our analysis uses Wyscout data from the past three seasons to track how both Newcastle and Al Ahli have evolved, tactically and stylistically, relative to teams in each of their respective leagues, under the guidance of their respective coaches. 

Matthias Jaissle At Al Ahli & Eddie Howe At Newcastle United Contrasting Tactical Trajectories 2023/2024-2025/2026

We created five broad areas of performance from Wyscout’s raw data for the first visual in this analysis.

We assigned percentile ranks to both Al Ahli (pink) and Newcastle United (yellow), benchmarking them against the other teams in their respective leagues.  

Premier League sides were ranked solely against Premier League sides in each season, while Saudi Pro League sides were ranked solely against Saudi Pro League sides in each season. 

Effectively, a high score indicates a stronger performance in that specific area relative to the other sides in their league. 

Al Ahli & Newcastle United League-Relative Percentile Ranks 2023/2024-2025/2026

For Al Ahli, the biggest change occurred in the Possession & Build-up department. 

Under Jaissle, Al Ahli went from being one of the more possession-heavy sides that focused on building attacks through a high pass volume and control on the ball to one of the Saudi Pro League sides that relied the least on build-up volume. 

At the same time, their Progression & Chance Creation numbers remained relatively strong, while their Attacking Efficiency was consistently elite among their Saudi Pro League opposition. 

So, Jaissle’s side transformed stylistically from a side that wanted to control possession and build through sustained attacks in 2023/2024 into a more vertical and direct side in 2025/2026, crucially, while remaining strong at generating goals and goalscoring opportunities. 

Meanwhile, Newcastle remained fairly standard from a stylistic perspective in the possession and build-up department among Premier League sides over the last three seasons. 

However, their Progression & Chance Creation and Attacking Efficiency numbers dropped off. 

The verticality and directness in possession that Matthias Jaissle has overseen at Al Ahli is something you might expect from a coach of the Red Bull school.

This reinforces the idea that Matthias Jaissle favours progression over sterile possession.

He will likely look to push Newcastle United into a more aggressive direction with the ball over the long term, as he’s proven he can oversee that stylistic change in a team while maintaining efficiency in chance creation and goalscoring. 

Defensively, Al Ahli have actually become less active without the ball throughout Jaissle’s tenure in charge, but, importantly, they’ve become consistently more solid at the back with rising Defensive Outcome numbers. 

So, Al Ahli’s defensive improvements are more down to pressing efficiency than volume. 

In other words, Al Ahli weren’t necessarily trying to win the ball back more often in their third season under Jaissle than they had been in their first season, but they did become consistently better at making their defensive actions count when they did opt to engage, indicating a team that learned to work smarter rather than harder out of possession.

The in-possession and out-of-possession data point towards a broader tactical identity that developed at Al Ahli over the past three seasons under Matthias Jaissle: they didn’t need to dominate territory or possession to control a game.

Still, while their pressing activity dropped from 2023/2024 to 2025/2026, it’s worth noting that Al Ahli remained above-average among their Saudi Pro League peers in the Pressing & Defensive Activity department, again, as you might expect from a side led by a Red Bull-coded coach. 

During the same time period, Newcastle remained steadily below average among Premier League peers for Pressing & Defensive Activity, but their Defensive Outcome progressively worsened. 

In the defensive department, Jaissle’s job is not simply to make the Magpies press more in order to achieve better defensive outcomes. 

It is to help the team learn to make their defensive actions matter more. 

Jaissle has shown the ability to build a side that can be difficult to play through without needing to dominate defensive metrics in terms of volume. 

At Newcastle, the challenge will be to reproduce that out-of-possession efficiency. 

What Drove Al Ahli’s Change Under Matthias Jaissle Tactics 2023/2024-2025/2026?

While the previous section of analysis established how Al Ahli and Newcastle evolved over the past three seasons in broader terms, the next two sections will look to go into greater detail on exactly what specific metrics drove the change seen in both teams’ respective styles of play and performance outcomes. 

Starting with Al Ahli, Figure 2 below measures how the Saudi side’s league-relative percentile ranks between 2023/2024 and 2025/2026 evolved for individual Wyscout metrics rather than the broad areas created from individual Wyscout metrics in the previous section. 

In this image, the zero line in the middle is the reference point, while pink bars to the right indicate Al Ahli improved their performance in that particular metric (lowering the numbers from 2023/2024 to 2025/2026 for metrics where lower is better, like xG per shot against, and raising the numbers where higher is better, like xG per shot) and yellow bars to the left indicate a negative trend for the same time period.