Farewell, Kieran Trippier, one of Newcastle's greatest signings

AFC BournemouthArsenalAston VillaBrentfordBrighton & Hove AlbionBurnleyChelseaCrystal PalaceEvertonFulhamLeeds UnitedLiverpoolManchester CityManchester UnitedNewcastle UnitedNottingham ForestSunderlandTottenham HotspurWest Ham UnitedWolverhampton WanderersScores & ScheduleStandingsFantasyThe Athletic FC NewsletterPodcastsMan Utd Table Carrick OfferThe Liverpool Blame GameRatcliffe’s Estimated Wealth FallsPL PredictionsTrippier's January 2022 signing was transformative for Newcastle United Lindsey Parnaby/Getty Images Share articleThere are good signings and bad signings and plenty in between. There are players who come and go, players who come and stay and, very rarely, players whose coming changes everything, from the way you feel about your club, to the way others look at you, to the way your team play. Kieran Trippier has been one of those players for Newcastle United; a ripple-maker, a gloom-buster and a standard-bearer. There have not been many like him during Newcastle’s recent existence.  Kevin Keegan is the big one, the foundation stone on which this version of the club got built, whose arrival in 1982 was a jolt of adrenaline when they were treading water in the old Second Division (today’s Championship). Keegan the player paved the way for Keegan the manager — equally startling — who, in turn, bought Alan Shearer for a world record fee of £15million in 1996. Like Keegan, Trippier was in his early thirties and a serving England international when he joined. Unlike Keegan or Shearer, he was not a forward but a full-back, which isn’t traditionally a position fans swoon over. In his case, it was about context and commitment; back then, in early January 2022, Newcastle were in the bottom three of the Premier League and had won a single game in any competition all season. They were adrift and listing, and Trippier was a lifejacket. The defender was fresh from winning La Liga with Atletico Madrid. He was giving up Champions League knockout-stage football for a team flirting with the Championship, with no get-out clause in the event of relegation. Trippier was the first new player to sign post-takeover, and when Shearer interviewed him for The Athletic, he described him as “an embodiment of where they want to go but grounded in the mucky business of now”. Trippier said, “I’m not scared to throw myself into the deep end.” Four years on, Newcastle are unrecognisable. If this season has not been wholly palatable, it has still taken them to the Champions League’s round of 16 for the first time and to the semi-finals of the Carabao Cup — the trophy (their first in domestic football for 70 years) they lifted at Wembley 14 months ago. They have some very fine players — Bruno Guimaraes, Sandro Tonali — but Trippier was the vanguard. It all flowed from him. Dan Burn, the Newcastle and England defender, who joined later the same month, tells The Athletic: “I don’t think anything that has happened here would have happened without Tripps signing.” Amanda Staveley, the driving force behind the club’s takeover, calls him “transformative and brilliant — he took a huge leap of faith in us. Newcastle owe him a huge debt. We all do.” Head coach Eddie Howe has a few words for him: “Unbelievable” and “gigantic” and “magnificent”. Warren Barton, the right-back for Keegan’s team of “Entertainers” who came close to winning the Premier League 30 years ago, calls him “the most important signing in the club’s recent history. He’s a hero. He’ll always be loved in Newcastle”. Thomas Concannon from Wor Flags, the fans group, says of Trippier: “He completely changed our mentality as a club. The bloke’s been an absolute legend.” Now 35, Trippier is leaving at the end of the season; Sunday’s fixture against West Ham United will be his final home game as a Newcastle player, and the East Stand at St James’ Park will be plastered with banners in his honour. His spell at the club has been touched by difficulty, on and off the pitch, but he has always fronted up, always grasped the nettle, always been there, a game-changer in every sense. “Kieran was fundamental to our plans,” Staveley tells The Athletic. Staveley was the financier who had spent years attempting to buy Newcastle and, backed by the contentious support of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, finally succeeded. She was a co-owner and, in the early days, effectively charged with running a club who had been flatlining under the previous stewardship of Mike Ashley. Optimism had returned to Tyneside, but it remained a desperate moment. The team lacked coherence, direction, belief. “I remember talking to Graeme Jones (the first-team coach) about Kieran just as we bought the club,” Staveley says. “We’d had a lot of time to look at the business plan and the players we wanted to attract, and he was top of the list. We knew he was a great leader, technically brilliant, hard-working, and his age didn’t worry me because we knew how professional he was. He embodied the type of club we wanted to build.” Newcastle understood that Trippier was looking to come home after two-and-a-half years in Madrid to be closer to his family, but would he really give up Atletico for a struggle against demotion? “He was doing incredibly well in Spain and he was very much loved; it wasn’t like anybody (at Atletico) wanted him to leave,” Staveley says. “We needed to get our defence right, otherwise we wouldn’t have had any hope. I was going to matches thinking, ‘How the hell are we going to turn this around?’. He was just so open to everything.” Ah yes, of course: Trippier just came to Newcastle for the cash, right? “Initially, everyone said it was financially motivated, but I can tell those people it wasn’t,” Howe said to reporters ahead of this weekend’s match. “The actual decision to come here in the first place needs to be celebrated, because he’s gone from a team that was hugely successful in Spain to a team that’s fighting for its life. In his position, that was a big risk, but he took that fight on.” Burn agrees with this assessment. “It was a massive risk for him,” he says. “There was such a big thing made when the new owners came in about all these players we were going to sign, but until someone actually made that jump, players wouldn’t have come. Him showing that he was prepared to take that gamble opened the door for everyone else. He’s just been huge around the club.” Howe recalls Trippier’s first team talk. “When you come into a new dressing room, that feeling on your first day at a club is still very, very difficult for a player,” the head coach says. “We were in a relegation battle, and he stepped forward and delivered a speech of real leadership, real strength. I was like, ‘Oof, that’s powerful. That’s positive. That’s a player throwing down the gauntlet to everybody else’. “Kieran talked about what we had to do to stay in the league, what we’ve got to do to be successful. I’d worked with him before (at Burnley a decade earlier), but I left that meeting with a really positive impression of him and how much he’d grown and matured as a person, how much his experience had helped him. “He hasn’t really changed from that period onwards. Even this week, you can see he still has that desire to be successful, that desire to win. That speaks volumes.” Trippier made an instant impact at a training ground where confidence was subterranean. “Kieran just automatically raised the levels,” then Newcastle midfielder Isaac Hayden tells The Athletic. “You thought straight away, ‘This is the kind of player we’re trying to attract and if you don’t keep up, you’re going to be left behind’. He was the one that changed it all.” “The way he carried himself, the way he played, I just watched and observed him,” says another team-mate of that time Matt Ritchie. “I learned so much from him.” Like plenty of others, Staveley calls Trippier a “standard-bearer,” but what does that actually mean? “It means he does everything, has everything,” she says. “It’s a combination of hard work, tenacity, being brave and having extraordinary talent. He’s across every vertical. He’s brilliant. He took fitness incredibly seriously and that sets the tone in a dressing room, particularly when you have younger players who are coming to terms with being a footballer. “We knew he would be a great leader for us. If you take on that kind of role, you have to wear many, many hats. You have to talk to referees, you have to strike the right balance, you’ve got to inspire, on the pitch and in training. The workload he had is exhausting; I don’t think we always appreciate how hard footballers work. It can be pretty soulless. You need people of Kieran’s stature. Whenever I watched him play, I felt comfortable, happy.” Trippier’s debut was an abject FA Cup defeat at home to third-division Cambridge United; he was the one who cajoled his fellow players back onto the pitch to acknowledge the crowd afterwards. “As daft as it sounds, even in that game, you could see him dictating orders to the back four,” Concannon says. “And yeah, OK, we went on to lose, but you could see there was a mentality thing there. In the games that followed, he became the complete leader.” Injury meant that Trippier only started six games for Newcastle that season, but of those, Cambridge was the sole defeat and he travelled everywhere with the squad, which had by then been further strengthened with the signings of Burn, Guimaraes and Chris Wood. “It was the way he went about his work,” Burn says. “It just makes other people follow. I’ll miss him as a player, but I’ll miss him even more as a person who I’ve got to come in and see every day. “He’s always got a story to tell. He’s always laughing and joking on. Whether it’s that or playing two-touch with the lads… We don’t have cliques, but he brings people together and makes us stronger because of it.” Newcastle stayed up comfortably in the end, and then they flew, reaching the Carabao Cup final the following season, losing to Manchester United, and finishing fourth in the Premier League to qualify for the Champions League. Trippier played 46 matches in all competitions, tearing up the right wing, firing in crosses and free kicks. In huddles before matches, he would say the same thing: “Pressure is a privilege.” It is a phrase he personified. “He played an unbelievable part in that run,” Howe says. “He was pivotal. He transformed our defensive output. That’s probably my biggest memory of him.” There have been some challenging episodes along the way. Trippier was forced to confront his footballing mortality up close when Newcastle signed the exceptional Tino Livramento, then 20, in summer 2023. There were losses of form and there were personal issues. He was hurt when Guimaraes was given the on-field captaincy the following year and, more than once, he nearly moved on, although Howe put a stop to that. Even if Trippier was not a guaranteed starter, he was way too valuable. Through all of it, Trippier brought reliability and dependability to Newcastle. “He’s had different things going on here, but he’s been big enough and open enough to speak about them with the lads,” Burn says, “and it’s made me like and respect him even more. He’ll go down as one of the best right-backs in the country and probably the best right-back ever to play for Newcastle, but as a person I feel very, very lucky to have crossed paths with him.” Staveley left Newcastle two summers ago, but still regularly texts with and speaks to Trippier. “He’s the kind of person you’d want to work with your whole life, but he’s become a very dear friend, too,” she says. “Lexi, my son, adores him. That’s because of who he is. It was more than football. It was what he did in the community, behind the scenes. He spoke to our women’s team, which was a huge passion of mine. He was like an ambassador.” Newcastle’s return to Wembley last season was his zenith. They beat a title-bound Liverpool 2-1 in that Carabao Cup final, a scoreline which does not do justice to the dominance of Howe’s team, their composure, discipline and professionalism, all the qualities Trippier had brought with him from Spain. For him, it was a throwback sort of day; patrolling the flanks and prodding and irrepressible, delivering the whipped free kick which Burn headed in for the opening goal. “People talk about that cross for Dan Burn and having an impact in the tunnel before they went out,” Concannon says, “but the bit that made me relax the most was a ball over the top and he just cushioned it back to (goalkeeper) Nick Pope with his head. It was so calm and collected and it was like, ‘That is perfect’. Any other player might panic in that situation, and he was just completely chilled. That helped get us over the line. He will be a big, big miss and very tough to replace.” A string of injuries to Livramento has meant Trippier’s final season at Newcastle has been busier than might have been anticipated and, if he is not quite the same player now as he nears 36 — less capable of bombing up the pitch — he is still a focal point. After an awful 3-2 defeat to Brentford in February, he apologised to fans and took responsibility. “I don’t hide. I don’t shy away from it,” he told the club’s website. “We have to reset.” They won their next match. Not too long ago, on a player visit to the Royal Victoria Infirmary hospital in Newcastle, Trippier was asked by The Athletic to reflect on his achievements at the club. When he had spoken to Shearer for us, he said of himself, “I have no regrets and I always look forwards,” but sometimes looking back is unavoidable. “I didn’t expect it to go so fast,” he said. “From where we were back then, to win a trophy three years later, to be in the Champions League twice, it means there’s a lot of expectation on the players now, on the whole club, because of what we’ve done. It’s a pressure, but pressure should be a privilege and we should expect it. Newcastle is a huge club. We’ve got to take that responsibility on our shoulders.” Trippier had won things before, won things elsewhere, but how did it feel to have played a part in Newcastle ending their magnificent obsession? How did it feel to be a legend? “Legend is a big word,” he replied with a smile. “If a supporter is looking at it like that then, y’know, perfect,” he said. The privilege has all been ours. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms