'Yasir instilled a discipline' - Newcastle United change 'could give an edge' amid £11.8m dream

'Really smart', 'elite', 'going against the grain'. Those were just some of the words Eddie Howe used to describe what Newcastle United have to do to 'buck the trend' and finish above sides with bigger revenues and wage bills.

Data will play its part along the way. In fact, Dominic Jordan, who was Manchester United's first director of data science, places such importance on the growing influence of intelligence that he has called it a 'revolution' in the game. The key to success? Buy-in as much as investment.

"Newcastle have the size and ability to hire the best people, to have the best data infrastructure and then to have the best processes," he told ChronicleLive. "What that leads to is trust. If I can demonstrate to one of the coaches that I am doing something which enhances their role, that function will succeed. If I'm not, it won't.

"That vision comes from the top. The teams that have been successful in data science are also the teams that have had strong, consistent and clear visions of what the club is.

"Brighton have changed managers a lot, but there has been a consistent vision in how they want to play. Brentford and Liverpool, previously, have had managers for a very long time. Their ownerships are very stable. Arsenal eventually got up there with [Mikel] Arteta. I'm not saying anything is easy but it doesn't matter what you do from a data point of view if you don't have that stable base, a north star, of where you're heading to."

Newcastle's north star? To be the best in class. Not only in youth development, women's football and coaching and innovation but, also, in data and insight and scouting and recruitment.

That will take time, but Yasir Al-Rumayyan is the most 'data-driven individual' fellow owner Jamie Reuben has met and the Newcastle chairman has 'instilled into the club a discipline of getting all the data and facts first'. Reuben, who has seen more numbers at Newcastle than any other business, has previously spoken on the Business of Sport of the Magpies 'putting data first and how that potentially could give us an edge'.

Newcastle have certainly come a long way since the takeover - appointing Michael Emmerson, for instance, as the club's first head of data and insights - but there is a reason why sporting director Paul Mitchell has called the improved use of intelligence the 'next phase of the growth of this project' after noting how clubs who were more data-informed prospered last summer during a difficult window for the Magpies.

Mitchell was the first to admit there were 'things we got wrong in our strategy' last summer - the sporting director arrived three weeks after the window opened - but the 43-year-old vowed to put a process in place where 'we can become a sustainable high performer'. Data will play its part in that and Mitchell certainly has experience in this field. Not only from his time at Monaco, RB Leipzig and Spurs - but even as far back as his spell working under Les Reed, who was the head of football development and vice-chairman at Southampton. The Saints invented the black box, where data met intuitive scouting, and Reed was hardly speaking out of turn when he suggested the club started 'a bit of a data revolution'.

"It gave you an edge in terms of getting early information through the data analysis that gave you a steer on where to go, who to watch and what to watch," he explained to ChronicleLive. "But, completing the loop, Paul was very much responsible for developing our European scouting programme where we appointed some very experienced and very talented eyes-on scouts.

"Pulling together the data and intuitive scouting gave us a bit of an edge. I often get asked how did we get to Virgil van Dijk first in the Premier League? How did we get to Sadio Mane first? How did we get to Toby Alderweireld when no one had really taken much notice of him? That was that ability to get ahead of the game. Now everyone is doing it.

"We talk a lot about Brighton now. They are very much on the ball in the same way, but we happened to build that pretty early when everyone else was still doing a lot of intuitive scouting. We always knew that people would catch up and what that meant was people like Paul who worked within that were going to be headhunted."

It is a lot harder to get to a Mane first these days and sign the Senegal star for just £11.8m, like Southampton did, but Newcastle's move for Dinamo Tbilisi youngster Vakhtang Salia feels like a sign of things to come after the Magpies stretched their scouting radius and targeted undervalued talent ahead of 'a number of other top clubs'. It is likely to be the first of many such signings in the coming years.

However, data alone is not a magic wand solution. It can lift what Jordan called this 'thin but very broad veil across football', but it works best as a complement to what experts are seeing with their eyes.

Although the temptation may be there to try and imitate a side like Brighton, whose sophisticated model has been in place for many years, Newcastle have to map their own route and there is always going to be a blend moving forward, particularly when the Magpies' character-driven approach has helped foster a togetherness that is hard to measure as Howe explained.

"The way we evaluate the game, the data we have, we have huge numbers and graphs and all sorts we get, which is great and can really help you and the players make sense of what's happened," the Newcastle boss previously said. "But you also have to go back to your eyes and your emotions because there's such a strong indicator of what's happened and what will happen in the future. There's still a balance to be had and we try to get that balance right here where we're data-led, but we're also following the human side and we don't want to lose that."