James Bunce, the man tasked with helping Eddie Howe improve Newcastle’s performance

“We have to set our boundaries.”

When Eddie Howe aired his anxieties in Germany during pre-season, the Newcastle United head coach’s insecurities stretched beyond the arrival of a new sporting director.

One of Paul Mitchell’s first acts in that role was to appoint James Bunce — someone he worked with at Monaco — to the newly-established position of performance director. Bunce’s role handed him over-arching control of several key non-coaching departments, including medical, sports science and performance, and Howe feared his authority was being eroded.

“There’s a natural resistance when a performance director is appointed,” says Carlos Avina, Monaco’s technical director. “In my experience, head coaches see it initially as a threat because it feels like they’re having someone imposed upon them.”

That was Howe’s immediate reaction. During internal discussions, as far back as when Dan Ashworth was still in situ at St James’ Park as sporting director, he had agreed with the need for a performance director given Newcastle’s injury record last season — the third-highest rate in the Premier League, with 11 senior players unavailable simultaneously at one stage — but there was an initial apprehension that, due to their past relationship, Bunce would be ‘Mitchell’s man’, rather than an ally.

“I saw the narrative that emerged, but I wasn’t worried,” says Dan Hunt, GB Surfing’s executive performance director, who recruited Bunce for his previous role with the Premier League. “He comes in and he gets s*** done, but he’s not a threat. He’s not trying to one-up you. He comes in, links arms with people and joins the fight.”

While tension with Mitchell may have persisted, Bunce almost immediately assuaged Howe’s concerns. Bunce assured Howe he was on his side, then proved it with actions.

“I remember the first time I met him, and I recall the first time many others have met him… he just has a very special ability to make an awesome first impression,” says Ellie Maybury, head of performance for the women’s national team while Bunce was the U.S. Soccer Federation’s director of high performance. “He genuinely just wants to help.”

As Avina explains, “the performance director role has never been to impose, but to support and guide with evidence so that head coaches can make the right decisions”. Even so, as Bunce told the Training Science podcast in May 2024, his message to head coaches is: “My job is to protect you. We cannot be best friends, but we can be like a married couple.”

This relatively new (and often misunderstood) position is becoming more prominent in top-level football. “If I was to start a project from zero, the first appointment would be performance director,” Avina says. “It is the position which really creates a high-performance culture.”

Still, not every performance director holds the same responsibilities. At Newcastle, Bunce is theoretically on a hierarchical level similar to that of the head coach.

But, while Howe oversees all coaching aspects, Bunce has responsibility over the performance operation throughout the men’s, women’s and academy sides. Medical, performance, sports science, rehabilitation, nutrition, and psychology fall under his remit and, just for the men’s first team, which includes 28 staff members.

The Athletic has spoken to multiple figures at Newcastle and those who have worked with Bunce previously and we have learned:

• Mitchell’s message to Bunce upon his appointment was, “Your job is to protect the head coach at all costs”
• Bunce and his team are active on the training field, carrying laptops, meaning sessions have become more data-driven
• Training intensity and volume have not been tempered downwards, despite suggestions to the contrary, and in some cases have actually increased
• Injury incidence was down a third on last season until the November international break and, despite the small sample size, new practices seem to be taking effect, even despite some recent significant setbacks
• Player availability is Bunce’s key performance indicator
• A more formalised meeting structure for performance staff has been implemented to ensure there is “natural collaboration”, including an end-of-day debrief and at least two discussions between Bunce and Howe
• Bunce has been involved in reshaping the flow of the training ground and would be in plans for a new state-of-the-art facility
• He has little involvement in matchdays, beyond a post-game debrief with Howe, and observes games from the directors’ box alongside Mitchell

As Bunce himself told NUFCTV: “My role is to be the conductor of the most brilliant orchestra, blending our talented staff’s expertise all together to play their symphony.” This is what having a performance director actually means in practice at Newcastle.

“The job, essentially, is a management role because it’s about coordinating people,” says Yann Le Meur, who worked under Bunce at Monaco and then succeeded him as performance director. “The key is to build a clear methodology, to build routines and to align departments so that everyone can do their job properly, effectively and collaboratively. Rather than work in silos, the performance director brings departments together.”

To understand precisely why Bunce has come to be so highly regarded and what he does, some background is required.

The 39-year-old, from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, studied sports science at Portsmouth University, before interning at Southampton, initially without pay. Having progressed from bottle washing and being a general dogsbody to a youth strength and conditioning coach, Bunce served as Southampton’s head of athletic development between 2011 and 2014, working closely with youngsters such as Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Luke Shaw.

Headhunted by the Premier League in 2014, Bunce became the organisation’s head of sport science and then head of elite performance.

“Buncey is still one of the best recruitments I’ve ever made,” says Hunt, who was head of elite performance.

At the Premier League, Bunce oversaw the elite player performance plan (EPPP) — which creates standardisation across clubs with the aim of developing more homegrown players — and the introduction of a national injury surveillance project, which recorded injuries centrally. He also pioneered bio-banding, which categorises young footballers by physical maturity, rather than age, something Oxlade-Chamberlain said aided him as a late-bloomer.

“Some of the work was genuinely groundbreaking,” Hunt says. “When you consider how hostile football is, getting 20 clubs into a room is a mission in itself, never mind getting them to agree to something, yet he helped to get all of them to agree to record their injuries centrally.”

U.S. Soccer then approached Bunce and, in February 2017, he became their director of high performance, a strategic role implementing structures and overseeing standardisation across 21 academy, men’s and women’s sides. During his time there, the U.S. women won the World Cup.

“He was pivotal in shaping and executing the high-performance strategy for the whole organisation,” says Maybury. “There was no framework before James. He established a cohesive, evidence-based approach to performance across all national teams. A big part of his role was the integration of technology and data to inform decision-making and ensure we could individualise player support.

“What impressed me most was his humility as well because when it came to the women’s game, he had limited experience but sought to educate himself, rather than forcing his ideas.”

In September 2020, Mitchell, newly arrived at Monaco, called. At first, Mitchell asked for Bunce’s advice on how to tackle a rebuild at a club with 74 first-team players and a poor injury record, before making him performance director for Monaco and Cercle Brugge.

“It’s rare to find someone with so much experience,” says Le Meur. “I am not sure anyone else has ever worked as performance director for a league, national federation and clubs.”

One of Mitchell’s first calls as Newcastle sporting director was to Bunce.

Although the pair were at Southampton in the early 2010s, they did not work closely together and it was not until Monaco between 2020 and 2023 that their relationship blossomed. The duo discovered they held a shared vision for what ‘elite performance’ looks like.

“Monaco taught me that if you want to make real, systematic change, the leadership needs to be super-good and aligned,” Bunce told the Pacey Performance Podcast in March.

Cercle were in a multi-club relationship with Monaco and Avina, as the Belgian side’s sporting director, worked closely with Bunce.

“You both have to understand what you want to achieve,” Avina says. “Paul and James know each other like the back of their hands. That ensures immediate alignment and that will accelerate the integration process at Newcastle as they strive for elite performance.”

The Newcastle hierarchy wanted the performance director role to be established, as did Howe, with everyone accepting last season’s injury crisis could not be repeated. But, just as he was not informed in advance of Mitchell’s appointment, he was not given notice of Bunce’s arrival.

Bunce managed to pacify any worries Howe harboured immediately, even if he made clear he would not merely be a ‘yes man’.

“He just knows what to say in those situations,” Hunt says. “He doesn’t wade in, demanding everything, or saying, ‘You lot are f***ing up, it has to be this way’. He’ll disarm you by showing he’s not a threat, that he’s here to help and is highly capable. He’s a very good ‘critical friend’.”

Despite early difficulties in his own relationship with Howe, Mitchell told Bunce the performance director must “protect the head coach at all costs”. The way Bunce and Howe operate is collegiate and Mitchell believes the head coach has been “super receptive” to the appointment.

The pair usually speak at least twice a day, with Bunce relaying detailed information from his departments to the head coach, to ensure Howe is as informed as possible about the conditioning of every player.

While Howe and his coaching staff devise training drills, Bunce offers input on the duration and intensity of sessions, helping to condition and mould training time with a view to delivering how Newcastle want to play.

From August to November, overarching six-week training blocks were devised, then more specialised blueprints for each week were agreed upon. Every day, there are pre-training and post-training discussions, with any necessary tweaks made for illness, fatigue or change in circumstances.

Sessions have become more data-driven — Bunce described himself on the Training Science podcast as “one of the most data-informed people on the planet”. GPS data is monitored during training, for example, to ensure individual players reach their optimum output. For those above their quota, their sessions will be tempered down, for those below it, top-up exercises are introduced.

A formalised meeting structure has been implemented for performance departments, starting with an 8am catch-up, followed by wellness checks, questionnaires and blood tests for players. There are post-training debriefs with coaches to plan the next session, before a detailed end-of-day review and look-ahead chat with performance staff.

“There is so much information circulating in a club that, if you don’t have this kind of role, poor communication can then lead to poor decision-making,” says Le Meur.

Last month, Howe admitted Newcastle are “working smarter” thanks to Bunce’s “really positive impact”.

“James helped me to understand what is the best method for managing the load of players, how you can build the right injury-prevention protocols and also set the right recovery standards,” Avina says. “His methods are based on real-time science, which is not the way it used to be.”

For Bunce, the most critical performance indicator is matchday availability. It is also a key reason why his role was created at Newcastle.

“We were aligned, believing it is crucial we learn lessons, to make sure we don’t have that again,” Mitchell said in September of last season’s injury record.

The early signs have been encouraging — just as they were in Monaco, when there was an uptick in player availability from 76 per cent before Bunce’s arrival to 90 per cent in 2021-22 — even if sample size remains small.

Premier Injuries calculates the volume of injuries a team has suffered per 1,000 minutes played, or “incidence” rate. Across Howe’s three previous campaigns at Newcastle, 8.7 per 1,000 was the lowest incidence rate, while it reached 9.0 last season.

In 2024-25, up to the November international break (13 matches), that had dropped to 6.0, 33 per cent down season on season. Compared to the same stage of 2023-24, it dropped 39 per cent (from 9.8).

Currently, five players are unavailable — Sven Botman (though he made his return for the under-21s on Monday), Jamaal Lascelles, Emil Krafth, Nick Pope and Callum Wilson — and, of those, the first two were injuries sustained last season.

It must be noted that Newcastle have not faced the increased demands of the Champions League this season, but Bunce’s appointment is also with European football in mind, given his experience enhancing player availability.

Theoretically, Bunce’s methods should allow Newcastle to play even more aggressively, as Howe desires. In 2021-22, for example, Avina claims Bunce helped Cercle deliver “the most physically dominant team in Europe”, covering the furthest distance with a high percentage availability. At Monaco, meanwhile, their total distance covered, high-speed running, sprint distance and acceleration statistics increased significantly under Mitchell and Bunce.

Interestingly, while some have speculated that Bunce has overseen a tapering down in training load, the opposite has often been true. To play with the intensity Howe desires, Bunce believes players must train the same way — albeit within a controlled environment.

As Bunce told The Athletic in 2022: “The best injury prevention is good training, so having a coach that embraces sprinting and individualisation is good.”

“Individualisation” has become critical, as players are monitored closely, meaning that while the wider group may take full part in an intense session, those who need to be protected can have their loads reduced accordingly. Sandro Tonali’s return from a 10-month suspension, for example, was managed with significant input from Bunce.

Bunce is the bridge between performance department and coaches, relaying individualised information so tweaks can be made. That filters down to the academy, so that when youngsters progress to train with the seniors they are able to cope.

There is also a greater degree of accountability now, with decisions questioned in a constructive manner. Rather than immediately overhaul personnel, Bunce communicated his expectations to staff and told them they “all start from zero”.

“James places trust in his team, he empowers and motivates them, but he also creates environments where accountability is essential,” Maybury says. “He will really push for those performance standards, and will encourage every member of staff to challenge ideas.”

Bunce is significantly less involved during matches than during training. “All of my work will be done beforehand,” he told The Guardian in 2017.

Bunce — often combining white trainers with a suit, a style he has become renowned for — observes alongside Mitchell in the directors’ box. Afterwards, Bunce heads to the changing room to check in with staff and players, before going to Howe’s office for a debrief.

“How the performance director affects matchday happens long before matchday,” Le Meur says.

Bunce and Mitchell watch on from the directors’ box (Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images)

“Natural collaboration” is a phrase Bunce uses often and it is the rationale behind many of his changes, including alterations at Newcastle’s Benton training ground.

An extension has been proposed, which would see the building expanded out into a car park. Alongside increasing the footprint and allowing Newcastle to accommodate their ever-growing staff numbers, it will also facilitate a reshape of layout.

Bunce has argued Benton requires a more productive layout, believing the flow of the building affects player experiences and impacts performance. The proposed alterations will likely see coaching grouped into one area, with other departments that collaborate closely — including medical, sports science and performance — arranged in a more logical order.

The long-term plan remains for Newcastle to build a state-of-the-art facility, and Bunce would be involved in drafting designs for that. He helped deliver new training grounds at Southampton, San Diego FC and Monaco — where the changing rooms were placed centrally, with all other departments leading off 360 degrees around.

“It’s a big thing to say about a club the size of Newcastle, but they are lucky to have Buncey,” Hunt says. “For a club trying to reach ‘elite’, nobody is better suited to helping them get there.”

On The Training Science Podcast, Bunce suggested his timeline at an organisation tends to be “three or four years, maximum”. If that continues at Newcastle, his success will be measured on whether he has made lasting and sustainable off-field improvements.

“His role is not only about affecting results now, it’s about building a legacy that can keep being developed,” Le Meur says. “James has done it everywhere he’s been and he’ll do the same at Newcastle.”

Additional reporting from George Caulkin

(Top photo: Serena Taylor/Newcastle United via Getty Images)