When Jurgen Klopp took the job two years ago the Red Bull school was revered around the world as the future of football, widely praised for producing a tactical ideology that took Klopp’s gegenpressing and turned the dial to 11.

“I could not be more excited to get involved in a project like this,” Klopp said on his appointment, as if this was a great opportunity for him, rather than an extraordinary coup for Red Bull; unearned legitimacy for a corporate enterprise that has produced nothing of value.

To this day the ‘Red Bull model’ is a phrase that excites journalists and amateur tacticians, its amorphous principles so brilliantly spun by this (lest we forget) energy drink brand that we can projection onto it any fuzzy idea we want about the cutting-edge or the hipster cool, concepts regularly evoked by the nebulous tactics-speak of ‘verticality’.

Its cultural success is self-evident, its real-world impact less so. Only outstanding PR could erase from history the irritating wrinkle that Marcelo Bielsa and his disciples made Red Bull’s tactical discoveries decades ago. Only top-notch propaganda could make a ‘school’ with no notable alumni seem like a success.

Red Bull has produced Julien Nagelsmann, Jesse March, Ralph Hasenhuttl, Adi Hutter, Matthias Jaissle, and Marco Rose. End of list. The only success story is Nagelsmann, who won the Bundesliga with Bayern, but the Germany manager is widely criticised for a kamikaze style of football that has often fallen flat in Europe.

Add together all the major honours won by the rest of them (at an RB club or post-graduation) and you get seven league titles and a German Cup, which sounds good until you learn that all seven titles were won in Austria with RB Salzburg, where the Bundesliga has been hijacked by Red Bull and won ten years in a row and counting.

Take the manager out of the finishing school and they do not succeed.

Jaissle would take umbrage with that. He would argue that becoming the first manager in history to win back-to-back Asian Champions Leagues with Al-Ahli is a major achievement, but even if that is fair we can, at best, compare coaching in Saudi Arabia to coaching in Austria.

It just isn’t elite level. And neither is Jaissle.

Matthias Jaissle has seen a mixed start to life at Newcastle

We are only seven games into the Premier League season but already he looks out of his depth at Newcastle, his tactical idealism getting bludgeoned by English realism much as we saw for Marsch at Leeds, Hasenhuttl at Southampton, and – the godfather of the RB school himself – Ralf Rangnick at Manchester United.

Speaking of Man Utd there are shades of Ruben Amorim to Jaissle’s start at Newcastle, where an ultra-hard press looks hopelessly choreographed, leading to genuinely astonishing amounts of space between the lines and behind the defence. Coventry and Leeds, hardly high-scoring sides, hit four each against Newcastle before Aston Villa’s 1-0 win that really ought to have been four or five.

The Villa game continued on a theme.

Nicolas Jackson and Johan Manzambi got into two-on-two positions over and over again when a simple tackle – or misplaced Newcastle pass – exposed a team with no defensive screen.

Players pile forward and spread wide, a kind of tactical expansiveness that only makes sense when your team are easily among the richest and most powerful in the league, as RB Salzburg (or Al-Ahli) have become.

Amorim, who had only sculpted a model at Sporting, found a very similar problem. It will end the same way for Jaissle.

You can draw some comparisons to Ruben Amorim

If that sounds too reactionary then the statistics reveal the scale of the problem. Newcastle are conceding two goals per game on average. They have allowed 15 fast breaks, the most in the division.

They have made 14 errors leading to a shot, again the most in the division, and their ‘direct speed’ against is 1.52, the second-highest, a particularly damning stat given the top spots are usually occupied by clubs who choose to sit deep, therefore inviting opponents to charge ‘directly’ forward.

It is difficult to see how Newcastle overcome such basic tactical issues even if Jaissle can point to new signings still to bed in after a tumultuous summer transfer window. Sean Steur, Aladji Bamba and Bazoumana Toure are new to the Premier League and have barely featured yet.

But at this rate Jaissle will be gone before the new signings have time to settle.

The Red Bull system is a mirage, a PR stunt, an empty promise to reinvent the game disguising a hostile corporate takeover of clubs around Europe.

Newcastle are just the latest to fall for it.

More from Sporting Life

Safer gambling

We are committed in our support of safer gambling. Recommended bets are advised to over-18s and we strongly encourage readers to wager only what they can afford to lose.

If you are concerned about your gambling, please call the National Gambling Helpline / GamCare on 0808 8020 133.