The ‘surreal’ rise of Newcastle’s Lewis Miley, the perfect student who faced PSG

A fortnight ago Dan Coombe’s mobile phone beeped with a message from a familiar number.

Coombe is the founder of Reevo Coaching, a small company based in County Durham that specialises in coaching PE and football to school kids.

But they also offer one-on-one sessions for up-and-coming academy scholars, and Lewis Miley has been a client since he was a 14-year-old aspiring footballer looking to keep sharp with his brothers during the first Covid lockdown.

The story he tells offers some insight into the mindset of a teenager who has looked so at home for Newcastle United in the rarefied air of the Premier League.

“It was the international break and Lewis had only made his debut against Bournemouth a few days earlier, but he texted me and said: ‘Are you going to do any sessions this week?’,” Coombe recalls to i.

Reevo do their private coaching on the 3G pitch at Greenland Primary School in County Durham and Miley asked to meet at 3pm, just as school was finishing.

“I thought, ‘That’s the worst time you can come!’” Coombe says.

“Our facility is quite open, so you had all the parents there and loads of the kids stopped behind after school to watch it, shouting his name.

“I said: ‘How can you deal with that at 17?’ He said: ‘I just do’. He signed so many autographs, took so many pictures, he was there forever.

“He did that, did a session and then next week he’s playing against PSG. I just thought, ‘Wow, this guy is special’. It’s not gone to his head one bit.”

Miley is the ordinary teenager from County Durham doing extraordinary things. Newcastle knew they had an exceptional player in their academy – even before the injury crisis that forced Eddie Howe’s hand into playing him he’d been told he would be part of the first team squad this year – but few could have predicted just how impressive his immediate impact would be.

Kieran Trippier believes he’s the “future of Newcastle” while Brazil international Bruno Guimaraes has been left stunned by his natural ability and football IQ. Dressing room insiders tell i that it is his maturity that most sticks out. He’s not fazed by anything.

A big part of that is down to his upbringing. He comes from a family of aspiring footballers – older brother Jamie is a highly-rated tigerish midfielder at Newcastle, rehabilitating a lateral collateral ligament tear that has probably prevented him from taking the field alongside his sibling during the club’s injury crisis.

Younger brother Mason is a box-to-box midfielder in the Magpies academy, while the youngest of the four boys, Layton, is a defensive midfielder and part of Sunderland’s academy.

Coombes has seen all of them and believes “all four will be professional footballers”, which is surely a testament to dad Mick and mother Maxine, who have spent hours ferrying the brothers to training sessions and matches.

Miley always stood out: one North East scout who spoke to i dug out notes that highlighted his technique and football brain. “He has an instinctive knack for finding space,” he’d written, the crispness of his long passing stuck in his memory.

With Reevo he does passing drills where mannequins and decoys are placed to encourage speed of thought and technique. “Some of the stuff he pulls out is just unbelievable. But he’s been like that since he was 14,” Coombe says.

Marry that natural technique to his temperament and you perhaps have the secret to his rapid rise. Football has always been an obsession for Miley, who even preferred a private coaching session to his end-of-year prom in 2022 and there is likely much more to come as he gains experience.

So far, he has mostly played for Newcastle in the No 6 or 8 role, stationed deeper in the midfield engine room to allow Guimaraes free licence to roam. But those who have seen him play youth football believe his natural dribbling and ball-carrying ability lend themselves to the sort of evolution Jude Bellingham has made to a more attacking, offensive role.

Coombe first saw Miley as a 10-year-old playing for Tanfield Lea Primary School, regularly dribbling the ball the length of the field before scoring. He played as a No 10 or winger and would regularly score 30 to 40 goals a season.

You sometimes have to remind yourself that he only left school in May last year, departing Tanfield School in Stanley, County Durham with “good GCSEs across the board”, remembered as a diligent, popular, caring student who, his teachers note, never handed his homework in late. When he went on day release with Newcastle’s academy, he worked double time to catch up.

His teachers at Tanfield School describe seeing him going up against – and outplaying – Kylian Mbappe and Bruno Fernandes over the last week as a “surreal experience”. And chatting to them, the pride in their former pupil shines through.

“It hit home when you saw him last Tuesday on the pitch against PSG and you think, ‘He was sitting in one of our classrooms a year ago’,” Alex Jeffrey, head of PE at Tanfield, says.

“I don’t think anyone had a bad word against him, ever. I’ve spoken to members of staff across all departments and every single staff member has the same thing to say about him – how lovely natured he was, how hard working and determined he was in everything he did.

“Obviously we knew he was going on to play football – he probably knew that as well – but it never stopped him in his education, he was always very determined, always had a good network of friends, liked by everyone, kept his head down.

“All he ever got was positives in his behaviour record.”

He was a member of the school’s all-conquering futsal side that made the national finals at St George’s Park as a Year Nine. Head of year Grant Parker says: “You just knew he was going to be massively successful, everything he did he went into it to be the best he could be.”

The sky is the limit for Miley if he continues on his current trajectory and manages to avoid the pratfalls that have derailed previous wonderkids. There seems little chance of that.

“He’s one of those kids where you just wish him the best with everything because the way he conducts himself, it’s all top class,” Coombe says.

“He told me the other day he’d been up to the Metro Centre to do some shopping and I was thinking, ‘You can’t go to places like that anymore’. He went to Starbucks for a coffee and there were 15 or 16 people stopping him for a photo but he takes it all in his stride.

“His life is changing and it’ll get more difficult for him but he’s just taking it all so well.”