“If we don’t have the ball, we want to get it back as soon as we can and always compete, always make it difficult for the other team to win against us. Always defend so hard that it takes an extra pass and an extra pass and an extra pass, and then enjoy it when we have the ball.”
With this pair of sentences, Arne Slot is articulating the mindset he demands of his Liverpool players: in short, intensity without the ball and expression with it. It is no simple formula, yet his record so far suggests that Slot has conveyed his message with the required clarity since coming to Anfield as Jürgen Klopp’s successor.
Stepping into the shoes of a Kop hero is a huge task, but Slot, with his calm demeanour and clear vision, has earned impressive early results. He secured 16 wins from his first 18 matches, and at the halfway stage of the league phase, Liverpool were the only Champions League team left with a perfect record. Players are said to appreciate the attention to detail of the man who led Feyenoord to the 2022 Conference League final and the Eredivisie title in 2022/23.
His unruffled manner is certainly apparent as he explains his vision to Champions Journal at Liverpool’s Kirkby training centre. Still in his tracksuit, the 46-year-old Dutchman arrives fresh from a training session to sit down and address a range of topics – among them, the development of his coaching philosophy.
If Barcelona, as he elaborates here, were a source of inspiration for the former Cambuur, AZ Alkmaar and Feyenoord boss, this vision was already forming towards the end of his playing days as an attacking midfielder with FC Zwolle, NAC Breda, Sparta Rotterdam and – crucially, from 2010–13 – PEC Zwolle. Now he has the opportunity to put it all into practice at Anfield, where, as Slot has fast discovered, a culture of excellence prevails.
“I inherited a lot of quality, but maybe even more importantly, I inherited a team, a club, that was already fully focused on hard work and trying to get the best out of the team and individuals every single day,” he reflects, while understanding that the job of maintaining, and even enhancing, that culture has only just begun.
I saw Liverpool playing a lot of games in the Champions League or the Premier League when I was young, watching Match of the Day. I was in the stadium once – five or six years ago – and now I know what it is to work here and be here. It’s a special club. I’m fortunate. I’m lucky that I’ve worked at a few special clubs already, and I think what makes this club, and Feyenoord as well, special is that it’s a club that’s mainly for the people, and the fans are so enthusiastic, so supportive – I think even more than at some other clubs.
Fans in general can have a big impact on the game because if you create chances and do good things, and the fans are really loud, that helps the team and also sends a signal to the other team: “Oh, we’re having some problems here.” The louder the fans are, the better for the home team and, like you’ve just mentioned, Feyenoord as well as Liverpool have fans that are really loud. They don’t need a lot to support the team. There are clubs where you need to do a lot of good things before they start to support you, but here the stadium is on fire from the first second, like it was at Feyenoord.
A lot. You only have to look at the history of the club and the managers that have worked here to understand how special it is. I’m really lucky to have worked at a beautiful club like Feyenoord and now to work at a beautiful club like Liverpool, with some extra luck – if you can call it that – because we have great players to work with. So it was, of course, a very special moment when I knew I’d become the next Liverpool manager – for the history of the club but definitely also the quality of the players I inherited from Jürgen.
I had the advantage that I spoke English at my former clubs in team meetings, so it helps with your football language. And it all starts with having a clear game idea. If you have that, you can start thinking, “How do I communicate this to my players?” What was a disadvantage was that, in pre-season, it took quite a long time before we had all the players in. I think nine or ten players came in two weeks before the first league game, but the ones who were already there did such an amazing job – they were already so good at what we wanted from them that it helped the others to come in. In combination with that, I don’t think we changed a lot. We kept a lot of things the same because they were in a really good place with Jürgen and Pepijn [Lijnders]. That was also a reason why the ones who came in only two weeks before the season could adapt quite easily, because so many things were still the same.
I wouldn’t say surprised, but I’ve said it many times already about the culture of this team, the culture of this club, the hard work, the players showing up every day in training sessions, trying to bring the best out of them... Sometimes, if you come to a new club, you need to get that culture in, but that was absolutely not necessary here. It was nice to see that it was just like Jürgen told me, because he’d told me that that was the culture, and I experienced this from the start.
I think the characteristics that all teams have that have done special things or won league titles or Champions Leagues, especially in the last few years – they’re all on the front foot, trying to press as high as they can, trying to play out from the back. Those are the characteristics that you can expect from us as well. If we don’t have the ball, we want to have it back as soon as we can. And, because we have so many quality players, it’s good to have the ball a lot, so that’s why we want it as much as we can – because if so many quality players have the ball a lot, it’ll normally lead to success. Of course, they need to work hard without the ball and that’s also one of the main characteristics of a successful team – that they put a lot of effort in if they don’t have the ball.
I see a successful manager as a manager that has a playing style you can see day in and day out, and that he can combine with success. Now, if you’re working at a lower league table team, you can’t expect to win the league, so success could be to stay in the league but with a certain playing style. That playing style doesn’t always have to be the same, but if you’re able to implement your playing style – no matter what it is – and bring the best out of the players, to develop individuals and a team, that will eventually lead to success. If you work at clubs like Liverpool, you always have to aim to be winning something and that’s not going to be easy because you’re in competition with a lot of good teams. It’s really hard, but at a club like Liverpool, you always have to compete for trophies, and that’s what we’ll try to do in the coming year and the years to come as well.
If you asked my father, he’d say, “He does everything differently as a manager to how he was as a player.” I always say, “I was not so fast, some people called me slow, and that helped me a bit with game insight.” I needed the team to get to a certain level because, individually, I couldn’t go around three players – I always needed my team-mates to be where I could play them my passes. That helped me to understand that we needed certain patterns. I had to think a lot about the game and, at a certain age, I felt, “OK, if a team-mate of mine plays this ball, it normally leads to losing the ball, and if we play a different ball, it leads to success.” At the end of my career, it became more and more clear to me. And I was lucky enough then that the Barcelona team started playing and I saw similar patterns, not in terms of how we play but more: “OK, this ball which we sometimes play – and Barcelona constantly play – leads to success.” And that helped me to create my own philosophy about football.
That’s quite difficult for me to tell you because I wasn’t involved. In the end, you need a great team spirit and some special individual quality to win tournaments like the Champions League. It’s difficult for me to judge, but the only thing I know is how special Anfield can be on European nights. Maybe that has something to do with it as well – that in difficult moments the fans have helped the team.
Additional reporting by Simon Hart
“If we don’t have the ball, we want to get it back as soon as we can and always compete, always make it difficult for the other team to win against us. Always defend so hard that it takes an extra pass and an extra pass and an extra pass, and then enjoy it when we have the ball.”
With this pair of sentences, Arne Slot is articulating the mindset he demands of his Liverpool players: in short, intensity without the ball and expression with it. It is no simple formula, yet his record so far suggests that Slot has conveyed his message with the required clarity since coming to Anfield as Jürgen Klopp’s successor.
Stepping into the shoes of a Kop hero is a huge task, but Slot, with his calm demeanour and clear vision, has earned impressive early results. He secured 16 wins from his first 18 matches, and at the halfway stage of the league phase, Liverpool were the only Champions League team left with a perfect record. Players are said to appreciate the attention to detail of the man who led Feyenoord to the 2022 Conference League final and the Eredivisie title in 2022/23.
His unruffled manner is certainly apparent as he explains his vision to Champions Journal at Liverpool’s Kirkby training centre. Still in his tracksuit, the 46-year-old Dutchman arrives fresh from a training session to sit down and address a range of topics – among them, the development of his coaching philosophy.
If Barcelona, as he elaborates here, were a source of inspiration for the former Cambuur, AZ Alkmaar and Feyenoord boss, this vision was already forming towards the end of his playing days as an attacking midfielder with FC Zwolle, NAC Breda, Sparta Rotterdam and – crucially, from 2010–13 – PEC Zwolle. Now he has the opportunity to put it all into practice at Anfield, where, as Slot has fast discovered, a culture of excellence prevails.
“I inherited a lot of quality, but maybe even more importantly, I inherited a team, a club, that was already fully focused on hard work and trying to get the best out of the team and individuals every single day,” he reflects, while understanding that the job of maintaining, and even enhancing, that culture has only just begun.
I saw Liverpool playing a lot of games in the Champions League or the Premier League when I was young, watching Match of the Day. I was in the stadium once – five or six years ago – and now I know what it is to work here and be here. It’s a special club. I’m fortunate. I’m lucky that I’ve worked at a few special clubs already, and I think what makes this club, and Feyenoord as well, special is that it’s a club that’s mainly for the people, and the fans are so enthusiastic, so supportive – I think even more than at some other clubs.
Fans in general can have a big impact on the game because if you create chances and do good things, and the fans are really loud, that helps the team and also sends a signal to the other team: “Oh, we’re having some problems here.” The louder the fans are, the better for the home team and, like you’ve just mentioned, Feyenoord as well as Liverpool have fans that are really loud. They don’t need a lot to support the team. There are clubs where you need to do a lot of good things before they start to support you, but here the stadium is on fire from the first second, like it was at Feyenoord.
A lot. You only have to look at the history of the club and the managers that have worked here to understand how special it is. I’m really lucky to have worked at a beautiful club like Feyenoord and now to work at a beautiful club like Liverpool, with some extra luck – if you can call it that – because we have great players to work with. So it was, of course, a very special moment when I knew I’d become the next Liverpool manager – for the history of the club but definitely also the quality of the players I inherited from Jürgen.
I had the advantage that I spoke English at my former clubs in team meetings, so it helps with your football language. And it all starts with having a clear game idea. If you have that, you can start thinking, “How do I communicate this to my players?” What was a disadvantage was that, in pre-season, it took quite a long time before we had all the players in. I think nine or ten players came in two weeks before the first league game, but the ones who were already there did such an amazing job – they were already so good at what we wanted from them that it helped the others to come in. In combination with that, I don’t think we changed a lot. We kept a lot of things the same because they were in a really good place with Jürgen and Pepijn [Lijnders]. That was also a reason why the ones who came in only two weeks before the season could adapt quite easily, because so many things were still the same.
I wouldn’t say surprised, but I’ve said it many times already about the culture of this team, the culture of this club, the hard work, the players showing up every day in training sessions, trying to bring the best out of them... Sometimes, if you come to a new club, you need to get that culture in, but that was absolutely not necessary here. It was nice to see that it was just like Jürgen told me, because he’d told me that that was the culture, and I experienced this from the start.
I think the characteristics that all teams have that have done special things or won league titles or Champions Leagues, especially in the last few years – they’re all on the front foot, trying to press as high as they can, trying to play out from the back. Those are the characteristics that you can expect from us as well. If we don’t have the ball, we want to have it back as soon as we can. And, because we have so many quality players, it’s good to have the ball a lot, so that’s why we want it as much as we can – because if so many quality players have the ball a lot, it’ll normally lead to success. Of course, they need to work hard without the ball and that’s also one of the main characteristics of a successful team – that they put a lot of effort in if they don’t have the ball.
I see a successful manager as a manager that has a playing style you can see day in and day out, and that he can combine with success. Now, if you’re working at a lower league table team, you can’t expect to win the league, so success could be to stay in the league but with a certain playing style. That playing style doesn’t always have to be the same, but if you’re able to implement your playing style – no matter what it is – and bring the best out of the players, to develop individuals and a team, that will eventually lead to success. If you work at clubs like Liverpool, you always have to aim to be winning something and that’s not going to be easy because you’re in competition with a lot of good teams. It’s really hard, but at a club like Liverpool, you always have to compete for trophies, and that’s what we’ll try to do in the coming year and the years to come as well.
If you asked my father, he’d say, “He does everything differently as a manager to how he was as a player.” I always say, “I was not so fast, some people called me slow, and that helped me a bit with game insight.” I needed the team to get to a certain level because, individually, I couldn’t go around three players – I always needed my team-mates to be where I could play them my passes. That helped me to understand that we needed certain patterns. I had to think a lot about the game and, at a certain age, I felt, “OK, if a team-mate of mine plays this ball, it normally leads to losing the ball, and if we play a different ball, it leads to success.” At the end of my career, it became more and more clear to me. And I was lucky enough then that the Barcelona team started playing and I saw similar patterns, not in terms of how we play but more: “OK, this ball which we sometimes play – and Barcelona constantly play – leads to success.” And that helped me to create my own philosophy about football.
That’s quite difficult for me to tell you because I wasn’t involved. In the end, you need a great team spirit and some special individual quality to win tournaments like the Champions League. It’s difficult for me to judge, but the only thing I know is how special Anfield can be on European nights. Maybe that has something to do with it as well – that in difficult moments the fans have helped the team.
Additional reporting by Simon Hart
“If we don’t have the ball, we want to get it back as soon as we can and always compete, always make it difficult for the other team to win against us. Always defend so hard that it takes an extra pass and an extra pass and an extra pass, and then enjoy it when we have the ball.”
With this pair of sentences, Arne Slot is articulating the mindset he demands of his Liverpool players: in short, intensity without the ball and expression with it. It is no simple formula, yet his record so far suggests that Slot has conveyed his message with the required clarity since coming to Anfield as Jürgen Klopp’s successor.
Stepping into the shoes of a Kop hero is a huge task, but Slot, with his calm demeanour and clear vision, has earned impressive early results. He secured 16 wins from his first 18 matches, and at the halfway stage of the league phase, Liverpool were the only Champions League team left with a perfect record. Players are said to appreciate the attention to detail of the man who led Feyenoord to the 2022 Conference League final and the Eredivisie title in 2022/23.
His unruffled manner is certainly apparent as he explains his vision to Champions Journal at Liverpool’s Kirkby training centre. Still in his tracksuit, the 46-year-old Dutchman arrives fresh from a training session to sit down and address a range of topics – among them, the development of his coaching philosophy.
If Barcelona, as he elaborates here, were a source of inspiration for the former Cambuur, AZ Alkmaar and Feyenoord boss, this vision was already forming towards the end of his playing days as an attacking midfielder with FC Zwolle, NAC Breda, Sparta Rotterdam and – crucially, from 2010–13 – PEC Zwolle. Now he has the opportunity to put it all into practice at Anfield, where, as Slot has fast discovered, a culture of excellence prevails.
“I inherited a lot of quality, but maybe even more importantly, I inherited a team, a club, that was already fully focused on hard work and trying to get the best out of the team and individuals every single day,” he reflects, while understanding that the job of maintaining, and even enhancing, that culture has only just begun.
I saw Liverpool playing a lot of games in the Champions League or the Premier League when I was young, watching Match of the Day. I was in the stadium once – five or six years ago – and now I know what it is to work here and be here. It’s a special club. I’m fortunate. I’m lucky that I’ve worked at a few special clubs already, and I think what makes this club, and Feyenoord as well, special is that it’s a club that’s mainly for the people, and the fans are so enthusiastic, so supportive – I think even more than at some other clubs.
Fans in general can have a big impact on the game because if you create chances and do good things, and the fans are really loud, that helps the team and also sends a signal to the other team: “Oh, we’re having some problems here.” The louder the fans are, the better for the home team and, like you’ve just mentioned, Feyenoord as well as Liverpool have fans that are really loud. They don’t need a lot to support the team. There are clubs where you need to do a lot of good things before they start to support you, but here the stadium is on fire from the first second, like it was at Feyenoord.
A lot. You only have to look at the history of the club and the managers that have worked here to understand how special it is. I’m really lucky to have worked at a beautiful club like Feyenoord and now to work at a beautiful club like Liverpool, with some extra luck – if you can call it that – because we have great players to work with. So it was, of course, a very special moment when I knew I’d become the next Liverpool manager – for the history of the club but definitely also the quality of the players I inherited from Jürgen.
I had the advantage that I spoke English at my former clubs in team meetings, so it helps with your football language. And it all starts with having a clear game idea. If you have that, you can start thinking, “How do I communicate this to my players?” What was a disadvantage was that, in pre-season, it took quite a long time before we had all the players in. I think nine or ten players came in two weeks before the first league game, but the ones who were already there did such an amazing job – they were already so good at what we wanted from them that it helped the others to come in. In combination with that, I don’t think we changed a lot. We kept a lot of things the same because they were in a really good place with Jürgen and Pepijn [Lijnders]. That was also a reason why the ones who came in only two weeks before the season could adapt quite easily, because so many things were still the same.
I wouldn’t say surprised, but I’ve said it many times already about the culture of this team, the culture of this club, the hard work, the players showing up every day in training sessions, trying to bring the best out of them... Sometimes, if you come to a new club, you need to get that culture in, but that was absolutely not necessary here. It was nice to see that it was just like Jürgen told me, because he’d told me that that was the culture, and I experienced this from the start.
I think the characteristics that all teams have that have done special things or won league titles or Champions Leagues, especially in the last few years – they’re all on the front foot, trying to press as high as they can, trying to play out from the back. Those are the characteristics that you can expect from us as well. If we don’t have the ball, we want to have it back as soon as we can. And, because we have so many quality players, it’s good to have the ball a lot, so that’s why we want it as much as we can – because if so many quality players have the ball a lot, it’ll normally lead to success. Of course, they need to work hard without the ball and that’s also one of the main characteristics of a successful team – that they put a lot of effort in if they don’t have the ball.
I see a successful manager as a manager that has a playing style you can see day in and day out, and that he can combine with success. Now, if you’re working at a lower league table team, you can’t expect to win the league, so success could be to stay in the league but with a certain playing style. That playing style doesn’t always have to be the same, but if you’re able to implement your playing style – no matter what it is – and bring the best out of the players, to develop individuals and a team, that will eventually lead to success. If you work at clubs like Liverpool, you always have to aim to be winning something and that’s not going to be easy because you’re in competition with a lot of good teams. It’s really hard, but at a club like Liverpool, you always have to compete for trophies, and that’s what we’ll try to do in the coming year and the years to come as well.
If you asked my father, he’d say, “He does everything differently as a manager to how he was as a player.” I always say, “I was not so fast, some people called me slow, and that helped me a bit with game insight.” I needed the team to get to a certain level because, individually, I couldn’t go around three players – I always needed my team-mates to be where I could play them my passes. That helped me to understand that we needed certain patterns. I had to think a lot about the game and, at a certain age, I felt, “OK, if a team-mate of mine plays this ball, it normally leads to losing the ball, and if we play a different ball, it leads to success.” At the end of my career, it became more and more clear to me. And I was lucky enough then that the Barcelona team started playing and I saw similar patterns, not in terms of how we play but more: “OK, this ball which we sometimes play – and Barcelona constantly play – leads to success.” And that helped me to create my own philosophy about football.
That’s quite difficult for me to tell you because I wasn’t involved. In the end, you need a great team spirit and some special individual quality to win tournaments like the Champions League. It’s difficult for me to judge, but the only thing I know is how special Anfield can be on European nights. Maybe that has something to do with it as well – that in difficult moments the fans have helped the team.
Additional reporting by Simon Hart
