Long but worthwhile read on Slot's early days coaching and his meticulous, if not obsessive, tactical preparation and coaching methods. Translated from a Dutch article.
''The way of putting pressure, and the variation and intensity involved, is very much like Klopp'' | Profile on Arne Slot, NRC 2023
Sometimes Arne Slot strikes out in his drive for perfection
Arne Slot | Feyenoord coach He already tried to make the youth of PEC Zwolle play like FC Barcelona. Now Arne Slot is creating a furor as an innovative coach at frontrunner Feyenoord. The Slot method vetted. “Arne is a very dominant figure.”
It was a “very mediocre team,” PEC Zwolle's under fourteen in the fall of 2013. “We always lost thickly,” captain Max Leeflang says now. And yet, they had a young, ambitious coach who mirrored the team to the flowing combination soccer of FC Barcelona. His name: Arne Slot, then 35 and just retired as a professional soccer player. He actually wants to become an assistant at Zwolle's first team, but there is no place for him there. First develop yourself with the youth, says the club management.
Fixed prick, Monday afternoon: watching specific match footage. Only takes an hour, Slot tells the boys. After which he regularly analyzes for two hours, pointing at the screen, how the Barcelona midfield builds up, that they also run without the ball, how they put pressure as a team. Always move on after play-in, play overtal. And give every ball a 'message'.
“He made you think about soccer. Really special,” Leeflang says. “There aren't many trainers who do that, especially when you're young.” Everything has to be perfect, Leeflang noticed. If he says to Slot that he finds a certain pass and kick form “boring” while just playing two balls wrong himself, he is told. “You are not allowed to whine until you do everything right.”
Slot trains the youth team as if it were a first team. That sometimes clashes. He asks too much of players of 12, 13 years old in exercises, Leeflang observes. “We had guys on the team who didn't understand a thing, found it much too difficult. He was at too high a level of thinking for that kind of player. He was also just rock hard.”
Big defeats, such as 9-1 against Ajax and 6-0 against AZ, are no exception. The team will play one level down. When they are still fighting for the title in that league in March 2014 at Roda JC, Leeflang experiences for the first time that players have to stay on the bench. While in youth it is common for everyone to get playing time. “I just leave it,” Leeflang hears the coach say. Three, four guys will not be in action that day. “Those were crying on the bus. Will never forget.”
His demanding approach is having an effect. The team manages to play slightly better and better under the pressure, Leeflang says. And spring 2014, the team itself wins by big numbers and finishes second. Colleagues see his potential. “Team tactically he was much further along than any coach at our training,” says his then assistant, Alexander Palland.
Staying with that season, Slot is unstoppable. He quickly makes his career, via SC Cambuur (2014-2017) and AZ (2017-2020). At both clubs, he grows from assistant to head coach. To begin one of the most difficult positions in Dutch professional soccer in June 2021: trainer of Feyenoord.
NRC spoke with eighteen people from his (work) environment, almost all players call him the best trainer they have worked with. Tactically progressive, didactically strong, persuasive, very detailed and documented. Although in his drive for perfection he sometimes strikes out. “I think about things down to the decimal point,” Slot (44) recently said in the podcast Met open vizier.
What characterizes the method-Slot? Profile of an inquisitive vak-idioot (Dutch term for someone obsessed with their job) on the eve of the resumption of the Eredivisie, in which frontrunner Feyenoord faces FC Utrecht on Sunday.
Shortly before their matches they always look around, brothers Jakko and Arne Slot. “Is he there? Their father Arend, former player of the Dutch amateur team, sees everything. “If he wasn't there, you'd think: pooh, can we walk a little less,” says Jakko, more than three years younger than Arne.
When he does stand there, they give full play. The boys don't want him to notice anything about their play - that they stand still too much or take too long after a nice pass so they are too late connecting. “He was very critical in that, in a good way.”
They grew up in the Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorpstraat in the Overijssel village of Bergentheim, close to the German border. Slot is the third in a family of four - he has another older brother and sister. It is a sporty family, lots of tennis and soccer. In the garden, on the street, the garage or in the bedroom where the two youngest share a bunk bed - Arne is upstairs.
On Saturdays they play soccer at v.v. Bergentheim, where their father is coach of the first - later he trains other clubs in the region. At matches he takes the boys into the locker room and the dugout, Arne has been there since he was five years old. From the meeting to tactical substitutions, they get everything. They love it, even just the smell of the muscle balm.
At home in the cupboard is the book Soccer, curriculum for the ideal soccer player by trainer Wiel Coerver, known for the “Coerver method” he developed: chopping and turning on the square meter. The inquisitive Slot often picked it up and asked his father to do the actions for him, recalls Jakko. “Then he just kept going until he mastered it himself.” If he succeeded, his father would say, “Can you do it with your other leg, too?”
As a young player at Zwolle, Slot stood out to his six-year older teammate Gerald van den Belt. “A terribly intelligent boy,” he calls Slot, who easily passed atheneum. He considers him “young adult.” At sixteen, he sees what exactly the point of training is, says Van den Belt, who later brings him to Cambuur and is one of his best friends. “With the game line-up at training, he flawlessly figured out what the line-up would be in the match,” he said.
Slot already thinks like a coach at a young age. He endlessly discussed game situations with players and trainers. His hobbyhorse is finishing with the inside of the foot. According to him, this is much more efficient than hard and less controlled shooting - only it looks more spectacular.
As a soccer player, Slot - he plays at Zwolle, NAC and Sparta - is partly misunderstood, Van den Belt says. He is a graceful, ball-fast playmaker with good passing, but a bit slow which means he has to be tactically clever. This, he says, affects how Slot now thinks as a coach. “Trainers took him out when they were behind, a different keg had to be tapped from. That frustrated him incredibly. And triggered him not to be that kind of coach.”
Just as his father's keen eye influences him as a coach, brother Jakko thinks. Slot is close to players - just as his father used to be with him. “Every day he's after your pants. If you fail for a moment, it can just cost you your starting place,” says Omar el Baad, who played under Slot at Cambuur. With a brief comment, he tries to put players on edge. Like, after an inferior training session: “Slept badly the last two days, right?”
When Slot walked past striker Bryan Linssen at the team meal last season, he couldn't help but notice something. Linssen: “He said: are you not allowed to eat vegetables?” And if Orkun Kökcü is uncomfortable for once and shows a little less commitment, he is immediately “called to the carpet,” says the current Feyenoord captain. “You can never train less with this trainer.”
Because he sees everything, just like his father.
Normally the editorial in trade magazine The Soccer Coach occupies ten pages. But in late 2016, Marco van der Heide, analyst and freelancer at the magazine, lobbied for more space. It's really worth it, he thinks. For five hours he interviewed Arne Slot, then assistant coach of Cambuur and of Jong Cambuur. Twice he approached him, Slot held off, until he got a phone call. Although a familiar name only to insiders, they make twelve pages for it.
The article launches Slot as a trainer. In detail, he lays out his vision there. Instead of working with a fixed system of play, work from “principles of play,” which provide more stability within the chaotic course of a match. Principles like: when the ball is on the side, it has to go back to the axis. Continuously create depth behind the back line, with a run-up and out of sight of the opponent. And, a Slot classic by now: hit low or withdrawn crosses, avoid inefficient high crosses.
It now seems a-b-c's, and much is inspired by Pep Guardiola's methods earlier at FC Barcelona, but in those days Slot is a forerunner in the Netherlands. At AZ, technical director Max Huiberts read it with great interest and invited Slot - by then coach of Cambuur with Sipke Hulshoff - for an interview. March 2017, three months after the article, it is announced that he will become assistant at AZ the following season.
Regardless of the influence on his career, the article shows how he tries to make gains in every area. “Every millimeter of influence he can exert, he uses,” Van den Belt says. Behind that is a huge drive for control. “Because Arne thinks playing good soccer is very important, but the will to win is also extreme.”
Although Slot is known as an attacking coach with a lot of forward pressure, deep down he wants to make defensive substitutions when a lead needs to be pulled over the line, he says in With Open Sights. But after a defensive change that turns out wrong at Cambuur, he learns from assistant Jan Bruin: “Take as much risk as possible, instead of anxious choices. Often you are too scared.”
Much of his inspiration comes from the views of Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp, now coaches of Manchester City and Liverpool. At this Feyenoord, Pieter Zwart, editor-in-chief of Voetbal International, sees many of Guardiola's build-up patterns. Such as the backs being “high” in midfield. “And the field layout he uses in attacking: five lanes, where the outside lane may be occupied by only one person. The way of putting pressure, and the variation and intensity involved, is very much like Klopp.”
He always wants to learn, to hear different and new views. It is one of the reasons Slot is in regular contact with Liverpool assistant Pepijn Lijnders, including how to translate game ideas into training forms. And years ago, he has himself added in a closed group of soccer blog Catenaccio, where the latest articles and views are shared.
Shortly before Christmas, Slot hosted Norwegian trainer and scientist Karl Marius Aksum for two days at Feyenoord, precisely because he has different ideas about the usefulness of positional play - in jargon, the “rondo. Six or seven players pass the ball around as much as possible in a small area, with two or three defenders trying to take the ball away. Because many match situations are reflected in this, according to Slot, he is a firm believer in it.
But Aksum, who does scientific research on how players “scan” the game, doesn't think the form is specific enough for matches. “All the passes you do in a rondo are not towards anything. There are no goals, you're not defending anything,” he says when asked. “You don't scan in rondos because you know where all the players are. All the players are almost stationary and the opponent is always in the middle.”
It leads to an inspired, hour-long discussion at the Feyenoord training complex. Slot asks Aksum “for little details, little secrets” about scanning, which is known that the more often a player does it, the more successful his passes are. Aksum: “He asked about ways he can train this with his players. And he wanted to know how to tell if a player they are scouting is a good scanner.”
Slot had the Norwegian give a presentation to the Feyenoord squad with clips of how top players scan and how they did it themselves against PSV, with Kökcü standing out in a positive way. Two days after the visit, Slot repeatedly calls out at a training session - he does almost everything in English - “check your shoulders before receiving.” The old term for “scanning” before receiving the ball.
At about 25 meters above the Feyenoord training pitch, a drone hangs continuously - only coming down briefly for battery changes. Virtually everything under Slot's guidance is filmed. Footage of specific moments - from duels and training sessions - is a crucial part of his working method. It is the way he makes it clear to players what he expects of them.
It is also why Slot considers the drone's pilot an important link. This was noticed by Rob van Leemput, who piloted the small four-propeller until last season - he is now retired.
Eight years he filmed with the first team, and Slot was the first head coach to have a conversation with him about what exactly he expected from the video department. “He wanted to record all training sessions,” Slot said. That footage goes to the video analyst and is used for tactical purposes. Slot looks back a lot, including training sessions.
At Cambuur, with trainer Marcel Keizer, he created a large database of footage of dozens of specific soccer actions that he requires of his players, such as depth on the “counter side,” the side where the ball is not. That media library, in a program on his laptop, Slot expands daily with clips from matches around the world - he watches endlessly. He also uses the clips in conversations with potential new players, to show exactly what he wants.
It is part of how Slot continually convinces players of his tactics, what he himself calls “indoctrinating”: getting them to believe in his approach in both word and image. In his view, this is becoming increasingly important, because players hear noises through media or business associates that do not always match his philosophy.
Just starting at Feyenoord, June 2021, he shows footage of the Champions League final between Manchester City and Chelsea. A game with few chances, as players do everything they can to avoid opportunities, right down to the strikers. This to indicate, says Linssen, who was at the discussion, that those top players also do “dirty” defensive work. And that at Feyenoord, they definitely have to do this.
A year later, before the Conference League final against AS Roma, Slot shows those images again, but now mixed with similar fragments of their own team. To emphasize that by now they can do it, too, and that's why they got this far - even if Feyenoord does lose the final.
“It helped that we came to believe very much in his way of playing soccer. Everything he said, we accepted blindly,” Linssen says. A psychological trick Slot uses is to make the opponent small and his own team big. Olympique de Marseille had “better, bigger and stronger players” in the Conference League semifinals, says Linssen. “They were actually at an advantage in everything. He didn't give that feeling to us for a moment. We really believed in ourselves. He instilled that feeling in us throughout the season and leading up to that semifinal.”
His match discussions are “next level,” says Omar el Baad. “After a talk like that, you knew there was a very small chance of losing. He knew exactly where we could make our move.” In terms of perception in the discussion, Slot learns a lot from Henk de Jong in this at Cambuur as an assistant - that the team goes onto the field full of energy and conviction.
However, his instructions “can sometimes go to your head,” says Calvin Stengs, who played under Slot at AZ. Because of him, he has come to understand soccer better, has become tactically smarter, Stengs says. “Arne can convey it in a way that everyone gets it.” But: “Now and then you do have moments: so, shut up for a moment.”
The ball does not escape him for a moment, at a training session in late December. Slot has the Feyenoord squad playing six against six on a small pitch with four goals and four goalkeepers, under high pressure. “1.5 minutes full press!”, Slot shouts. Dressed in a red training jacket, whistle at the ready.
“Team with the possession has to be much better with the ball!”
“Check your shoulders!”
“Kill the counterpress!”
Enthusiastically, at a quick combination: “That's one touch!”
He is close, leading emphatically, his voice roaring across the training field.
A day later, on a rainy afternoon in a practice match against Go Ahead Eagles, at the training complex, his instructions sound loud again.
“Hey hey hey, do the extra work!”
“Read!”
“Stay active!”
He does the instructions to substitutes himself, where on many teams it is done by assistants. Sitting in the dugout, he leans forward, never backward. Never completely satisfied.
Norwegian coach Karl Marius Aksum, who has also analyzed many top coaches, becomes impressed with the level of coaching by Slot at a Feyenoord training session. “Intense, with a good flow. He was very precise in what he wanted from the team.”
He is very decisive as a trainer. Dennis van der Ree, who worked with Slot at Jong Cambuur and was an analyst at Feyenoord last season, also noticed this. In Friesland, he was officially the supervisor of Slot, who was trying to get his UEFA A-level education. “But Arne is a very dominant figure, I'm a bit introverted, so the relationship was soon that he was the head coach and I supported him. But when we were busy, it was really together.”
Slot now hands off training forms more often, but to a certain limit. “If he thinks something is not right, he is right on top of it to correct it,” Van der Ree said. “That can sometimes be difficult for people who are giving the practice form at that moment. But that's part of top performance.”
Like when training with the substitutes last season at Feyenoord, led by one of the assistants. “He does always want to be there, to see how the substitutes are doing. There were times when he took over part of the training, because he thinks it should be better or that it can be done differently.”
Van der Ree experienced something similar himself. During a meeting in which the opponent was being analyzed, he said something just in a different way than previously discussed. “Then he takes over right away. It wasn't annoying to me. The fact that he is so sharp makes me sharp, too.”
Slot sees it as a pitfall that he wants to “keep reasoning through almost everything,” he says in With Open Sight. Like why he arrives at a lineup. He tends to “want to explain everything,” to players and staff. “I think sometimes I get a little carried away with that.” For example, he can wait just as long with the lineup in the hope that he “gets another hunch” that turns out to be the best option.
One consequence of his dominant style of leadership is that he involves his players little in tactical plans. “It's not that I can think along in anything,” said captain Kökcü. Nor is that necessary, according to him, because they “trust the coach blindly.”
