The Priest
How Arne Slot has made winning look easy.
Drawing by Sammy Moody
Thore Haugstad
16 Mar 2025
When Sky Sports met Arne Slot in September, they might have expected a flustered man grappling with the hyperintensity of the Premier League. For four months the press had told Slot he was taking an impossible job from an irreplaceable guy in a big, big club far bigger than poor little Feyenoord, oh and by the way Liverpool wanted Xabi all along. Yet whatever Sky Sports tossed at him, Slot batted it away. Had he not been shocked by the pressure?
"I don't feel this massive media attention since I'm here, to be honest."
Had the job been as he imagined?
"I'm not the type of person that the night before thinks, Oh, how am I going to feel tomorrow with Anfield for the first time, or the first time coming to this building, or Old Trafford …”
Had he seen a lot of the city?
"Over here, my private life is mostly in the inside of my house."
Slot warned they had only beaten Ipswich and Brentford, that Old Trafford would be harder. A few hours later, Liverpool won 3–0.
At 46, Slot has never lost two straight league games on a senior level. Liverpool are so good they have killed the title story, and you’d moan about their big spending, had it actually existed. These players came third last year. Slot bought no one except a cheap, injured winger and a goalie sent back out on loan. Slot has no gilded player career (like Pep Guardiola) or box-office charisma (José Mourinho) or million-dollar smile (Jürgen Klopp). We still have no soundbites. Where many new coaches have won with tactical novelties, Slot has made a big deal about how little he’s changed. The analysts merely know that he's dialled down the tempo, and that he's really good at avoiding injuries. Beyond that we only have the kind of Q&A basics that Slot served ESPN NL in April 2023.
Best league in the world?
Premier League.
Are you a sore loser?
Yes.
0–0 or 5–5?
5–5.
Which club would you love to coach one day?
Cliché, but Barcelona.
Guardiola or Mourinho?
Guardiola.
When ESPN asked about his weakness, Slot mentioned his "reluctance to engage in small talk" in morning meetings. While we’re waiting for Slot to face failure, we can ask how he has such a good relationship with success.
In May 2009, Slot was playing for Sparta Rotterdam as they prepared to meet Ajax, led by Marco van Basten. Coach Foeke Booy told the players to press high.
Slot disagreed. He told Booy in front of the players.
Slot was a creative attacking midfielder, slow as a snail. A teammate once said that to his face. Slot did not disagree. When Slot emerged at Zwolle as a teenager in the second tier, he needed 18 months to get into the team because he barely ran. Another teammate, Bram van Polen, would joke that he doubted Slot had ever seen the inside of a gym.
Now at Sparta, Slot was neither younger nor faster, and when Booy was telling him to press high next to the striker, Slot could imagine galumphing between opponents and getting nowhere close to the ball. He told Booy, “If we press high, I’ll get whistled at again, and everyone will blame me. I’d rather play wide on the right and deliver the key passes.”
Booy went silent. He thought about it for a few seconds, and then he turned to his assistant, Adri van Tiggelen. "Erase our tactics from the board. We’ll do it Arne’s way.”
Sparta beat Ajax 4–0.
After the game, Van Basten resigned.
Slot had studied tactics since he was five, when he sat in the dressing room and listened to his dad giving pep talks to the amateur team he led. His parents were both teachers, a job that so often goes hand in hand with coaching. They were living in Bergentheim, a farming town in the Dutch Bible belt near the German border. Ali Boussaboun, who played with Slot at NAC Breda, says that he never once heard him swear.
When Slot was finally a key player at Zwolle, he moved to NAC, where he spent a year under Henk ten Cate, Frank Rijkaard's soon-to-be bad cop at Barcelona. They finished fourth in the Eredivisie, their best effort since 1956. “I can’t say that I saw a future coach in Arne back then," Ten Cate told Helden Magazine. "But I did notice that he was deeply involved in the tactical side of the game."
Like many future coaches, Slot had to make up for his lack of tempo by knowing what was happening around him: positioning, distances, tempo, space. Since his legs were slow, his mind had to be fast. He’d still be subbed off early. When he moved to Sparta, Booy told him about this rumour that the team were playing with 10 men once they lost the ball. "It was meant as a sarcastic way to set my expectations for him without the ball," Booy told Helden Magazine. "He took it very well. He was tactically very intelligent, could set up attackers for one-on-one situations with the goalkeeper, and became my on-field extension."
If Booy asked the players what they thought about an idea, they would all go quiet …….. and then Slot would put up his hand.
“I don’t think anyone who played with me is surprised that I’ve become a manager,” Slot would tell the BBC.
When Slot retired back at Zwolle in 2013, he thought about going to university. Years later he said that had he not become a coach, he’d work in a bank. Instead he started a business with his brother Jakko to sell captain's armbands. He also went to the Zwolle directors and asked for a coaching job at the highest level possible. They put him in charge of the U-14s.
The players were terrible.
The defender Max Leeflang said it was the worst team he'd played for. That was true even after Slot had taken over. They won one game in the first half of the season, yet Slot stayed calm and set up training from 8.30am to 10am every morning. "When you made a mistake, you heard it every time—from the first training until the last," Leeflang told The Athletic. "If you play one bad ball, he stopped the session and would say, ‘Next one has to be good’".
After training the players would go to school, and then they’d be back with Slot at 3pm to analyse the session. He used a drone to film training at a time when nobody at Zwolle used video. "It was weird," said Leeflang. "But then we’d see the results and realise that maybe it has helped."
As Zwolle began winning, Slot told Leeflang to dribble out from the back until he met an opponent. The fullbacks ran into midfield. If a player did badly at school, Slot banned him from training. They were weighed every Friday morning, and anyone who was too heavy got kicked out. Even if the bans hampered the drills, Slot showed no mercy. Once, he held a session with eight players.
He was clearly too good for youth football. Soon he spent two years as assistant manager at Cambuur, and when they got relegated from the Eredivisie in 2016, he took over as interim co-coach with Sipke Hulshoff. It was an odd fix, but Cambuur climbed from the bottom half to third, a run that earned Slot a move to AZ as assistant to John van den Brom. In 2019, Slot became the head coach, only to hear a few months later that the roof on the stadium had collapsed due to high winds. As Slot geared up for an unlikely title charge, AZ had to play their home games in The Hague.
Yet AZ did better than anyone had expected, and when they beat Ajax in March, they moved level on points with the leaders. All of a sudden the players were told not to shake hands with their opponents. A few weeks later the Eredivisie was cancelled due to the pandemic, with AZ still level with Ajax. There would be no resumption. Nobody got the trophy, a call that left Slot bitter.
When the football resumed in fall, AZ beat Napoli away, and the tactics blogs began analysing Slot. So did Feyenoord, who began holding secrets talks with him. But AZ found out and sacked him for not being focused on the team he was managing. Slot left in December 2020 having won 2.11 points per league game, the highest average in AZ history.
For the next few months, he watched Feyenoord and played golf.
One of the people who got Slot to Feyenoord was Mino Raiola.
Earlier in 2020, Feyenoord had hired the advisory group Sportsology to review the club. According to The Athletic, they noted that Feyenoord were earning half of what Ajax did, that they had one full-time scout compared to Ajax’s 12, and that they did not even have a data analyst. The first team and the academy did not cooperate. That same year Feyenoord hired Frank Arnesen as technical director, and then Dick Advocaat said that he’d leave after the season. Having barely moved into his new office, Arnesen had to find a coach.
One day, Arnesen told Helden Magazine, he was speaking to Raiola about a player when Raiola said, "Have you ever considered Arne Slot?"
Arnesen had not, but now he did. He got a consultancy firm to draw up a personality profile, which told him that Slot was not too harsh but firm, introverted but talkative. Arnesen invited Slot to two ‘informal’ conversations, and Slot told him that he wanted to play fast attacking football. When AZ found out, Slot agreed to take over in summer.
He knew he had work to do. Feyenoord finished fifth, 29 points behind Ajax.
"A lot of people thought I was crazy," he said.
As Slot packed his bags and headed for Rotterdam, his family stayed behind in Zwolle. He knew he was giving up the chance to watch his kids play sports on the weekends. "That's something I almost never get to do," he’d tell Feyenoord’s in-house channel. "Actually, let’s be honest—I never get to do it."
Slot had two goals at Feyenoord.
1. To entertain the fans
2. To develop players that create value
On his first day, Slot showed the players a video of the Champions League final between Chelsea and Manchester City. “These are the two best teams in the world,” he told the players, and yet the game only had two clear chances. Why? Because the players worked so hard when they’d lost the ball. Point made, Slot put on some Feyenoord footage.
"I do not see the same level of defensive commitment,” he said.
People said Feyenoord weren’t capable of winning the ball back quickly. “If this is your tempo, then no, you can’t press high," said Slot. “But over the next few weeks we’re going to work incredibly hard to increase your fitness, to the point where I’m convinced we can reach the physical level we just saw in the Champions League final.”
Slot would later make the point that anyone can tell the players to work harder. The art is in how you say it.
"How do you convince players of what they need to do?" Slot told the Feyenoord channel.
"If I simply say, ‘Okay guys, from now on, we’re going to work really hard,’ they might think, Yeah, here’s another coach just saying the same thing as every other one before him. But if I connect it to something concrete—like footage of City and Chelsea in a Champions League final—alongside clips of where we fell short the previous season, then suddenly it becomes real. And once we start working on it together, and the players see the progress, they get energised by it. So it’s all about how you present things. When do you say what? How do you say it? What examples do you use? What do you leave out? That can make the difference between earning a few extra points over the season and achieving just a slightly better performance than another team."
When Slot peered into the club coffers, he found nothing.
Worse, he knew Feyenoord were expected to sell whoever did well. Just three months after taking over, Slot wanted a versatile defender because he believed that Tyrell Malacia and Marcos Senesi would move on. When Feyenoord had sold Steven Berghuis to Ajax, Slot spent the money on a handful of cheap youngsters from Scandinavia—Patrick Wålemark (Häcken), Marcus Pedersen (Molde), Fredrik Aursnes (Molde). He loaned Reiss Nelson (Arsenal) and Cyriel Dessers (Genk), who signed his contract at the airport. According to Transfermarkt, the net spend was below €3m.
Feyenoord did background checks for each signing. They monitored social media, they spoke to coaches, agents, teachers and taxi drivers. At one point, they stalked a player outside his home to see if the lights were still on at 9pm, a trick borrowed from Alex Ferguson's time at Aberdeen.
The players realised what Slot was made of during a pre-season friendly against Atlético Madrid at De Kuip. Feyenoord won it in the last minute, and when Slot went to shake hands with Diego Simeone, Simeone shoved him. "He thought he might be the kit man or someone of that level," the Slot biographer Mikos Gouka told TalkSport. When Slot began to laugh, Simeone thought he was poking fun at him. But Slot stood up to Simeone, and Linssen later said that the duel brought the squad together. All season, Slot used that episode as a reminder that they had to defend one another.
As Feyenoord began to win, Slot told the players what would happen in each game. Nine times out of ten, he’d be right. "We had absolute belief in his approach," Linssen told Helden Magazine.
Many of the exercises were copied and pasted from the Zwolle U14s. Slot would say that if the kids from that team had turned up to watch Feyenoord, they would recognise some of the drills. "I want to stand for a certain blueprint,” Slot told Viaplay. Yet he never issues Antonio Conte-style instructions for every decision they had to take. One time he told Linssen, "Just do what your instincts tell you."
Slot was hellbent on rooting out the club’s underdog mentality, which he felt did not suit Feyenoord. "We didn’t want to just be happy when we won a big game," he told the club channel. "Or feel satisfied just because we managed to stay close to the league leaders. This team started to exude something different—that winning alone wasn’t enough. We wanted to win in a certain way. And the fans recognised that. They fully embraced it."
The style was inspired by Guardiola’s Barcelona. Slot would recall that when he was a player, he felt the team produced more chances whenever they played short passes. Then he watched Barça and realised they played the short pass 10 out of 10 times, whereas Sparta did it two times out of 10. To him it was proof that his instincts were correct.
The Dutch football journalist Marcel van der Kraan told Sky Sports he hadn't seen so much attacking in the Dutch league since Johan Cruyff managed Ajax in the 80s. In September, Feyenoord beat PSV 4–0, Hereenveen 3–1 and NEC Nijmegen 5–3. If Dutch teams were surprised, their rivals in the Conference League were shocked. Feyenoord topped their group unbeaten, then knocked out Partizan 8–3 and Slavia Prague 6–4. Not even semifinalists Marseille knew how to handle Feyenoord, who made the final having not even reached the knockouts of a European competition since 2015.
"That year, in almost every European match, opponents didn’t know us very well," Slot told the club channel. "They all thought, 'Let’s build up calmly against Feyenoord .... '"
Only one man spotted the trap: José Mourinho.
Ahead of the final, Slot made a rare mistake by provoking Mourinho. "I prefer to watch Manchester City and Napoli," he said, and Mourinho's pupils must have dilated the moment he heard the words. Roma came out in a low block, and once Nicolò Zaniolo scored after half an hour, they shut down Feyenoord. They won 1–0 with 36% possession. Slot later said that Dessers smiled every day at the club, except for that night.
After the game, Mourinho shouted to Slot, "Respect. Go to watch Napoli, watch Napoli now."
The loss hurt Slot. He spent a year thinking about how they should have gotten more from the final, and then he rewatched it. His analysis made him sound like a classic victim of the Mourinho smash-and-grab.
“The first half … it wasn’t that we weren’t ourselves, but it was a match with very few chances,” he told the club channel. “And then out of nowhere they scored the only real chance they had … in the final stages, well, you know what happens against an Italian team. They shut the game down completely. Killed the tempo. And that was the most frustrating part.”
A few months after the final, Slot had lost seven of the players from the starting lineup.
Feyenoord had sold Malacia (to Manchester United) and Senesi (to Bournemouth) as Slot had anticipated. They had cashed in on Aursnes (Benfica) and Luis Sinisterra (Leeds). The loanees had disappeared. Feyenoord fetched nearly €70m in sales, but Slot had to rebuild the team.
He cast his net across Mexico, Germany and the Czech Republic. A key signing was Santiago Giménez, a striker from Cruz Azul, who Slot spent six months bringing up to speed. Like the rest, Giménez was put through a punishing fitness regime that used every available method. Feyenoord launched a DNA project to dig up details that could aid recovery and prevent injury by collecting samples of urine, stools, saliva and sweat. Some players were given personalised training plans, reports The Athletic. When the staff decided that Marcus Pedersen needed more aggression, they took him to a kickboxing gym. Captain Orkun Kökcü had to get quicker, so the staff installed a gym at his home and handed him exercises to repeat for 30 days, with Slot checking in regularly.
When the Dutch league stopped for the 2022 World Cup, Feyenoord were top.
When the Dutch league resumed, they got even better.
Slot used the break to work six days a week. Feyenoord ran more, pressed more and avoided injuries. Player availability over his first two seasons hit 90%, and Slot would make the point that his teams always played better after the winter break than before it. "I believe in the fact that the more games you play, the physically stronger you become," Slot would say. "Some people think you get tired, but as long as you manage it well, the players will get stronger by playing a lot of games instead of getting tired.”
As Feyenoord kept winning, CEO Dennis te Kloese promised Slot a padel court at the premises if they brought home the title.
Slot combined his fitness regime with thoughtful man management. In meetings he’d be direct and to the point. One on one, he might ask more about their private lives and how they were feeling. He was especially curious about the players from abroad. "I care deeply about my players, not just as athletes, but as people," he told ESPN NL. He rarely lost his temper, because he fears the players will just think, Ah, here we go again … Linssen says Slot has the advantage of being fairly young. "He understands what the current generation of players cares about."
"Arne is a diplomat," Everse told The Athletic. "He is very smart. He always first counts to 10. He is like a priest."
As Feyenoord chased down the title, they met Ajax away in March. Slot threw the players an analogy with the Dutch boxer Rico Verhoeven.
"Ajax is the challenger. We are Rico Verhoeven," he declared.
“When someone faces him, they know they’re going to lose. But they start shouting, trying to act tougher, just to create the illusion that they have a chance. They [Ajax] might try to start the game that way too, by throwing the first punch. But we’re flipping the script. We’re going there and from the first second, we’ll show them that we are stronger.”
Feyenoord won 3–2 and went on to stretch their winning streak to 13 games. When they finally lost, at home to Vitesse, it was the last game of the season and Feyenoord were already champions. A little later, when the trophy had been lifted and the champagne bottles were empty, Slot put on his shoes, grabbed his racket, and hit some balls in his new court.
Slot had long worried about losing players who were doing well.
Now Feyenoord were worried about losing him.
Back in February 2023, Leeds had flown a delegation to Rotterdam to speak to Feyenoord. Slot was also linked to Crystal Palace and Brighton, and in May he came close to Spurs, only to sign a new deal.
"I'm not done here yet," Slot said.
When The Athletic visited Feyenoord that month, everyone expected to lose Slot. They just wanted him to stay a little longer. They were lucky that Slot wanted to try the Champions League. "You can every time leave somewhere after one or two successful seasons," Slot said. "But in the end, where and what are you then? So sometimes you also have to cherish what you have. There’s more to life and to football than only winning a prize."
After drawing their first two league games, Feyenoord hammered Almere 6–1, Utrecht 5–1, Heerenveen 6–1 and Ajax 4–0. They stayed on course for a similar points total as when they won the league, and only an unstoppable PSV made a second title unlikely.
In April 2024, Liverpool's technical director Richard Hughes flew to Rotterdam to meet Slot. With Michael Edwards back at Anfield, their analysts had spent weeks pouring over data, videos and character references. Nobody had really expected Liverpool to go for Slot, who had never worked outside the Netherlands, and whose name lacked the magnetism of Xabi Alonso and even Ruben Amorim. Hughes knew Slot was good, having signed Senesi and Sinisterra as a director at Bournemouth. When they fed the data to the algorithm, they realised that Slot was even better than expected.
They had three main criteria:
1. Playing style
2. Improving players
3. Injury prevention
Slot came out top for all three.
Like Liverpool, Feyenoord were a traditional club in a working-class port city, playing in an intimate stadium. Ryan O'Hanlon wrote a piece for ESPN about how Feyenoord mirrored Liverpool in a series of stats, such as possessions per match, opponent pass completion and average pass distance. Though Feyenoord came second, their non-penalty xG difference was the third highest since Stats Perform had begun collecting data from the Eredivisie in 2012. "At both AZ and Feyenoord," O’Hanlon wrote, "Slot's teams have performed at close to the maximum level of what you could expect from a club of their size."
Liverpool paid €11m for Slot. "Sometimes in life,” Slot said, “opportunities come along and you have to listen."
He left Feyenoord with a heavy heart. As he sat down for a goodbye with the in-house channel, he crowned the recent win at home to Ajax as his favourite. Already then he knew Liverpool were interested. "And I had this thought in my head ...." Slot said. “I don’t want to be remembered as the Feyenoord coach who never won at home against Ajax.”
Feyenoord made it 1–0, 2–0, 3–0.
Slot wanted more.
"It wasn’t enough to just win,” he said. “That’s something people sometimes overlook. I was still coaching intensely even when we were up by a few goals. Some might have thought, Is that really necessary? But too many times, this season and in previous seasons, the final score didn’t fully reflect how dominant we had been. And I thought, If this ends 4–2 again, people will start nitpicking. If we’re playing this ridiculously well, we need to make sure the result reflects that."
Feyenoord beat Ajax 6–0.
"In that match, almost everything came together," Slot said. "Three years of hard work from everyone—the staff, the players, myself. Every single day, trying to improve by a few percent."
The fans sang for Slot for several minutes, a gesture he has never forgotten. Feyenoord changed him forever.
"I started at Cambuur, a relatively small club," he said. "There, people in the region would have opinions about you. Then I went to AZ, and it became a bit more national, but even then it was only one day a week that people might talk about you. And that was only if you had won an important game. Then I arrived at Feyenoord. Suddenly, every single day was about Feyenoord, or in this case, about me. Five, six, seven, eight years ago, I might have been the type to think, Oh no, what are people saying about me? At the time, on Monday mornings, I’d be checking to see what was being said on TV. Now I get in my car to drive to Rotterdam, and I genuinely have no idea what’s being said about me. And that’s just the reality of Feyenoord. This club is always in the news. If you let that affect you too much, you won’t have a life. But Feyenoord is huge. You feel it every day."
Before leaving Rotterdam, Slot added, "I hope that at some point in my career, I’ll have another period as special as this. But for it to truly surpass this experience … it would have to be very special."
Nearly a year later, Slot has started a journey that might come close or even surpass his time at Feyenoord. When Liverpool beat City in late February, they put one hand on the trophy.
In England, the press is still wondering how Slot handles setbacks.
“In Holland it was the same,” Gouka told TalkSport. One time the Dutch journalists even asked Slot the question. They said, "You're always calm and collected, but what happens when you lose three in a row?"
Slot replied, "Well, I never did."
And then he began to laugh.
***
