Arne Slot’s journey from child prodigy coach to Premier League champion

The man who has supplanted Pep Guardiola as coach of the Premier League champions is, it turns out, something of a fanboy. “He was always talking about Pep,” says Henk de Jong, now in his third spell as coach of Cambuur, the Dutch club where Arne Slot got his first break as assistant 11 years ago.

“We were sometimes laughing at him,” De Jong says, describing how Slot would get out his extensive video collection of Bayern Munich and Barcelona games to amplify a tactical point. “‘Pep again, eh?’ we would say. He had videos of all his games. And we would sit and listen to him talk about what he was seeing.”

There is an avuncular air to De Jong as he describes how Slot took his baby steps in coaching under him. It was 2014-15 and Guardiola was rewriting football’s rules, having won everything at Barcelona and then taking on the Bundesliga with Bayern Munich. For a young, idealistic coach such as Slot – he was 36 when he joined De Jong – Guardiola was a guiding guru. Manchester City’s manager would be entitled to view him much as Dr Frankenstein did his monster.

After a middling career as a pro player in the Netherlands, Liverpool’s head coach had ended up at his childhood club, PEC Zwolle, a top-flight team, coaching youth players. “I liked his style,” says De Jong of Slot the player. “He was not fast …” You suspect that is a polite way of saying “slow”. “But he played as a No 10, so he had to think quickly. He was coaching the Zwolle youth and I heard good things from our club director, who asked me if I wanted to have Arne as my assistant. But at that moment I already had an assistant, who, like Arne, was a genius: Sandor van der Heide.”

Cambuur were enjoying a spell in the Netherlands top flight, the Eredivisie, at the time. It led to some high-minded philosophical discussions of tactics, invoking the godfather of Dutch football in Johan Cruyff and, of course, Guardiola. “Sometimes it wasn’t easy for me with two assistants who were geniuses,” De Jong says. “They were both thinking at such a high level but they did not always have the same idea of what to do. They never had [serious] problems but I had to manage that.”

View image in fullscreen The Cambuur manager, Henk de Jong (left), alongside his assistants Sandor van der Heide (second from left) and Arne Slot (centre) in 2014. Photograph: VI-Images/Getty Images

Soon after De Jong left, Slot was promoted with some success to joint-caretaker manager, his partner in the role being Sipke Hulshoff, now his assistant at Liverpool, which led to a move to AZ Alkmaar, where he was assistant and then the first-team coach. His controversial move to Feyenoord – AZ sacked him when it was clear he was negotiating with the Rotterdam team – brought him to greater attention when he won the league title in 2023 against the might of PSV and Ajax. But he will for ever have a slice of Cambuur in his football philosophy, according to De Jong, who has been a mainstay at the Friesland club, which is based in the city of Leeuwarden, about 10 miles from the North Sea and cut off from Amsterdam by IJsselmeer, the huge seawater inlet reclaimed as a freshwater lake.

“Cambuur is a club where if you don’t play well, you know about it from the supporters,” says De Jong. (They are currently fighting for a promotion place in the Eerste Divisie, the second tier of Dutch football.) “The fans are hard-working people, like in Rotterdam and Liverpool. Leeuwarden is the capital of Friesland and people here are quite independent.” Many speak Frisian, the regional language. “You can understand going from Leeuwarden to Rotterdam to Liverpool. You have to work hard for your fans, you have to be special. So I always told him: ‘You have to show good football. Don’t play like a grey mouse! No one is coming to see that. Play special football!’”

Perhaps it runs even deeper, however. Bert Snippe is from Bergentheim, the small town on the German border in the far east of the Netherlands where Slot grew up. With its Calvinistic roots, it as far removed physically and culturally from liberal Amsterdam as it is possible to be in the country, though at least some of the urban spirit, that of Cruyff, did permeate through to the school’s headteacher, Arend Slot, who was also player-coach of the local team, VV Bergentheim. Slot Sr had been a talented non-league player, representing the Netherlands amateur national team. “In 1978-79 I was 15 and Arend invited me to play in the first team,” Snippe says. “I played for four years under Arend and his training was always intensive, at full speed and at the end we would play 11 v 11.”

It was about that time that Arend’s young son, Arne, started to tag along with his dad. “When I was a coach my wife wanted a bit of peace and quiet on a Saturday afternoon,” Arend told the local newspaper De Stentor in 2023. “So I took Arne along to my games. In the pre-match talk with the players he always wanted to sit in the corner of the dressing room. I used to say: ‘You can go and kick a ball if you want, you don’t have to sit here.’ But he insisted on staying. He wanted to know everything I said. He was only six and seven years old at that time. He even sat next to me in the dugout.”

View image in fullscreen Arne Slot battles (left) with Ajax’s Steven Pienaar during his playing days at NAC Breda. Photograph: VI-Images/Getty Images

Snippe recalls Arne as something of a child prodigy coach. “Every Saturday Arne went with his dad to watch the game and would sit on the bench next to his dad, to watch and listen to how his dad coached his team.” Given the Dutch reputation for heated tactical dressing-room debate it is perhaps little wonder that he grew up with a highly developed football brain.

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Snippe didn’t just observe young Arne but coached him to his first national success. “In 1988, the KNVB [the Netherlands’ football association] introduced a 4v4 small-sided tournament. The club asked me to look after the 10-year-olds and Arne was one of the four. The team won three tournaments and their prize was a week’s stay at the KNVB training centre.”

Snippe is well placed to judge the relative merits of father and son as players. “Arend scored a lot of goals for Bergentheim, was faster as a player and his speciality was free-kicks, like the ones Declan Rice scored against Real Madrid. Arne was as good as any player but when he had the ball he always played to the right man. And he was always like a player-coach, just as his dad was.”

Ultimately, though, Dad has had to concede the family bragging rights, as he made clear in the 2023 interview. Asked whether he saw a lot of himself in Arne, Arend replied: “Yes, his winning mentality.’’

At which point, Fennie, wife to Arend and mum to Arne, interrupted: “Well, you had the hump for almost a week if you had lost. Arne never has the hump.’’

“Well, [the reason] is obvious,” responded Arend. “He hardly ever loses …’’

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