Arne Slot liked what he heard and then what he saw. He had tuned in on Tuesday. He had a personal and a professional interest when his former club visited his next opponents. “What made this game special for me was more sitting at home, putting the volume up and hearing the Feyenoord fans singing my name,” he said. “That’s the biggest compliment you can get if you leave a club, that the fans still like you.”
The team that Slot built then shocked the side he will face on Sunday. Manchester City were seemingly heading to Anfield this weekend with a restorative win. Then came a comeback for the ages and for the watching Slot: no side had been 3-0 down that late in a European Cup game and avoided defeat. “For me as a Feyenoord fan, I could hardly believe what I saw,” said Slot.
“At 3-1 you thought, ‘OK…’ but then City took control again. Then it was 3-2 and then 3-3. You don’t see this very often. It was the first time in the history of the Champions League this has happened.” It prompted Slot to get in touch with some old friends. “I spoke to more than a few people to congratulate them but it was not in a tactical manner,” he said.
But tactically, he has learnt much from Pep Guardiola. It is a reason why he is looking forward to Sunday. While Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp had a defining rivalry, Slot has never even met the Manchester City manager. “With Feyenoord, we never got to the latter stages of the Champions League,” he said in a modest explanation.
With Liverpool, however, he could go 11 points ahead of City. If Slot is a new threat to Guardiola, the Catalan is a long-standing influence on the Dutchman. “There are few people in football who, when you watch, they never let you down,” the Liverpool head coach explained. “That has been Lionel Messi, who is always a joy to watch. Nine times out of 10 the games of Barcelona, Bayern Munich or City have been a joy to watch for everyone who loves football. So that’s why I like to watch his teams play.”
Guardiola’s status as an innovator is one of the reasons that Slot was intrigued by his thinking. “He was the one who invented – maybe not invented, maybe it was done 100 years ago – or came up with the idea of inverted full backs and then thought, ‘Now I’m going to push my centre-back [John Stones] into midfield’,’ he explained. “You always see new things or inventions with him. They have a very good and clear playing style; always an interesting game plan as well.”
But Guardiola’s Barcelona also helped cement Slot’s understanding of the game. When the older man took over at the Nou Camp in 2008, the younger one was a Sparta Rotterdam midfielder. He was already interested in a career in coaching, already thinking about the game.
“When I played I always felt that certain balls my team-mates gave were successful, and certain balls were unsuccessful,” he recalled. “Then, when I started to watch Barcelona, I saw that the successful balls were only the ones that Barcelona played, so that gave me the reassurance that what I thought was the right ball proved to be the right ball,” he explained.
“It definitely helped me to create my own idea about football and my own playing style. There was a bit from playing myself, such as feeling that if a full-back kept the ball on one side we were going to lose this ball, and if they played it inside then everything would open up. And if you watched Barcelona you always saw the same pattern.”
Many of Guardiola’s ideas, however, stem from Slot’s native Netherlands. The City manager is open in the debt he owes to Johan Cruyff. But Dutch football’s greatest figure is indelibly associated with Ajax and Barcelona. Slot has come through different footballing schools; unlike Guardiola, he could not learn directly from Cruyff. Klopp, meanwhile, was hugely influenced by Arrigo Sacchi, albeit indirectly and via his mentor Wolfgang Frank. Where does Slot stand on their tactical spectrum?
“It is hard for me to say where I am,” he said. “I have never spoken to Johan Cruyff but when he was with Barcelona, I was eight or nine years of age. I watched them but it was harder to find coverage. Sacchi was the same period of time, it is difficult for me [to see much of his AC Milan]. Both teams had a high press and a high last line, which you still see a lot of clubs doing at the moment.”
It is something Liverpool and City share. Now, having learnt from Guardiola and admired him from afar, Slot faces him from the neighbouring dugout. And for the second time in a week, it is with the chance of a result he can savour and with fans singing his name.
