Arne Slot is my golf buddy – he’s a perfect fit for Liverpool

I not only remember Arne, but he still uses me as his golf buddy because I am the only one of his friends that doesn’t have a “job”. Whenever he has a day off, he phones me, “Hey, what are you doing tomorrow?” We play golf together, so we see each other regularly.

I am a social golfer who never takes lessons. I just want to play 18 holes, but he is a perfectionist in everything he does. He is better than me — I can have my day but it is hard to beat him. That goes for all games he plays.

That goes into his coaching. When I was at Almeria, I was with Unai Emery and he was giving meetings for 1½ hours, offering all these little details, and then you saw that in the game.

• Liverpool open talks with Feyenoord over appointing Arne Slot

Arne is like that, too. I spoke to him this morning and he just said it is not a secret that Liverpool wants him but that he could not say anything. I hope it will happen.

When I played with Arne at Sparta, you could see that he would become a coach. He was a leader, a No10 midfielder and someone who would change tactics by himself.

The job he has done at Feyenoord makes him the perfect fit for Liverpool. He arrived there from AZ Alkmaar. AZ had finished higher up the league than Feyenoord but he still went there because he liked the challenge and he thought the coach was not taking all of the potential out of the team.

When he signed for Feyenoord they sold the best player, Steven Berghuis, to Ajax and they didn’t have lots of money to spend. Everyone said it would be difficult, but Arne said: “No, no, I will make this happen.” A year later he became the champion of Holland with this team and that is why I think there are similarities with Liverpool.

Liverpool have a lot of potential in the squad, and we don’t have the money that Manchester City have to spend, so I think he will get all the potential out of the players. He plays in the same style as Jürgen Klopp: sexy football, forward pressing and the percentage of ball recoveries in the opposition half is the highest in Holland. When he loses the ball, he wants the ball back in three seconds.

If you talk to him about his style of play, you think you would be talking to Pep Guardiola or Jürgen. Those similarities are there.

One good thing is his first assistant, Sipke Hulshoff, is the first assistant of Ronald Koeman with the Holland national team, so he is already coaching Virgil van Dijk, Cody Gakpo and Ryan Gravenberch.

I have heard some people say Arne does not have enough experience but he has won the league, reached a European final and won the cup.

His personality is perfect for Liverpool. He is a good fit because he is not only the manager of a team, he can manage a club and the fans. He is an intelligent guy, he is a good analyst and when you see his press conferences, he speaks good English and is very respectful. You will not see Arne being like Erik ten Hag was in his recent press conference. He is a respectful guy like Pep Guardiola and he is an ambassador for the club. You need to be a special coach to coach a special club and I think Arne is that.

Interview by Paul Joyce

One of the most remarkable aspects of Feyenoord’s Eredivisie triumph last year was arguably the summer that preceded it. In Arne Slot’s first season as the club’s head coach, 2021-22, they finished third in the Dutch league. They made it to the final of the Europa Conference League, where they were defeated by José Mourinho’s Roma. From the staid, conservative football of Slot’s predecessor, Dick Advocaat, a thrillingly full-throttle, high-octane style of football had emerged.

The reward? Feyenoord’s team was gutted. Their top scorer, Luis Sinisterra, was sold to Leeds United. Tyrell Malacia departed for Manchester United. Marcos Senesi left for Bournemouth, Fredrik Aursnes for Benfica. Reiss Nelson’s loan spell ended and he returned to Arsenal. Guus Til signed for PSV. Each of the four players who had accrued double-figure goal hauls, and a combined €70million (£60million) worth of talent, was gone.

And yet less than 12 months later, Feyenoord were champions — for the first time since 2017, and only the second time this century. That they did so having recruited 17 players, at a cost of only €30million, was impressive enough. But to do so playing the kind of high-pressing, possession-dominant football that Feyenoord did suddenly marked Slot out as one of the most talented — and highly coveted — coaches in Europe.

That Slot, 45, is the head coach Liverpool want to replace Jürgen Klopp, then, is not as left-field a decision as some might suggest. Moreover, there are a number of parallels to draw between the approaches exhibited by Slot’s Feyenoord and Klopp’s Liverpool over the past few seasons.

Since Slot was appointed in 2021, Feyenoord have won possession in the final third 722 times, more than any team in Europe’s top five leagues plus the Eredivisie. The team in second, with 706, is Liverpool. It is the same story for high turnovers and pressed sequences, two more metrics that measure the intensity of a team’s press, which Feyenoord and Liverpool rank either first or second for.

Another way of measuring the aggression of a team’s press, and their dominance over opponents, is start distance, which measures how far upfield a team’s open play sequences start in metres. Feyenoord and Liverpool’s start distance, at 44.9 and 44.6 metres respectively, is almost identical. Only Manchester City have recorded a higher start distance.

However, it is City’s manager, Pep Guardiola, whom Slot has named — more than once — as a reference point in his vision for how the game should be played. When he arrived at Feyenoord, Slot showed his squad clips of City’s ferocious pressing as a means of explaining that everyone — even the most talented attackers, or the biggest stars — must be willing and committed to work tirelessly to regain possession.

At Feyenoord, the shift from Advocaat’s approach could hardly have been more pronounced. Slot, though, has left a trail of players who speak effusively about his skills as a manager and qualities as a person. When Oussama Idrissi, who played under him at AZ Alkmaar and Feyenoord, was asked by the Dutch newspaper AD where Slot ranks in the coaches he has played for — who include Julen Lopetegui and Erik ten Hag — he said: “For me, he’s the best. He can develop players, and make teams play fun football.”

Matt Wade, head of sporting strategy at Feyenoord, says Slot leads “democratically, but always retaining control”. “He is a brilliant communicator, and consultative, but also clear at the same time,” Wade told The Athletic last year. “He is quite cautious, quite introverted, but very rule based and principled, which means everyone knows where they stand. And he is not paranoid, which allows freedom for specialists to operate.”

Slot, who hails from Bergentheim, a small village close to the border with Germany, spent his entire playing career in his native Netherlands, most notably with Zwolle and NAC Breda. As a midfielder with Breda, his only brush with Europe — and the elite — was rather bruising: 5-0 and 1-0 defeats by Newcastle United in the first round of the Uefa Cup in 2003.

It was of no surprise to Slot’s team-mates, however, when he moved directly from playing to the coaching staff at Zwolle upon retiring in 2013. “Arne was constantly working on the boys in the team during training, already clearly a trainer in the making,” a former Zwolle team-mate, Bram van Polen, recalled.

After three years as a coach at Cambuur, Slot moved to Alkmaar in 2017, first as assistant then as head coach two years later. With the same principles of play — high-pressing, high-intensity, attack-minded — Slot’s impact was immediate. By the March of his first season, in 2019-20, a 2-0 win away to Ajax put Alkmaar level on points with the Amsterdam giants at the top of the Eredivisie. Then, with nine games left and all the momentum with Slot’s team, the season was cancelled due to the pandemic.

Who knows what might have been — but three years later, the Eredivisie shield would be his. While PSV Eindhoven are certain to win this season’s title, Slot added the Dutch Cup to his trophy cabinet last weekend. Feyenoord, it should perhaps be noted, could yet surpass their league-winning points tally (82) before the end of this season. They just happen to be up against an outstanding PSV team, who are nine points ahead with four games to play and have lost once all season.

In Europe, meanwhile, Slot got his first taste of Champions League football this season, where there were wins against Lazio and Celtic before a group-stage exit and a Europa League quarter-final defeat against Roma on penalties.

Liverpool would be a huge step, of course, but they are not the first Premier League club to attempt to prise Slot away from Rotterdam. Slot rebuffed the advances of Crystal Palace and Leeds United in 2022-23. Chelsea registered an interest. Tottenham Hotspur made their pitch last summer, but Slot eventually chose to sign a new contract at Feyenoord.

The chance to succeed Klopp at Anfield, however, may finally lure Slot to the Premier League.