Shortly before midday on Friday, Arne Slot eased into his seat at the AXA training centre in Liverpool with a smile, a man assured of himself and promising to build upon the firm foundations laid by his predecessor, Jürgen Klopp.
The head coach was joined by Richard Hughes, Liverpool’s sporting director, who emphasised that the “approach and style” would not be particularly different to “what has been so successful” in the recent past. Continuity, then, is the plan.
‘We are here to win trophies’
Slot believes he has inherited a squad with a “winning culture” that requires minor tweaks to challenge for the title.
“We’re here to win something,” he said. “We’re here to become better players, to become a better team and as an end result of that, we want to win trophies. I think our aim should be: we want to win it, and we want to be on top of the league — we want to be there for 38 games.”
Hitting the ground running may prove difficult: Slot will have limited time to work with starters such as Virgil van Dijk, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Alexis Mac Allister, Darwin Núñez — expected to be the team’s starting centre forward this season — and Alisson, who are on international duty in either the European Championship or Copa America.
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“Every manager has this challenge,” he said. “The manager of [Manchester] United, [Manchester] City [and] Chelsea.”
But unlike Pep Guardiola and Erik ten Hag, Slot is a new appointee attempting to impress his identity onto his squad. “That’s true,” he responded. “You could see it as a disadvantage, but not an excuse.”
Heavy-metal football is here to stay
Slot is positioned as both the change and continuity candidate: he brings with him a new backroom staff, of which he hinted two more are expected to join assistant coach Sipke Hulshoff, Ruben Peeters (lead physical performance coach) and Fabian Otte (head of first-team goalkeeper coaching) soon, but his principles sound similar to Klopp’s.
“I don’t want to take words out of Richard’s [Hughes] mouth, but I think one of the reasons why he came to me was that our playing style is not so different [from Klopp’s],” he said. “There are a lot of similarities but, of course, I am not a clone of Jürgen.
“Sometimes it’s a 4-2-3-1, sometimes it’s a 4-1-4-1, sometimes we build up with three. There’s a lot of freedom when we have the ball. But if we don’t have the ball, there’s not so much freedom, we want to be really aggressive.
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“We both like the fans to come into the stadium and see a team that plays with a lot of energy, that plays good football, and I think that is the thing I’m focused on most.”
That “positive” relationship with the fans, Slot explained, is important, referring to a match he attended at Anfield in 2017 on the invitation of Pepijn Lijnders, when Liverpool beat Tottenham Hotspur 2-0. Slot watched from the stands with Michael Edwards, the former sporting director.
“It was before they won the league and Champions League. You know better than anyone that people liked what Jürgen did here. He changed the style of play and the amount of times the team won. Everyone was positive even back then without the team winning trophies at that stage.”
Hughes intimates towards a quiet summer
One of the elements that drew Liverpool to Slot was his record of improving players. As head coach his remit is focused on the training pitch, and while new signings will be made collaboratively, they fall primarily under Hughes’s purview.
“We’re both delighted to have inherited the current squad, it’s very talented,” Hughes said. “We need to improve on the training pitch, first and foremost. With the window open, we will always be opportunistic if we can improve certain areas as we go.”
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The sporting director would not to be drawn on the contract statuses of Van Dijk, the club captain who turns 33 next week, Alexander-Arnold, 25, the vice-captain, and Mohamed Salah, 32, the club’s top scorer since he joined in 2017. All three players have a year left on their deals.
“Contractual situations I don’t think would be fair for me to talk about, I think these are private matters between club and players,” he said.
The club had an informal policy that they would not renew contracts for players past their peaks under Edwards — recently appointed Liverpool’s chief executive and described by Hughes as “the best British sporting director to date”.
The presence of Hughes, and the return of Edwards, Julian Ward and David Woodfine to operational positions suggests that the real continuity at the club will be behind the scenes.
