After leading Feyenoord Rotterdam to victory over Ajax Amsterdam for the first time in 17 years, a video of coach Arne Slot spread, congratulating his players in the style of Spaniard Pep Guardiola, whom he may face next season, if the negotiations revealed on Thursday between Feyenoord and Liverpool are successful.
In the video, Slott spoke about the importance of the following weeks: “Because it's just a win. Nothing more than a win, a big win, but nothing more than that. “We have a bigger goal than the first win in Amsterdam in 17 years.”
Indeed, Feyenoord continued the journey and last season won the Dutch Football League title for the first time since 2017.
Critics did not only link Slot, whose negotiations between his club and the English giant were confirmed according to Slot himself during an interview with ESPN, and Guardiola, the coach of Manchester City, the English champion for the last three seasons. Slott himself even expressed the similarities with Pip.
As the former coach of Barcelona, Spain and Bayern Munich, Slot studies every little detail, believing that watching Guardiola's teams gives him "absolute joy in football." He continues: “There is no team in the world that I prefer to watch more than Manchester City, then Napoli (Italian), and Arsenal and Brighton (English).”
The 45-year-old, who started his career with Feyenoord in 2021, says: “I never want to compare myself with Pep, but he is obsessed with details like me.”
Earn a reputation as a demanding coach. He told the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper: “At Feyenoord, I tell the players: You must create four times the chances of the opponent and do twice as much as they do. In all the matches we won this season, the numbers show that we ran 20 or 30% more than the opponent. “In the matches we lost, we did not run more than 3 to 6 percent.”
He continued in an interview with Football International magazine in May 2023: “I try to win the match a week before it is scheduled, by conveying all the necessary ideas to the players through exercises, pre-match conversations and tactics.”
