Did you know that Arne Slot reckoned the best two teams at the 2022 World Cup were Germany and Spain? It’s one of the unexpected insights about the embattled Liverpool FC manager to be found in Mikos Gouka’s biography, Arne Slot: The New Era.
The respectful and affectionate biography is written by a journalist who has known Slot since he was a player at Sparta Rotterdam. A goalscoring midfield player whom the controversialist pundit Johan Derksen once dubbed ‘Juffrouw Slot’ or ‘Little Miss Slot’ as it’s translated here – ‘Mademoiselle Slot’ might be closer? – due to his distaste for the rough stuff.
Slot’s opinion about Germany and Spain is interesting because the Germans got knocked out in the group stage, while Spain went out on penalties to Morocco in the second round, after 120 goalless minutes in which they had 959 passes and one shot on target. Their efforts are remembered in their respective countries with embarrassment, if they’re remembered at all.
Slot argued that these teams’ underlying numbers were actually better than anyone else’s: it’s just that, unfortunately for them, luck is often decisive in a short tournament like the World Cup. No doubt there was also an aesthetic affinity there, a sense that these two teams were trying to play football “the right way”. Hansi Flick and Luis Enrique are coaches Slot respects.
Still, you can’t help feeling that somebody who could nominate Germany and Spain as the best teams at that World Cup in Qatar is revealing a blindness – or at least an indifference – to entire dimensions of football.
Germany and Spain both lost in the group stage to Japan. Japan did not have their talent, but they had much more of certain intangible qualities that are not easily translated to spreadsheets or two-dimensional diagrams.
If you think Japan beat Germany and Spain because they were lucky then you missed a lot of what happened in those matches. Were Japan lucky when VAR decided that the stretching Kaoru Mitoma had – just about – kept the ball in play as he crossed for Ao Tanaka to score the winner against Spain? Yes, they were – but teams who show the desperate will to win that Mitoma showed in that moment get lucky more often than teams who don’t.
Japan won those games because they were more of a team. They played with courage, conviction, unity, sacrifice: qualities embodied by their No.6, Wataru Endo. Jürgen Klopp signed Endo for Liverpool a few months later and started him 20 times in the 2023-24 Premier League. Slot, who prioritises accurate passing over passion, has started Endo just once in 50 Premier League games.
Some of Liverpool’s underlying numbers don’t look too bad at the moment. One estimate of the expected goals (xG) tally of their last three games reads: Liverpool 6.59, Opponents 5.39.
Unfortunately the “overlying” numbers are that Liverpool have scored one and conceded 10 in these three games, adding up to their worst three-match run since their last relegation season of 1953-54. Nine defeats in their last 12 games means they have emulated the worst of Manchester City’s implosion from this time last season.
[ Defiant Arne Slot vows to ‘fight on’ as Liverpool’s nosedive gathers pace ]
This sort of collapse is not unprecedented at Anfield: Klopp experienced a similar run in the early months of 2021 – nine defeats in 15 – and again in the spring of 2023 with eight defeats in 16.
But the way the public has reacted to it feels different. Almost nobody thought Liverpool should sack Klopp during either of his team’s collapses, yet public support for Slot has melted away.
If it were all about trophies, then the recent Premier League winner Slot would have the same backing now that Klopp always had, but we all know there’s more to it than that.
Clearly the transfers are part of the story. Slot always took pride at Feyenoord in winning the title against much wealthier clubs of Ajax and PSV. “Liverpool has done the same in the Premier League,” Slot told writer Gouka soon after celebrating the title at Anfield, “with other clubs spending money like water and us spending hardly anything. To me, that gives these two championship wins even more lustre”.
Slot here doesn’t sound like a man who knew his club were about to become the biggest spenders in world football in 2025. In three seasons at Feyenoord, the club never spent more than €8 million on a player. By the end of August, Liverpool had spent almost half a billion euro.
The wisdom of that spree now looks highly doubtful, especially the decision to spend a British record £125 million (€143 million) on Alexander Isak when they had already spent £80 million on Hugo Ekitike. Suffice it to say that if the plan was not to play both of these guys in the same team, then this is one of the dumbest transfer decisions of all time.
That the sporting director might also be coming under pressure does not really help the manager. Even Klopp, were he still Liverpool manager, might be struggling to keep the fans on his side in this situation, with these results. Yet you’d still give him a better chance, because Klopp inhabited the role of leader in a way that Slot never really has.
Even though Slot is the type to argue that Germany 2022 were actually rather good if you look at their underlying numbers, he hates the idea that people might think of him as a “laptop manager”. He was, after all, a proper football player with 100 career goals, he has spent his life immersed in the game. He is not some hustler with 15,000 hours on Football Manager and a Pro Licence.
Maybe if he were that kind of hustler, then he’d pay more attention to the evidence that coaches at the biggest clubs are increasingly in the business of showmanship.
Gouka tells us: “Once, a reporter compared his behaviour on the sidelines to that of Atlético Madrid’s excitable coach Diego Simeone. ‘Quite frankly, I’m embarrassed that you say that,’ Slot said. ‘But if that’s how to want to portray me, be my guest.’”
Most coaches would be flattered to be compared to Simeone, who, besides being Atlético Madrid’s most successful manager, is the greatest sideline showman of his generation.
Simeone understands that when the game begins the manager becomes the avatar of the crowd, the incarnation of its will. Klopp knew this too. The crowds love them for it.
You get the impression that Slot thinks all that stuff is bull. Why should he pander to people who don’t understand the game by putting on an exaggerated theatrical persona and leaping about on the sideline like a lunatic?
It’s important to Slot to be thought of as “normal”. As he told Gouka: “If people think I’m still the same Arne that I always was, and I get the impression they do, it’s because I spent 43 years of my life making do on salaries only slightly higher than a journalist’s.”
But now some of Slot’s professional peers make more than €10 million a year (some far more). If you’re on movie-star money then people might expect you to perform like one.
Slot hasn’t even bothered to develop a distinctive sideline “look” to bolster his image as have Simeone, Klopp, Pep Guardiola, Tony Pulis, Carlo Ancelotti, Mikel Arteta and even Xabi Alonso. He looks like a normal man you might see on the Luas in Dublin.
But in times of crisis, people run screaming from normal men.
Football management and politics have always resembled each other in that an element of mania – even a tinge of psychopathy – can be a positive asset. In the age of ubiquitous media, these professions are converging on a kind of public performance art, concerned above all with the transmission of feeling.
In theory a coach should be judged on his technical work – the actual football work that happens in private, with the team – but in practice he is judged on his image, which he must feed weekly with dozens of compulsory interviews and multiple live stadium performances.
Slot’s image is mild and understated. His team’s response to defeat after defeat has been mild and understated. They react to defeat as if healthily aware of the unimportance of these defeats in the wider scheme of the world.
Onlookers cry: where is the rage?
In the foreword to Gouka’s book, Dick Advocaat writes: “I sometimes think if [Slot] hadn’t been a coach, he might have made a good politician.”
Advocaat was born in 1947 and it sounds like he has that generation’s sense of what a politician should look like: careful with words, consensus-oriented, diplomatic, the kind of person who would see “reasonable” as a compliment.
Maybe Advocaat hasn’t noticed that today’s successful political operators are dramatic, even histrionic personalities with a flair for channelling rage and contempt via the medium of short-form video.
If political success could have been achieved the same way in the 1990s as it is today, José Mourinho never would have had to bother with football. His dictatorship of Portugal might now be entering its third decade.
It’s difficult to see Slot leading one of our contemporary political movements, though you can easily imagine him as a minister from a declining soft-left or market-liberal party, appearing in phone videos where he hurries along a street pursued by people screaming “traitor!”. Indeed, if Liverpool lose at West Ham on Sunday you mightn’t have to imagine it at all.
