Slot rises from child prodigy coach to League champion

From sitting in the dugout with his dad to obsessing over Pep Guardiola, Liverpool's hero has always appeared destined for success sooner rather than later

- Rob Draper

The man who has supplanted Pep Guardiola as coach of the Premier League champions is, it turns out, something of a fanboy. "He was always talking about Pep," says Henk de Jong, now in his third spell as coach of Cambuur, the Dutch club where Arne Slot got his first break as assistant 11 years ago. "We were sometimes laughing at him," De Jong says, describing how Slot would get out his extensive video collection of Bayern Munich and Barcelona games to amplify a tactical point.

"Pep again, eh?" we would say. He had videos of all his games. And we would sit and listen to him talk about what he was seeing."

There is an avuncular air to De Jong as he describes how Slot took his baby steps in coaching under him. It was 2014-15 and Guardiola was rewriting football's rules, having won everything at Barcelona and then taking on the Bundesliga with Bayern Munich. For a young, idealistic coach such as Slot - he was 36 when he joined De Jong - Guardiola was a guiding guru. Manchester City's manager would be entitled to view him much as Dr Frankenstein did his monster.

After a middling career as a pro player in the Netherlands, Liverpool's head coach had ended up at his childhood club, PEC Zwolle, a top-flight team, coaching youth players. "I liked his style," De Jong says of Slot the player. "He was not fast..." You suspect that is a polite way of saying "slow". "But he played as a No 10, so he had to think quickly. He was coaching the Zwolle youth and I heard good things from our club director, who asked me if I wanted to have Arne as my assistant. But at that moment I already had an assistant, who, like Arne, was a genius: Sandor van der Heide."