Arne Slot’s ‘lost’ title at AZ: ‘It still hurts us every day’

As Arne Slot closes in on the second league title of his career, he may reflect ruefully on how it could easily have been his third.

It is five years to the day that AZ’s season was effectively ended by Covid-19 after Slot’s in-form team had beaten ADO Den Haag to draw level on points with Ajax, the team they had beaten the week before, at the top of the Dutch Eredivisie.

AZ had the look of champions-in-waiting, Slot having instilled such fearlessness and aggression in their football that their belief was growing with every passing week.

What made this fairytale even more incredible was that Slot, in his first season as a top-flight coach, was outsmarting his rivals with a team largely made up of academy graduates.

“We all sensed that it might be possible,” AZ’s then assistant manager, Pascal Jansen, tells The Athletic.

But with just two months of the season remaining, the mission was ended. AZ’s players had sensed a problem when, before the game with Den Haag on March 7, 2020, they were told for the first time not to shake their opponents’ hands as fears of spreading the virus grew.

Six weeks later, the Eredivisie became the first major football European league to cancel its season in response to the crisis. For the first time ever, there would be no Dutch champions and for those connected to AZ, it left an “open wound” that has still not healed.

AZ are not supposed to win the Dutch title.

Based in Alkmaar, just a 40-minute drive north of Amsterdam, they have always been in the shadow of the Netherlands’ ‘big three’ — Ajax, PSV and Feyenoord — even if they, along with FC Twente, are the only club outside of that trio to win a Dutch title in the past 60 years.

They have two in total, the first in 1981 and the second in 2008-09, under Louis van Gaal. The head coach placed pragmatism before idealism and turned his side into a deadly counter-attacking team, fuelled by the goals of Mounir El Hamdaoui and the craft of a young Mousa Dembele and Maarten Martens, now the head coach of the current team.

AZ have rarely threatened since, apart from that season like no other under Slot in 2019-20. It is why the feeling of ‘what could have been’ still haunts so many people connected to the club, even if there is an acceptance that there were bigger issues at stake amid the pandemic.

“That season hurt so many people,” says AZ supporter Brian Wijker, who was a long-term season ticket holder with his father before becoming a writer and podcaster covering the club. “It’s something we think about every day because, unlike Ajax, we do not get the opportunity to go for a title every year. It’s an open wound which will not heal until we win a trophy.”

Little was expected of AZ at the start of the season following the €18million (£16.2m, $19.8m) departure of academy graduate and prized asset Guus Til to Spartak Moscow.

Supporters were also initially underwhelmed with the appointment of Slot, who had been promoted from his assistant’s role following John van den Brom’s departure, yet those doubts were swiftly assuaged.

Arne Slot’s appointment at AZ was not met with universal enthusiasm (Virginie Lefour/AFP via Getty Images)

Addressing the players on his first day as head coach, Slot gave a speech for the ages. The coach, then aged 41, had studied Pep Guardiola’s methods in depth and built up years of research from his time as a player and a coach at Cambuur, a Dutch lower league club, and was eager to put those principles into practice.

The Athletic visited ahead of the campaign and watched training before interviewing the experienced defender Ron Vlaar. Retirement had crossed the 35-year-old’s mind because of problems with his knee, but a sixth operation gave him a new lease of life. He was intrigued, too, by the notion of playing under a fresh new manager.

“I’m excited with the new manager,” Vlaar said at the time. “He wants to play high press with a lot of energy and we train really hard.”

Vlaar, the oldest member of the group, was like a father figure to some of the youngsters, but it was Teun Koopmeiners, just 21 years old, who pulled the group together and acted as the conduit between Slot and the players.

“He put everyone in the right places,” recalls top goalscorer Myron Boadu. “We had a nice mix.”

Boadu was a burgeoning talent. An 18-year-old striker with blistering pace and energy to burn, Slot already knew about his skills from his first year at the club and placed immediate faith in the teenager as he returned from seven months out with an ankle injury.

Myron Boadu scored crucial goals for AZ in 2019-20 (Naomi Baker/Getty Images)

A few years earlier, Boadu turned down an offer from Arsenal to stay at AZ and he would soon reap the rewards under Slot. “When he became the head coach, he came to my house with a No 9 jersey,” Boadu tells The Athletic. “He talked with me and my parents and told me how much confidence he had in me, but that when he gives me this shirt, there’s also a lot of responsibility that comes with it. He asked me if I wanted it and of course I said ‘yes’. It was fantastic for me!”

Boadu needed the right coaching to unleash his qualities and Slot was there to provide it. “Sometimes we banged heads because he wanted me to do a lot more than just score goals,” he recalls. “He told me that I had to start the press and help the team defend. The way he motivated me was unbelievable. We would talk man to man and he’d tell me that I would feel disappointed at the end of my career if I didn’t give everything. I’ll never forget the things he said to me.”

Slot started to change the culture and the playing style at the club. Those who listened to his first speech remember his clarity and conviction, an observation which chimes with the impression he has made on players at Liverpool.

“Everybody had chills because of the way he came across when he addressed us all,” Boadu recalls. “It was a big moment for us. Even though we already knew him, we felt like this guy was going to be special and that this was the start of something.”

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A 3-0 win at Feyenoord in September gave an early indication of AZ’s potential, but it wasn’t until the end of October that the perception of Slot’s AZ began to change. A high-pressing, attacking style began catching opponents off guard and Slot mixed up his formations during games, which confused even the top teams in the division.

Key players began to emerge as Slot typically opted for Marco Bizot in goal, Vlaar (when he was fit) and Stijn Wuytens in defence, Fredrik Midtsjo playing alongside Koopmeiners in the double pivot, Stengs cutting in from the right, Oussama Idrissi on the left and Dani de Wit behind lone striker Boadu.

Inverted full-backs, Owen Wijndal and Jonas Svensson, tucked inside to create passing lanes for the wingers and they soon started to suffocate opponents.

Key to their success was a training drill that Slot modified early on. “Normally we would play ‘square’ at the beginning of training to get warmed up and have a bit of fun,” Midtsjo tells The Athletic. “But when he (Slot) came in he stepped it up and demanded perfect passes to the correct foot, all based on the opposition’s positioning. We had to move constantly so we were always at the right angle for the man on the ball to allow him more passing options. From this detail, we got the feeling that he (Slot) would go far as a coach.”

Slot made a very good impression on his players (Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)

AZ’s crushing 4-0 win at PSV on October 27 alerted Ajax to their growing threat: it came amid a blistering run of form when Slot’s side scored 26 goals in eight games across all competitions. Boadu scored eight of them.

Yet this team’s attacking flair was underpinned by grit. Pantelis Hatzidiakos lost two front teeth in the win at PSV as he was elbowed in the face during a challenge. Midtsjo, a tenacious and tough-tackling midfielder, gave the team a steely resistance and set the standard in training.

“I tried to make it clear to everyone how important it was to train in the same way as if it was a game,” he says. “By demanding that focus, it helped create the tension throughout the week and we were then able to take that into games.”

That leadership was vital for a young squad. Slot fielded half a dozen players under the age of 25, many of whom had progressed through the ranks together and shared a clear bond.

Koopmeiners was so developed at 21 that he became the captain. Stengs and Boadu linked up like a pair of playful kids and Wijndal kept the team engaged with his jokes. On one occasion, when a player slipped over in the dressing room, Wijndal stayed late into the day to cordon off the section and create a fake “crime scene” that nobody could enter the following day.

Slot with his AZ captain Teun Koopmeiners (Olaf Kraak/ANP/AFP via Getty Images)

To have four key players in the first team who had all graduated from the academy was quite the story.

“The cohesion on and off the pitch was magnificent,” says Jansen. “The squad was 65 per cent homegrown and they all had one big ambition to be very successful with AZ before going onto the next step in their career.”

As well as eating out and partying together away from football, the younger players knew what it meant to win. The beauty of their connection was that they could all speak openly about any issues and offer constructive criticism when necessary.

“That was a huge part of our approach — to have fun together,” says Jansen. “We combined the love of what we do with moments of fun and relaxation but then a hunger to perform at your best. The group was diverse, with many different personalities. They could take the p*** out of each other but also still perform and be there for each other.”

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By December, AZ had the chance to go level on points with Ajax when they entertained the leaders in a game that had extra significance.

Five months earlier, the roof had collapsed at the club’s AFAS Stadium, fortunately on a non-matchday so there were no injuries, but as a result, home games had to be played an hour away in The Hague at ADO Den Haag’s Kyocera Stadium. The Ajax game was the first one back in Alkmaar and supporters were in for a treat as Boadu scored a last-minute winner to draw AZ level on points at the summit.

Slot expressed surprise after the game that Boadu had scored a header, but that was a rare case of something not happening that he had predicted. The greatest compliment multiple players have said about his management is his ability to explain the strengths of opponents and how his team can overcome them.

“His tactics were unbelievable,” says Boadu. “Everything we talked about during the week would happen in the game.”

Slot called on his coaching team to pull together reports on the opposition, but his focus was to find solutions and lean into his own team’s strengths. “His planning was very specific, but going into the games our approach was 80 per cent based on what we were trying to achieve, what we stand for and where we could show our strength and expose the weakness of the opponent,” says Jansen.

“Arne’s strength is to focus on the things you can control and that is only partially your opponent because, in your analysis, you can only share an expectation. So, based on the analysis and how the opponent plays, we would always look for what is most common in their way of playing and take that into our game plan, but most of it was about what we were going to do.”

Despite losing games either side of the winter break, AZ were now becoming the team to beat, with Boadu and Idrissi among the top five goalscorers in the division. By March, Ajax, a club that had progressed to the Champions League semi-finals the year before, had exited the Europa League to Getafe and dropped out of the Dutch Cup. A top-of-the-table clash at the start of March gave AZ the chance to seize control of the title race.

Slot worked specifically on exposing Ajax’s high defensive line and constructed a game plan that was executed perfectly as goals from Boadu and Idrissi gave AZ a 2-0 win in Amsterdam.

Owen Wijndal (left) and Oussama Idrissi celebrate AZ’s win at Ajax (Maurice van Steen/ANP/AFP via Getty Images)

“The coach told us that they would take risks by playing the ball out from defence and that they would play man-for-man all over the field with high pressure,” Midtsjo says. “Both of the goals we scored came from finding space in behind as he had planned for. This was the moment we knew we were good enough to win the league.”

Slot had now beaten each of the Dutch ‘Big Three’ away from home and was building a reputation as one of the brightest young coaches in Europe. With momentum in their favour, supporters began to believe. “It felt like it could be our time,” says Brian.

Then came the fateful twist. One week after AZ beat Ajax, they entertained Den Haag with Covid-19 cases increasing in the Netherlands.

“We read in the press that there might be a chance that football would be cancelled, but the coach told us that it would cost too much money, so it was unlikely,” Boadu recalls.

“Then we were told not to shake hands at the end of the game with the opposition and after that it all went very quick. There was a virus and it was scary but we also knew this might be a chance to do something special and we were about to lose this opportunity.”

When the final decision was announced six weeks later, there was displeasure with the judgment, particularly in the relation to the awarding of European places. Not only had AZ missed out on the chance to win a title, they were also denied automatic entry into the Champions League. That went to Ajax as they finished top on goal difference.

The mood was not as sour in Amsterdam, although some players were aggrieved at the perception that AZ were more worthy winners. “So the goal difference doesn’t count now?” Hakim Ziyech told Dutch outlet AD.

Yet, for AZ, nothing will shake the belief that had the season just been extended by a few weeks, the title would have been theirs. “We were really sharp and getting better and we had beaten all the top teams, so we felt we were onto something special,” Midtsjo says.

Frederik Midtsjo believes AZ would have won the Eredivisie in 2020 but for Covid-19 (Maurice van Steen/ANP/AFP via Getty Images)

Perhaps the saddest part for AZ was what happened next. Not only were they denied a shot at the title, they were knocked out of the Champions League third-round qualifying stage the following season by Dynamo Kyiv. “It never felt the same after Covid,” admits Boadu, who scored 20 goals in 37 games in all competitions in 2019-20.

The squad, too, quickly broke up. Idrissi had left for Sevilla in a €12million deal in the summer of 2020 and Boadu followed to Monaco for €21m. Atalanta then snapped up Koopmeiners for €12m and, a year later, Wijndal went to Ajax for €10m, with Midtsjo moving to Galatasaray.

Yet the biggest blow came in December 2020 when Slot, whose record of 2.11 points per game was the best record in AZ’s history, was sacked for holding secret talks with Feyenoord, with Jansen taking over. Two years later, Slot did get his hands on the Dutch title with the Rotterdam club.

Seeing Slot succeeding at Liverpool now comes as no surprise. What remains difficult to accept, though, is missing out on what would have been a memory of a lifetime.

“We never know what would have happened had the season not ended like it did,” Brian says. “But the thought of what could have been with a generational group of talent hurts us every day.”

(Top photo: ANP Sport via Getty Images)