The inside story of Arne Slot’s craziest coaching idea: ‘It was a brilliant failure’

It was, to quote one Dutch headline, ‘een briljante mislukking’. Translation: a brilliant failure.

Or, to put it another way, Arne Slot has had better ideas during his 30-year career as a professional footballer and now a manager, which has brought him to the cusp of this season’s Premier League title with Liverpool.

He was 32 at the time, playing for PEC Zwolle in the Dutch second division, and it was an improvisational kick-off that brought one former Netherlands international, Rene van der Gijp, close to the point of spontaneous combustion on his television chat show.

“If you show this to (Spain’s World Cup winner) Andres Iniesta, he’ll think this is a completely different sport,” Van der Gijp told viewers of Vandaag Inside. “This has nothing to do with professional football. If you do this in a cafe team, with 12 people in the crowd, you are immediately taken off. And everybody says, ‘He is crazy’.”

How else can you explain the scene in 2011 when Slot sought out the approval of his coaches at Zwolle to try something a bit new, a little wacky, in an attempt to catch out the opposition players from Cambuur?

To give him the benefit of the doubt, it is a reminder that Slot, even as a younger man, was a keen tactician who liked to think outside the box.

It is also worth noting that, having come up with this plan, he had the gumption to run it by Art Langeler, Zwolle’s manager at the time, as well as his assistant, Jaap Stam, the former Manchester United and Netherlands international defender.

“But it was still a ridiculous idea,” Jan Everse, another former Zwolle coach, tells The Athletic, barely suppressing laughter. “Arne has a lot of ideas — this, unfortunately, was one of his worst ones.”

That plan was to flick the ball up, straight from kick-off, and then launch an almighty up-and-under into the opposition half, with the intention that it would drop into the penalty area. And, while the ball was mid-air, Zwolle’s attackers were to sprint to the penalty area to meet it on the way down and, ideally, stick it past an exposed goalkeeper. After all, they couldn’t be offside as everyone would have started behind the ball. And, if it worked out, the opposition defence would be caught by surprise.

“What they didn’t seem to realise was that, if you kick the ball all the way to the penalty area straight from kick-off, it should be a very easy catch for the goalkeeper,” says Everse, who still sounds utterly mystified today, over a decade on. “Also, how long would the ball be in the air? Maybe three seconds? Just think how fast the players would have to be to catch up. You’d need someone to break a world record just to get there. No. This was a very bad idea.”

But what if Slot, the team’s playmaker, could get the ball really high?

During training, the move went well.

“Three times even,” Langeler said recently in an interview with journalist Vincent de Vries for the Zwolle-based De Stentor newspaper. “That’s why Jaap and I said to each other, ‘Let’s try it’. But it needed the right execution, of course.”

What followed may be a surprise to those Liverpool fans who have seen Slot lead the team to the top of the table in his debut year without any tactical ideas that could be described as being unorthodox (or plain hilarious) since taking over from Jurgen Klopp. 

Unfortunately for Slot, the internet never forgets and the footage shows it was nowhere near the required level of execution. The tap from Joey van den Berg was fine. So was the flick from Slot to set himself up. Then… everything went hopelessly wrong.

“Arne wanted to fire it high into the penalty area but instead, he kicked the ball almost straight up,” Langeler recalled, with a chuckle.

Not quite straight up. The ball actually goes backwards, high into the air and then comes down again, landing on the left-hand edge of the centre circle in Zwolle’s half, to the sound of slightly mystified cheers from the crowd.

“We’ve started this match between Zwolle and Cambuur…” Vincent Schildkamp, the television commentator, announces. “And that is extraordinarily strange. That might be the tension… you rarely see this, a remarkable moment from Arne Slot.”

Everse, an Ajax and Feyenoord player in the 1970s, says the footage is still shown on television in the Netherlands: “Arne had talked about it with the other players and coaches during the week. ‘We have to change the kick-off. If we do it this way, they will be surprised’. But the kick was not what he wanted. He got it totally wrong.”

Slot appears to lose his bearings and the ball falls behind him into a no-man’s land. It is the Zwolle players who are caught by surprise and, within moments, Cambuur are on the attack.

Was there method to the madness? “Sometimes the opponents might have the sun in their eyes and couldn’t control it,” explains Ben Hendriks, who was manager of Zwolle from 1992 to 1995, and later worked for the club as a scout. “Other times it was his way of saying, ‘Here you go, we’d like to have the second ball.’ People here used to laugh about it. He would flick the ball up and then (laughing) … zuuuuut! (gestures like a rocket taking off). He would shoot it up to heaven.”

Hendriks remembers Slot was always thinking of new ways to try to get an advantage over Zwolle’s opponents: “When he was sleeping, he was thinking about football. He always had a football brain and was very good at making people believe in themselves.”

Langeler also has some sympathy: “By firing the ball as high as possible into the penalty area, the idea was our three strikers would run forward and be there (for when it dropped) on the edge of the area. And who knows what would come of that?

“It looked funny, of course. And if you didn’t know the background, you’d think, ‘What on earth are they doing? They just shoot the ball into the air’. No, this was a brilliant failure, let’s leave it at that.”

Slot has had a remarkable first season at Liverpool (Henry Nicholls / AFP via Getty Images)

Slot, however, was not prepared to leave it — not to begin with, anyway. Undeterred, he tried the routine again later that year. Again, the opponents were Cambuur and, again, it went badly.

“He made himself look ridiculous — it was unbelievable,” says Everse, who wonders if the intention was “that the opponent burst out laughing, doesn’t recover and they could profit from that”.

Everse, for context, had two spells with Slot, rates him as a better coach than Klopp and talks about his pride seeing the “fantastic job” his former player is doing with Liverpool. There is no malice in what he says, just bemusement. And laughter.

It is a reminder, he says, of how, in football, even the smartest people can get it wrong: “Johan Cruyff, the best footballer and coach, always said, ‘Football is a very easy game — but it’s very difficult to play it easy’. Sometimes, though, there are players or coaches who try to invent football again. And this, from Arne, is one example.”

Additional reporting: James Pearce

(Top photo: VI Images via Getty Images)