The best coach in the world? Arne Slot’s ominous Liverpool start hands Man United a unique challenge

It was in the USA this summer that Erik ten Hag and Arne Slot first met as managers of England’s two biggest clubs, where they also spoke happily about some of the common experiences so far. There were evidently no hard feelings from Ten Hag’s interview in May, when he said “people have been going overly lyrical about” Slot’s Feyenoord and that PSV Eindhoven had been better.

It is hardly the first time the managers of Manchester United and Liverpool have traded both laughs and barbs. Sir Alex Ferguson and Kenny Dalglish would go for each other in public before then chuckling privately about people they knew in Glasgow. Bill Shankly looked up to Sir Matt Busby as a god of the game, but could be biting when required with a Liverpool team who were at that point exchanging titles with United.

Deepening these relationships was the fact they were all Scottish, which has been part of both clubs’ cultural legacies. What is a quirk for this season, though, is that the managers from England’s two biggest clubs are both from the same medium-sized non-British country. A line that made fewer headlines from that Ten Hag interview was his pride that Slot’s appointment is “great for the Dutch coach’s guild,” and it has raised excitement in the Netherlands ahead of Sunday.

There’s a very specific question from that quirk, too, out of the country’s distinctive football culture.

How difficult is it for a coach to make a successful leap from the Eredivisie to the Premier League, especially at the two most intensely followed clubs in England? This question has only been accentuated here by the fact that Slot faces this historic challenge of succeeding a club great, while United’s failure in overseeing precisely that has created more expectation for Ten Hag.

The jury is still out on the latter, given that the new Old Trafford hierarchy came so close to sacking him in the summer.

While the general idea of Dutch coaches struggling may seem preposterous given the country’s own historic legacy as tactical pioneers, the discussion is really about modern football economics and the more fundamental idea of going from a competition of small scale to one of global scale.

Frank De Boer was the last coach before Ten Hag to go direct from the Eredivisie to the Premier League and his disastrously brief spell at Crystal Palace put off scores of executives. The understandable stance has been that the level of the Dutch league is now too far from the Premier League, and just has too many young players who are then able to operate in more open but fixed tactical systems. Coaches can have the talent, of course, but they may not have the readiness. There’s a lot to adapt to and the wrong move at the wrong time can stunt a career. All of these factors are also why clubs have been reluctant to sign high-scoring forward’s from the Eredivisie.

Roy Keane’s possibly apocryphal line to Jaap Stam, about how “you’re not playing f**king Willem II now”, has become one that is genuinely uttered within the division.

Even the Eredivisie’s status as a home for innovation has essentially been taken by LaLiga, where the Total Football model has been industrialised and updated by much greater wealth. Hence a quarter of the Premier League’s managers for 2024-25 are from Spain. Four of them play the Total Football model revolutionised by Pep Guardiola himself, with Unai Emery recently adopting many of its principles.

It’s notable that, when United were weighing up whether to sack Ten Hag in the summer, one thing that came up in discussions was how some of the manager’s approaches didn’t fit a club of this size. Those who know the Old Trafford boss say there were times when it felt like he was struck by the scale of the job. It maybe shows how far the remove is that those same figures believe that one advantage that Ten Hag had was that he’d experienced the greater intensity of Ajax. With their four European Cups still making it one more than United, the Amsterdam club are by far the most intensely scrutinised in the Netherlands, with European qualification constantly bringing the most intense schedule. Ten Hag had games every three days, albeit with that offset by the biggest expenditure in the Eredivisie. Slot didn’t have any of that at Feyenoord, although it did mean he was able to work in a more serene environment. He could apply his ideas with more patience.

The irony to all of that is of course that Ten Hag didn’t get to benefit from such experience because his start at United was so chastening. He immediately lost his first two league games in alarming fashion, forcing him to completely rethink tactics. It has often felt like he hasn’t fully clarified his idea of playing since. Of course, Ten Hag’s third game at United - and the first he won - was an Old Trafford match against Liverpool.

Slot now faces the exact same, albeit after a start that was as forgiving as Ten Hag’s was chastening. Whereas United lost those two games to Brighton and Brentford, respectively, Slot crowned a comfortable opening two fixtures with victory over the latter and an ultimately comfortable win over Ipswich Town.

They were certainly the sort of performances you could immediately do with after replacing one of the most celebrated figures in a club’s history. It starts to ward off inevitable comparisons.

Ten Hag has instead compared how Slot enjoyed a much better situation to walk into.

“Jurgen Klopp and Pep Lijnders have left a strong foundation,” the United manager said in May. “He ends up in better waters than I did when I went to Manchester United from the Netherlands, in terms of structure in the club, in terms of balance in the squad.”

Liverpool are understood to be calm about the make-up of their squad, despite external impatience about a lack of signings.

A key point to all that is that the question over Eredivisie coaches need not be relevant to every individual. If a manager is good enough, they’re good enough. Liverpool specifically selected Slot because his teams’ numbers hugely stood out amid all their research, and they feel he is potentially the best coach in the world. One executive at a rival club even echoed that view to the Independent, absolutely lauding Slot’s football. The view in the Netherlands is that he is the best coach they’ve produced for years.

Bringing so much full circle, sources maintain there is confidence that Slot is better at playing Guardiola’s football than anyone except the Manchester City manager himself, but that he will really be able to show his own way after a full season. The feeling is that his ideas are beginning to sink in even faster than expected, although the true tests will be the difficult moments that lie ahead.

Right now, it does mean opposition sides know how Liverpool will set up, in that curious way that is similar to Guardiola. The challenge is countering it, which is what Ten Hag and his overhauled staff have to ruminate on this weekend.

New United assistant Rene Hake is similarly seen as already making a huge impact, and is superb at coming up with exactly these types of plans.

It's a new test for both clubs - although with some familiarity for the managers.