Arne Slot‘s style has similarities to what Jurgen Klopp brought with him to Liverpool, but the new head coach has outlined the differences fans will see from his team in 2024/25.
The Reds’ season starts in three days and there begins the spotlight that will follow Slot as he begins his first campaign at Anfield.
There will be countless comparisons to his predecessor along the way – we’ll soon get tired of hearing them, if not already – and a lot of that may include the word ‘chaos’.
In an interview with Canal+, Slot spoke of what fans can expect to see more of as the season unfolds and how he’s eager to balance the chaotic moments that Klopp and his team thrived on.
The Dutchman explained: “Style of play has been with my teams where I worked, I think, always the same.
“There are a lot of similarities with Jurgen Klopp, with the way they played in the past, and I’m hoping we will see these similarities in the upcoming weeks and months.
“We like to have the ball, we don’t like the other team to have the ball. But the Premier League is a league where many good clubs are and many clubs want to have the ball, so we have to fight really hard for us to have the ball.
“And if we have it, we want to score, we want to be intense in everything we do. If we have the ball, we want to score – that’s quite simple of course! We want to be intense in everything we do.”
Balancing the moments of chaos
A critique, if you will, of Klopp’s game late on was how he harnessed the chaos and looked for it too often. Slot, on the other hand, wants to strike a balance, and as he previously coined it, “kill them with passes.”
He added: “Maybe the only slight difference there is, is that after we win the ball, I like to go forward just as Jurgen liked it.
“But I sometimes like it when players try to keep the ball and not play the difficult ball, where Jurgen or the former regime maybe liked the chaotic scenes in and around the 16 a lot as well.
“They were really, really, really successful with that for so many years.
“But it sometimes also depends a bit on the players you have. I think we’re trying to find the balance between trying to create chaos at certain moments and trying to keep possession of the ball a bit longer in other moments.”
Pre-season afforded us a promising glimpse of what is in store and while the lack of transfers are tainting some of the excitement, there is still plenty to look forward to in 2024/25 under Slot.
