This Is Arnefield?

Arne Slot is the new favourite to succeed Jürgen Klopp. But how does the Feyenoord manager match up?

The football news cycle moves faster than ever. This morning, I was contemplating if Thomas Frank’s Championship work with Brentford would scale up to success with Liverpool. The Bees got 100 xPTs from 46 matches in the season in which they were promoted, so maybe it could.

But by this afternoon, I was looking up data on Arne Slot. When somebody moves from having a two per cent chance of becoming the next Liverpool manager according to bookmakers on Monday to a 63.6 per cent likelihood on Tuesday (per Oddschecker), somebody knows, and has probably said, something.

While my knowledge of Feyenoord is more or less non-existent, there are a few data points which make for very interesting reading.

For starters, they have turned 11 high turnovers - possession regains in the final 40m of the pitch - into goals this season. Along with Stuttgart, that’s the joint-most of any team in the top seven leagues (England, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain) in 2023/24. Manchester City and Napoli have 10 apiece, while Sporting CP (wherefore art thou, Rúben?) are one of five teams on eight.

Such things can be somewhat random, with finishing the great leveller in football. Liverpool had scored three goals from 10.2 expected across four games prior to the match with Fulham, then scored three times from 1.0 xG at Craven Cottage. Feyenoord might score from high turnovers but it doesn’t mean they press well.

However, another metric suggests they do. They have made 6.9 final third possession regains per match this season, the most in the Eredivisie. To put such figures into context without either the data set or the brain power of Ian Graham or Will Spearman, I divide the number of touches which the opposition have in their defensive third by the total of possession regains made there. The lower the figure, the more intense the press. Here’s a look at Slot’s Feyenoord and Klopp’s Liverpool.

This suggests Arne’s boys press in the attacking third at a rate equal to or better than the best Liverpool have offered in the last seven years. Of course, there are a lot of factors here; teams in the Eredivisie have lower quality players and likely lower quality managers, so may be more vulnerable to a good counter-pressing outfit. But these numbers are certainly encouraging.

The two teams even seem to dominate the same areas of the pitch in 2023/24. Opta have a metric they call Zones of Control, where the pitch is split into 15 sections and the zones are colour-coded based on whether the team or their opponents dominate the touches within it. Behold:

So far, so Liverpool, but are Feyenoord actually any good? Here’s the expected points table for the Eredivisie this season.

It’s interesting that they have an identical win-draw-loss record of 11-3-1 both home and away. According to the numbers, they should be unbeaten on the road, having only lost the xG battle twice and by just 0.1 both times. Dominating away matches, even with one of the bigger clubs, has to be the sign of a decent manager.

Feyenoord’s only xG defeat at home came against PSV Eindhoven, a match they lost 2-1 on the little matter of actual goals. What we can see though is that Arne Slot is accustomed to challenging for titles, dominating almost every match, and doing so with a fierce high press. That’s not a bad starting point for a potential Liverpool manager, is it?

Opta Charts taken from here.