How Good is Arne Slot?

Arne Slot has not had a good season. What is his standing against his Premier League contemporaries? Could the Dutchman be the worst coach in the division?

“I consider the veracity of the idea that LFC currently has the worst coach in EPL. Most of our wins are ugly and due to the players we have as opposed to team performance and tactics. This season we are Man U 2.0.”

The above comment was posted on my review of Liverpool’s 3-1 win over Crystal Palace. If you want to build a case that Arne Slot is the worst coach in the Premier League, that match represents a decent place to start.

The Eagles generated roughly twice as many expected goals as the Reds, leading the Opta-defined big chance count by five to three. Fellow statto Michael Reid noted that Palace’s 2.26 xG “was the fifth-highest non-penalty tally by a visiting side at Anfield on Opta’s records in the Premier League (from 2012-13).” In coaching terms, Oliver Glasner had Slot pinned to the mat.

The difficulty in trying to assess coaches is that sport is not a control experiment. Football is like Formula One; the best driver won’t win if they’re in the worst car. You can see this in the managerial career of Vincent Kompany, who couldn’t keep Burnley in the Premier League yet has Bayern Munich playing like a dream. The standard of the players determines far more than the skill level of their coach.

Far smarter people than I have tried to establish the numerical impact of a good manager. Liverpool’s former Director of Research Ian Graham put a figure to the question in his excellent book. “There is some evidence that on the pitch, controlling for the quality of the players at his disposal, a good manager can add a few points per season. This is about the same value as a good player brings,” he wrote.

Fans will tell you that Jürgen Klopp added far more than that to the Reds, and perhaps he did. But the club didn’t consistently challenge for major honours until they signed the likes of Mohamed Salah, Virgil van Dijk and Alisson Becker. Player quality prevails, as much as it’s on their manager to elicit their peak performance level.

“I learned more from the lads I was playing with than any instructions I was getting from the manager.”

Roy Keane on Alex Ferguson

Money talks loudest in this game. Transfermarkt estimated that Liverpool had the third most valuable squad in the Premier League in mid-September. This suggests their likely final position of fifth is an underachievement.

The wage data is no better for Slot, albeit with the usual proviso that nobody really knows exactly how much players are paid. The figures on FBRef have the Reds as having had the second highest salary bill for their Premier League starters this season. That’s with top earner Salah starting his fewest league matches since the middle of the last decade too.

There’s an unquantifiable tax for playing when grieving that factors in to any analysis of Slot and his team’s performance this season though. It doesn’t matter how much a footballer is worth or the size of their pay packet if their head is not in the game. And if it just came down to relative performance against financial standing then Scott Parker is a better manager.

Slot out, Scott in? Didn’t think so.

Unai Emery is one man who is outperforming the Liverpool boss against monetary expectation and he has also won more trophies across his career. Pep Guardiola has very obviously collected more silverware, while Vitor Pereira has amassed league titles in China, Greece and Portugal. Otherwise, Slot is doing comparatively well against his Premier League peers for winning prizes.

To assess a coach, we should consider the success of their tactical plan. Were they able to nullify the opposition, then dominate the game to the point of deserving a victory, regardless of the actual outcome of the match?

Before we answer that, let’s get a word on the importance of tactics from a man with 107 international caps, a Champions League winner’s medal and three Premier League titles to his name. His opinion carries serious weight.

“We never done tactics, we just played.”

Ashley Cole on Arsene Wenger

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Jonathan Wilson considered the concept of quantifying tactics in 2013. “Imagine a match in which Team A would be expected to create 20 chances and Team B 10. If Team B's manager can shift that to, say, 14-8, he has done a good job, whether or not his side wins the game or not,” he wrote, in a passage that seems quaint now that expected goals are so widely used in football analysis.

With player quality inevitably influencing matters to some extent once again, using numbers along these lines feels a reasonable way to make an assessment. It will reward managers who eke a statistically better than expected performance out of their team.

Liverpool’s recent victory against Crystal Palace provides the perfect example to explain the concept. The Reds have led the xG tally by an average of 0.5 in their home games this season. As the Eagles outdid them by 1.1 on Saturday, they are rewarded with 1.6 as that is the margin by which they bettered expectation.

Palace’s average expected goal difference on the road in 2025/26 is zero. Liverpool underachieved this mark by 1.1 at Anfield, so this is debited from the Reds’ total for the campaign.

Slot has overseen the fourth best relative xG difference in the division. Liverpool’s figure for this metric is only down 1.6 against their actual xG difference. The problem is that only two teams have underachieved by more. Equally, Guardiola is only one place better off.

With the highly rated Andoni Iraola also in the bottom five, we may need a better way to measure the difference a coach can make. This doesn’t pass the eye test. It’s also notable that generally the teams with negative xGD improve on this whereas those in credit decline. Removing the random factor of penalties doesn’t make any significant change to the standings either.

We can conduct a similar experiment by comparing the expected goal difference in matches with the predicted xG outcome for the fixture. The order remains similar once again, likely because it’s a more long-winded version of the simpler experiment above (so that’s an hour or so spent spreadsheet wrangling that I won’t be getting back).

There is a method that produces results that look somewhat more reasonable. The non-penalty xG (npxG) is weighted against league average for home or away as appropriate. We then compare the new figure with the original npxG to find the difference; in essence we are rewarding notably above average performances and punishing the team on the wrong end of them. Look away now, Arne.

Emery is clearly a great coach. Daniel Farke and Régis Le Bris have dragged their teams to levels in the table few would’ve anticipated in August. The top three in this chart make a degree of sense.

The problem here is that this system is too volatile; Chelsea gained 7.1 npxGD at both Tottenham and Villa by utterly dominating them, so would be bottom by a long way if those two matches were excluded. Any one game can carry too much weight.

For the record, Liverpool were third by this measure at the point at which they won the title last season. That maybe feels about right for Slot; doing a decent job with a team that was already at a good level without necessarily being the best coach in England.

What makes some of his recent work so baffling is that he seemed so tactically adept last season. Perhaps the best example was making changes to recover after going a goal and a man down early on against a Fulham side that were seventh in the expected points standings. That was masterful from Slot. Where has that guy gone?

Ranking Premier League managers is ultimately an impossible task. Mikel Arteta will probably win the title this season but you wouldn’t want him to manage Liverpool. Too intense, too weird, too insistent on dour football.

In terms of who is over Arne, Guardiola is a given. Emery too, as he has trophies on the board allied to an ability to outdo financial expectation. The standard of football Iraola extracts from a frequently changing Bournemouth squad makes one wonder what he could achieve with even better players. Even then, he may be a risky appointment for a big club given his silverware is limited to a Cypriot Super Cup.

Beyond this trio, I’m less certain about who I think is better than Slot. I’m already very uncertain about how to assess the Liverpool head coach this season in any case.

An optimistic read is that he remains a good manager, just one who has endured a bad season in circumstances so unbelievably difficult and close to unprecedented that he deserves some grace. A pessimist will be ‘Slot out’ regardless. Let me know your view in the comments section.

I mentioned the idea of this article on Bluesky and asked for opinions - you can see the responses here. In January, Football365 ranked Slot 15th out of 28 Premier League managers this season. Has your opinion changed? You can recast votes on Slot’s standing among his peers too: