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 2-1 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