How Slot could learn from Dutch managers' unhappy Premier League history (2024)

After Ruud Gullit signed for Chelsea in the summer of 1995, he “pestered” the team’s left-back, Frank Sinclair, to go nightclubbing with him in London.

Twelve months later, Gullit emerged as the club’s manager following Glenn Hoddle’s decision to take the England job. Shortly after, according to defender Michael Duberry, speaking on a JOE podcast, Gullit turned to Sinclair in front of the squad and said: “And Frank, no more clubbing for you…”

Gullit was the Premier League’s first Dutch manager, and for a year, his methods worked. Most notably, he won the FA Cup in 1997, Chelsea’s first trophy in 26 years.

But Gullit is an outlier: in general, Dutch managers do not thrive in England. In fact, of all the nations that have most commonly supplied coaches to the Premier League, their record is the worst.

In total, 15 Spanish, 14 Italian, eight French, six Portuguese and six German managers have managed in the Premier League and each nation has either won a championship title or a Champions League crown. Ten Dutchmen, however, have failed to achieve the same feat and just four — Gullit, Guus Hiddink (at Chelsea in 2009), Louis van Gaal (Manchester United, 2016), and Erik ten Hag (United, 2024) — have claimed an FA Cup.

Amid the debate around Ten Hag’s future at Old Trafford earlier this summer, it was rarely pointed out that he is, in terms of trophies, the most successful Dutch manager in England since the launch of the Premier League, given he has also won the Carabao Cup in 2023.

Arne Slot will be the next Dutchman to try to buck the trend. Will he be able to take Liverpool further than any of his compatriots at other clubs?

Perhaps he can learn from those who have not necessarily failed, but equally did not really meet expectations either.

Gullit surely did well for Chelsea given the fallow years the club experienced before his hiring, but nine months after victory over Middlesbrough at Wembley, he was sacked, even though the team was standing second in the Premier League table and in the quarter-finals of two cup competitions.

Though much of the conversation following his exit focused on his supposed demands during negotiations over a new contract, Duberry suggested Chelsea’s players had turned on him.

Winning the FA Cup had heightened his self-belief and it seemed he didn’t feel the value in explaining himself to anyone. This was difficult for some of the players who had once considered him a team-mate, especially those who had been his partners on the dance floors of London.

Duberry described Gullit the footballer as “approachable” but Gullit the manager as “distant”, someone who always referred to players under his leadership as “lovely boy”. It did not feel like a term of endearment. Instead, it was his way of reminding players of their status.

After being left out of the starting XI for an FA Cup game, Duberry recalled going to Gullit and, following a short pause, the Dutchman replied: “Lovely boy, because I had a plan…” before walking off without saying anything else.

Gullit would reach another FA Cup final in his next job at Newcastle United, where he lost to treble-winners Manchester United. The same accusations came his way there, with the words “arrogant” and “blunt” appearing in the post-mortems when he was booted out of St James’ Park, where he fell out dramatically with Alan Shearer.

Gullit had been one of the best players in the world, with club and country, so it would be understandable if he thought rather highly of himself, and that players with much less experience should just trust what he said.

Yet according to Ryan Babel, the former Liverpool forward, this is where Dutch coaches have often gone wrong in England. Many speak good English but that does not mean they are great communicators.

When asked by The Athletic why his compatriots have struggled in English dugouts, Babel references the “Dutch ego” and an attitude of “we are not going to adapt, we always try to play our way”.

When coaches are high up the Dutch football food chain — at clubs such as Ajax, PSV Eindhoven or Feyenoord, as Slot was, for example — success can make a coach think he is invincible because it is easier to dominate a league where most of the opponents are so much weaker than the lesser ranking teams in the Premier League.

It means that the leading clubs do not have to adjust to the plans of whoever they are facing. “Again, that’s a Dutch ego,” Babel says. “And then if you go to a completely different league, culture, different set of rules then yeah, sometimes you need to adapt and be realistic. And the step from the Dutch Eredivisie to the Premier League is simply very big.

“Coaches need to adapt to the Premier League. The Premier League won’t adapt to a foreign coach.”

Gullit managed Chelsea for 18 months and was sacked within a year at Newcastle. Hiddink was a temporary solution at Chelsea. Van Gaal lasted two years at United, before he was sacked after winning the FA Cup.

Hiddink and Van Gaal had managed for much longer in other countries before arriving in England. And in fairness to Van Gaal, he did try to adjust culturally — to a degree.

His title elsewhere had largely been “coach”, and this meant he had a hands-on approach on the training ground. As “manager” of United, he felt he should wear a suit, especially on matchdays, and let his staff have more of a say in the sessions at Carrington.

Hiddink and Van Gaal were direct but neither was moved on because of communication problems with the players — Chelsea felt they had better options and United were dissatisfied with the pace of their progress (and Jose Mourinho was available).

Speak to anyone with an understanding of Dutch coaching and they will mention the country’s football ‘identity’ as a strength and a weakness. There is a set way of playing (4-3-3), training (positional play, where the coach stops sessions and moves players into the areas he wants), and responding to things when you are not happy (by speaking your mind, whether you are a player or a coach).

All of this can create an unstoppable force when it works; when it fails, however, it tends to do so dramatically. No Dutchman has stayed particularly long at a Premier League club — Ten Hag (114 games) is closing in on Martin Jol’s 147 games at Tottenham Hotspur, the longest stint from a Dutchman. At the other end of the scale, Frank de Boer’s reign at Crystal Palace is the shortest of any full-time appointment in the Premier League era in terms of game time, having lasted only 450 minutes at the start of the 2017-18 season.

After failing at Inter Milan, where De Boer had to wait to get some of the things he wanted, he came on strong at Palace. The club had previously been managed by Sam Allardyce, who favoured direct football, but De Boer wanted to change that “identity” and make Palace more attractive to watch. He removed players from the first-team training setup that he thought did not fit in. However, some of them, including Irish defender Damien Delaney, were highly influential.

In 2019, Delaney told The Athletic that he was fed up with being accused of undermining De Boer. “I had no relationship with the guy,” he said. “To put his failure at Palace on me is staggering. If I played in his four games and we lost all four, I might take some responsibility, but I wasn’t even allowed in the stadium to watch the games. I was down at the other training ground with the kids, not even in the building.”

De Boer was painted as cold and, yes, “arrogant”. To some of Palace’s players, this was demonstrated when he tried to show how easy it was to curl in free kicks in one training session.

Palace would lose each of their four Premier League games with De Boer in charge. Meanwhile, he felt the club wasn’t moving fast enough in the transfer market to correct some of the problems he inherited. The decision to sack him was made as the team flew back to London after losing at Burnley, and Mourinho later called him, “the worst manager in the history of the Premier League”. Statistically, he had a point.

It was a bad period for Dutch managers in the Premier League. The following month, Ronald Koeman was sacked at Everton. Like Gullit, Koeman was another European Championship and European Cup winner, who was thought of as distant, leading to the perception at Goodison Park that he did not really care — that his role was merely a stepping stone to a bigger job, like Barcelona, the club he represented with distinction.

The public mood against Koeman really turned when he posted a picture of his Christmas tree, one that was decorated in red baubles, the colour of rivals Liverpool. Internally, staff tended to think that his brother and assistant Erwin was more approachable. Everton had long felt like a family club and Koeman’s attempt to try to stop notable friends of players from entering the canteen of the training ground annoyed many.

He was fired after a 5-2 defeat at home to Arsenal and until Ten Hag arrived at Manchester United five years later, he remained the last Dutchman to take charge of a Premier League club. Koeman’s career has been chequered since leaving England, with a wretched spell in charge of Barcelona followed by taking the Netherlands to the semi-finals of Euro 2024, where they lost to England.

Slot is the next Dutchman to attempt to stamp their mark on English football. Jan Everse, one of Slot’s first managers when he started out as a player at PEC Zwolle, acknowledges that Dutch coaches, including himself, have a stubborn streak: the more they are told they can’t do something, the more they try to prove it is possible.

Yet he also believes Slot stands outside of this boundary, saying he is “99.9 percent certain he will succeed at Liverpool”, provided he is given time by the supporters and the directors who hired him. He describes Slot as a “diplomat” and this is not a word anyone associates with Gullit, Koeman, or certainly Van Gaal.

Everse remembers Slot’s earliest games in charge of Feyenoord, when the team struggled with his new demands because they were so specific. Feyenoord would reach the final of the Europa Conference League that season, losing to Roma, but they nearly went out in the qualifying round to Kosovan side Drita, who led 2-1 at De Kuip before an injury-time winner sent Feyenoord through.

“I’d never heard of this team, they were so terrible,” Everse recalls. “Feyenoord really struggled to beat them, but soon Arne got some new players, and his ideas began to work. Everything made sense.”

Slot has the track record, and the personality, to succeed at Anfield, but to do so, he will have to defy history.

Additional reporting: Tom Burrows

(Top photos: Arne Slot and Frank de Boer; Getty Images)