How Arne Slot will plot Liverpool’s pre-season: Periodisation, DNA samples, technical work

By Andy Jonesand Gregg Evans

The first wave of Liverpool’s senior players will arrive at the training ground on Friday as their 2024-25 pre-season — and the club’s new era — begins in earnest.

For the past eight years, squad members were met by the beaming smile and bear-hug embrace of Jurgen Klopp; this time, they will be met by Arne Slot, the club’s new head coach, who has been in charge for just over a month.

The welcome will still be warm, no doubt, but the hard work is going to start soon enough. After the first few days of initial fitness testing, the activity on the pitches, physically and tactically, will get underway.

Slot knows he’ll be without many of his squad, who are either on holiday after playing post-season internationals or are still with their countries at the European Championshipor Copa America, but the 45-year-old will want to make a quick impact.

So what can the Liverpool players who do attend expect?

Slot’s preferred style of football is intense, so he places significant focus initially on building players’ fitness levels.

He carefully picks the days to “beast” his squad — a common observation of Klopp’s notoriously exhausting sessions — but rigorous physical training involves a combination of endurance training, strength conditioning and agility exercises.

At Slot’s previous club, Feyenoord of the Netherlands, there was no individual day set aside specifically for only such full-on fitness drills. Instead, the requirement is for every session – and he includes double training sessions in the schedule – to be carried out at a high intensity, regardless of the activity.

Slot gets a kick out of pushing his players and watching their competitiveness. It is hard work, but he also wants it to be enjoyable, and there is an emphasis on technical improvement. Small one-on-one drills are used to encourage quick thinking and to speed up reaction times and improve coordination.

First-team lead physical performance coach Ruben Peeters, who was also his head of performance at Feyenoord, is following Slot to England and he plays a key role in his pre-seasons. Peeters’ main focus is the periodisation of training planning, where he maps out individual timetables for each player, deciding the workload required and when to build them up or rest them, so they peak at the right time.

Slot is inheriting a squad that is used to huge fitness demands because of Klopp’s own brand of high-intensity football. However, injuries have proved a regular headache for Liverpool in recent seasons, and the club want to avoid repeats under the new regime.

One of the key criteria when assessing possible contenders to succeed Klopp this summer was how the fitness records of their squads and Slot’s record at both Feyenoord and previous club AZ Alkmaar was positive in this regard.

His teams were repeatedly the fittest in the Eredivisie, Dutch football’s top division, but they also succumbed to injury crises. Muscle injuries were rare at AZ, and they were renowned in the Netherlands as the team whose players could still sprint full-throttle in the final minutes of matches.

When Slot arrived at Feyenoord in summer 2021, the Rotterdam club were making sweeping changes after a root-and-branch review by strategic advisory group Sportsology. From that, they became more aligned across all departments, and began to develop ways to maximise performance and results with Matt Wade, their head of sporting strategy, playing a leading role in the transformation.

The medical and performance team adopted a biopsychosocial approach to player fitness. Catapult training vests were used during sessions to track thousands of pieces of physical data, while each player was given a high-intensity level to hit, with Slot being kept informed of targets and progress.

Peeters also led a ‘DNA project’, which saw the club analyse samples of a player’s sweat, saliva, urine and stools several times per season, with the aim of obtaining more information to try to ensure faster physical repair and reduce time lost to injuries. This detailed management saw Feyenoord’s player availability hit 90 per cent or above in each of Slot’s first two seasons.

Slot has not had full control of pre-season preparations at Liverpool this summer.

Plans are put in place well in advance of the end of Klopp’s final season and as their managerial search rumbled on, decisions were made about where Liverpool would go on tour this summer and on some of their friendly fixtures.

From next season — assuming he’s still there, of course — expect Slot to be more involved in these discussions. At Feyenoord, he told staff the types of warm-up games he wanted at certain points during the summer and left the rest to them. Pre-season opponents varied from lower-level sides to top ones, a programme designed for him to try out a variety of tactical approaches to help prepare his side for different challenges once the matches began to matter.

Joining a club of Liverpool’s global stature means there are certain restrictions on which opponents are considered, largely due to the pre-season tours, which are a key revenue driver. This year, Slot will take on Premier Leaguerivals Manchester Unitedand Arsenalduring a three-game trip to the United States, as well as Spain’s Real Betis. The final pre-season game will be at Anfield against Sevilla, another La Ligaside, on Sunday, August 11 — six days before Liverpool’s Premier League opener away to promoted Ipswich Town.

The magnitude of these long-haul trips will be on a different scale to anything Slot experienced at his Dutch clubs.

He has always liked taking his squads off to a training camp, spending parts of his last two pre-seasons in Austria.

Alongside training sessions, there were team-bonding activities, including bike rides and a swim in an icy lake.

Slot recognised at AZ that other sports can help work muscles in different ways and he would join the squad in playing them at the training camp. He is a keen golfer. Like Klopp, he is a huge padel fanand a court for that racket sport was built at Feyenoord’s training base. There is one at Liverpool’s, too.

“There are two things (why) to do this. Of course, to get to know more about the players, because mostly you see them during the games. And you also want to know what the culture is, how they train and what they are used to,” said Slot.

“I said this: we (managers and coaches) all try to steal a bit from each other – mostly this is done by looking at the games, but if you can see the way they train, that can only help you. Let one thing be clear: the players are not going to get all the same exercises again (as from the Klopp era) – we will implement our own things. But it’s interesting to see what they did during the week.”

Slot — as befits his title of head coach, rather than manager— is very hands-on during training sessions and leads them, with assistant manager Sipke Hulshoff, his closest lieutenant, alongside him. Whereas Klopp allowed assistant manager Pep Ljinders to lead training, his replacement gets more involved. Slot regularly joins in with drills such as rondos or defence versus attack with player overloads and the message is all about winning the ball back quickly.

While there are similarities between Slot and Klopp’s style of play, there are key differences, not least the formation — assuming he decides to continue with the 4-2-3-1 he used at Feyenoord.

At AZ, where he was No 2 for two seasons from summer 2017 and then head coach for 18 months, meetings were held with the whole team, by position groups and also face to face. Slot is very committed to working through individual plans with players and keeping track of their progress through frequent communication around and away from the training ground.

Advice can include working with different specialists, as has been the case with Feyenoord striker Santiago Gimenez, who worked with the medical and performance team to improve his running style. His team-mate Marcus Pedersen, a defender, was taken to a kickboxing gym to increase his aggression on the pitch while midfielder Orkun Kokcuinstalled a gym in his home and performed specific exercises to improve his explosiveness.

Slot is aware that pre-season is a short window, and there may not be time to set all his plans in place during it, but it is a crucial part of the process.

At AZ, the three key themes he worked on in this period were:

• Emphasising the importance of pressing and counter-pressing, to encourage quick regains of possession

• Positional play, so players learn their roles during different phases of play

• Build-up play, with a focus on building attacks from the back, maintaining possession and transitioning smoothly through the phases.

“In pre-season, it’s all about getting players fit and getting your game idea, your game model, into the players,” said Slot. “We have quite a lot of training time with a few of them; and it depends how far players will go into the tournaments they are playing, how much time we have to work with these (other) players.

“The playing style will not be completely different (to Klopp’s). So we’ll try with the players who come in at the beginning, to implement our idea of football as soon as we can. And when the rest come in a bit later, hopefully the ones who are there already can help us as a coaching staff, so that they know what is being expected.”

Communication is one of Slot’s strengths. He speaks very good English and is described as an intelligent, personable and positive person.

He treats all players the same, whether they are his most experienced players or academy lads who have been with the first team for a few days. That will be important as the majority of his initial group this pre-season will be made up of younger players including Tyler Morton, Jarell Quansah, Conor Bradley, James McConnelland Bobby Clark.

He has spoken to a few of his new players since the end of last season, including captain Virgil van Dijk. Slot wanted to make his proper introductions in person rather than over text messages or by video chat, so there has been little communication from him or the club since last season ended in the middle of May.

After a quiet month, the action is finally about to get underway… and Slot will not want to waste any time.