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Post by LGH87 on Jun 1, 2023 7:26:24 GMT
In a corridor at Feyenoord’s training base, the club’s head coach, Arne Slot, and their chief executive, Dennis te Kloese, stand alongside one another, posing in front of the club’s red and white badge.
It is Friday, May 26, late in the afternoon, and the end of a nerve-jangling week that many suspected would end rather differently for the newly crowned Dutch champions.
Slot, 44, guided Feyenoord to their first Eredivisie title since 2017 and only their second since 1999. In doing so, he became one of the most desired coaches in European football. Slot arrived at Feyenoord in the summer of 2021 and in his first season the team finished third but reached the Europa Conference League final, where they lost against Jose Mourinho’s Roma. This time around, Feyenoord won the Dutch title and reached the quarter-final of the more prestigious Europa League. Before Slot’s appointment, the club had not progressed beyond the group stage of a European competition since 2015.
It is not only the outcomes that captivate suitors; it is a style of play that appears to mirror the most successful and attractive teams in 2023, such as Napoli, Manchester City and Arsenal. Slot’s team are comfortable in possession, they are intense with and without the ball, they seek overloads to destabilise opponents, they have full-backs wandering into central midfield and they recruit wingers who will go one v one with courage and conviction. “There are not many coaches in my age group who are not inspired by (the Manchester City coach) Pep Guardiola or his Barcelona side,” Slot says.
Slot’s reputation has been enhanced not only by the playing style but also by the age profile of his squad and his flexibility. Last summer, the club sold off some of their biggest assets, as Luis Sinisterra joined Leeds for €25million (£21.5m), Marcos Senesi and Tyrell Malacia headed to Bournemouth and Manchester United for €15million each, and Fredrik Aursnes joined Benfica for €13million. Slot also lost important loan players, such as Reiss Nelson, who returned to Arsenal, and Guus Til, who had been on loan from Spartak Moscow and then joined PSV. It left Feyenoord’s squad in need of major surgery and deprived him of the four players who reached double figures for goals during the previous campaign. Only four of the XI who started the Conference League final defeat by Roma remain at the club.
Feyenoord received around €70million in transfer fees and their aim, as the club seeks sustainability, is to reinvest roughly 40 per cent of their transfer income. The club recruited 12 permanent signings, none of whom were older than 24, although they did take Oussama Idrissi (27) and Jacob Rasmussen (26) on loan from Sevilla and Fiorentina respectively.
They spent just over €30million in total, meaning the club recorded a substantial positive net spend and brought the average age of the club’s squad down to just over 23 years of age. Along the way, Feyenoord recorded the longest unbeaten league run in the top seven leagues of European football (25 games) this season.
On a sun-baked spring day in southern Holland, Feyenoord have opened their doors to The Athletic. During five hours of interviews, we are granted rare access across major departments: to the head coach, to the chief executive, to the medical and sport science team, to the player-care expert and to a leading scout, as they explain how they collaborate together to achieve success.
Crucial to it all is Slot, and it was not surprising when English Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur made a move for the head coach at the end of this season. Slot rebuffed previous approaches from Leeds United and Crystal Palace but the Tottenham story had legs. Indeed, midway through last week, Feyenoord feared they may lose their coach.
Contingency plans were being made and potential replacements outlined. And then, last Thursday morning, Slot released a statement, in which he stated his wish to remain at Feyenoord. Stories emerged in the British media claiming that Feyenoord had priced Slot out of a move. His contract at the club did not contain a release clause this summer — although he could have been extracted for a fixed sum of €5million in the summer of 2024 — which meant Tottenham would have needed to pay a substantial sum. As it transpires, just a couple of hours before we meet, Slot puts pen to paper on his new contract, signing until 2026 and the release clause has been removed.
The club’s chief executive Te Kloese says that at no point did anybody from Tottenham contact him directly and instead any conversations went via intermediaries. He also shakes his head when it is suggested the asking price may have been too high.
“Circumstances also played a role,” Te Kloese says. “Family circumstances, but also Feyenoord are in the Champions League. After the celebrations when we won the title — the scenes last week at the city hall, how many people turned up — the emotion poured into it, you get a feeling this is a real big club. If you take everything into account, you recognise what you have here is not so bad.
“With a nice contract, with a supportive staff, people who all have best interests for the club in mind — then to convince somebody to step out of that is not an easy thing. And I think at some point, probably when everything settled down, he also made up his mind that by doing well here, hopefully (doing well) next year also would open doors. And there’s no secret in that there’s a lot of interest in him. There’s a lot of people looking at him and he’s highly regarded. So we’re very happy also that he can stay, we consider him as a huge talent and he probably will get an opportunity (elsewhere), but we hope that opportunity stays away a little bit longer.”
Slot smiles: “We are going to play in the Champions League, which I’ve never done before as a player and as a coach. The club is in a real good place. And I want to work longer on the project to see what comes from that, because you can every time leave somewhere after one or two successful seasons but, in the end, where and what are you then? So sometimes you also have to cherish what you have. There’s more to life and to football than only winning a prize. It is also the way you work. It’s not always that you come into the place where you can work like we can here and be happy, professional-wise but also family-wise.”
Feyenoord are one of the most established names in European football. The club has now won 16 Dutch top-flight titles and they were the first Dutch club to win a European Cup (in 1970) and UEFA Cup (in 1974). Yet, in recent times, success has been hard to come by. In 2010, the club came close to bankruptcy, which was only averted when a group of fan-led investors, the Friends of Feyenoord, intervened. The club stabilised but Ajax and PSV have dominated Dutch football since 1999, as PSV won 10 and Ajax won nine of the 23 titles.
In late 2020, the Feyenoord board, at the time seeking external investment and considering a new stadium project, invited the strategic advisory group Sportsology to review the club. Sportsology was founded by Mike Forde, who previously worked as director of football operations at Chelsea between 2007 and 2013. It was there that he met the Danish sporting director Frank Arnesen, who by 2020 was in a similar position at Feyenoord.
Sportsology consultant Matt Wade, now aged 29, entered the building. His first task was to listen, observe and analyse how the club could improve its practices. For the Dutch club, it was a brave step. After all, not everyone in football is open to consultants walking in and making clear where they are going right and wrong. Issues emerged. Feyenoord’s first team and academy operated very independently from one another. Wade explains: “We had two siloed buildings with independent department empires, so medical, performance, scouting, coaching; they were not really talking to each other enough.”
The first recommendation was to bring the club together, so that methodologies and processes, whether they be tactical, medical, performance or data-based, would go all the way down from the men’s and women’s first teams to the academy. The departments would need to communicate and support one another if the club was to be successful. There would be little sense, for example, for the club’s director of medical and performance Stijn Vandenbroucke developing best practices to work across the club if a head coach is then going to recruit his own fitness coach who may see the world very differently.
There was also the financial reality, because life as a Dutch club, even one as recognisable as Feyenoord, is immensely challenging. For the 2021-22 season, the broadcast income secured from the Dutch league came in at less than €10million. By comparison, in the same campaign, even the bottom-placed Premier League side received £100million via broadcast income, which emphasises the disparity in media revenues between European leagues.
Feyenoord’s wage bill, meanwhile, was around a third of Leeds United’s during the 2021-22 season. The disparity became vast within the Netherlands, too, because Ajax’s overall revenue reached €189million by 2022, compared to Feyenoord’s €87million. To this day, Feyenoord have never spent more than €8million on a footballer. Bournemouth’s record signing is over three times more expensive, for context.
Ajax’s increased exposure and broadcast income by playing in the Champions League partly explains their advantage. Yet Wade and Arnesen identified other areas where Feyenoord had fallen behind. In February 2021, they drew up the “Feyenoord Business Recruitment Plan”, a 19-page document which identified failings in their existing model and how it could be reformed.
The document pitted Feyenoord against their direct Dutch rivals Ajax and PSV. It found that Feyenoord had only one full-time scout reporting into the sporting director, compared to eight to 12 full-time scouts at Ajax and PSV. Feyenoord also had minimal data providers beyond platforms such as WyScout and Scout7, while the club also did not have a data analyst to interpret data or create video packages on prospective targets.
Not only did the audit show up flaws in resources and personnel, but also in the outcomes. The club’s net transfer profit in the five years leading up to February 2021 came in at only €32.95million, compared to €188.9m at PSV and €211.9m at Ajax. During that period, Ajax and PSV sold 10 players for fees above €10million, while Feyenoord only sold three. The analysis also showed that on non-academy players, Feyenoord had brought in only €23.5million during the five years, while Ajax and PSV made €120m. This told Wade and Arnesen that there was an issue in the identification of players signed for the first team, the manner in which they were being developed once they arrived at the club, or both.
As such, Feyenoord resolved to work smarter. Wade says: “There was an acceptance that we need young players and we have to be able to grow them so they either contribute for Feyenoord or we capitalise on their value, or both.”
Change was afoot. Dick Advocaat, a head coach in his 70s working his 25th job in coaching, left Feyenoord in the summer of 2021. Feyenoord recruited Slot who, by that point, had not actually completed a full season as a top-flight head coach but, in his first season at AZ Alkmaar, interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, had his team second to Ajax only on goal difference when the season curtailed. Slot had a clear tactical vision but even he acknowledges that “if a coach only talks about the process, then nine out of 10 times, the results are bad (at that moment)”.
Wade became a permanent hire, appointed as the club’s head of sporting strategy. Arnesen left in September 2022 after becoming unwell but it helped that the CEO Te Kloese had previously worked as a scout, technical director and general manager in Holland, the US and Mexico.
Feyenoord speak a lot about ‘topsport’, the Dutch phrase for high performance, and they set about codifying their identity under Slot. Wade, Arnesen and Slot held numerous meetings to understand and articulate Slot’s vision. It involved a consultancy firm, Cognite, drawing up a personality profile of Slot, while Wade also interviewed Slot’s backroom staff.
Wade says: “It was about understanding how he (Slot) operates, which is very democratically, but always retaining control. He is a brilliant communicator and consultative, but also clear at the same time. He is quite cautious, quite introverted, but very rule-based and principled, which means everyone knows where they stand. And he is not paranoid, which allows freedom for specialists to operate.”
In the Dutch Eredivisie this season, Feyenoord’s top goalscorer is Santi Gimenez. He only turned 22 in April and this season was his first in European football. Feyenoord signed Gimenez for €4million last summer from the Mexican top-flight club Cruz Azul. He was not only the player signed from markets that cynics might consider secondary or even tertiary for a club competing in the Champions League. Feyenoord signed their winger Igor Paixao from Coritiba, who had played in the Brazilian second division during the previous campaign, as well as signing Mats Wieffer from Excelsior, who had spent the previous season in the Dutch second tier.
“It is not like we have discovered penicillin,” jokes Christos Akkas, one of Feyenoord’s leading scouts.
“With Paixao, we had a young scout who is specialised in the South American market. Other clubs may have four scouts allocated across Latin and South America. And our guy is following Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, as well as bits of Colombia and Ecuador. We are not going to be following the huge talents at big Brazilian clubs like Vasco Da Gama, who might sign for Chelsea, or the best teenager at Fluminense that is going to cost too much. So we trim the options. Igor was in the Brazilian second division and the only thing we wanted to check with Igor is if he could handle playing for a dominant team. Last year, Coritiba was a dominant team in their league. So we saw he could do this because the kid was just overperforming and totally killing it.
“Maybe we were fishing in markets that nobody expects to find very good players. But look at what Julio Enciso is doing now from Paraguay at Brighton. We knew about Enciso and had regular contact with his agent. He found the idea quite interesting to bring him here. But, of course, when the club started to ask six, seven, nine million, then it became a bit tricky for us.” More than that, Brighton’s eventual fee — £9.5million — would have represented the most expensive transfer in Feyenoord’s history.
Feyenoord’s recruitment team are aided by Slot’s clear identity. Akkas says: “The coach is very specific about how he wants to play. And then the club set some rules. So we never sign an older or more expensive player than the one who is being replaced. So can we narrow down our search and within that range find the most suitable player?”
Instances of this model in action are easy to find at Feyenoord. Take, for example, the situation in central midfield. In Slot’s first summer at the club in 2021, Feyenoord purchased Fredrik Aursnes from the Norwegian club Molde for €450,000. The following summer, they sold him for €13million. They replaced Aursnes, now 27, by signing Wieffer, currently 23, who had spent the previous season in the Dutch second tier with Excelsior and the transfer fee was less than €600,000. He has been called up by the Dutch national team and is now valued at around €15million, although he signed an improved four-year contract with the club only in March. For Feyenoord, it means they have recruited in a key midfield position for two years in a row while gaining huge market value.
“It’s not a problem for us to sell because this is how this club has to operate,” says Akkas. “This is the business model. It’s how we survive, how we even become better. By reinvesting some of this money or half of the money that we are able to reinvest, we believe that we can find even better players.”
This is all a significant improvement from the situation three years ago, when the club had one full-time scout, limited data access and insufficient video analysis. The club’s overall spending on its scouting operations still falls below €1million per season but the focus is clear. Akkas speaks of the difference between “seeing” and “observing.”
He says: “Scouting is like a living organism in a way that you have to give attention to it and it gives you back the rewards. This might sound very strange, especially coming from a scout, but I don’t believe in good and bad players. I believe in right and wrong decisions within the market under the right and wrong time frame.”
When assessing targets, Feyenoord use an internal grading system, where prospective players will be marked on their fits depending on their tactical suitability, technical quality, physicality, their lifestyle and their mental strength. The club will use a variety of video analysis, live observations and data crunching to identify the talent, before then going to further lengths to not only rule players in or out but also to draw up a plan of what their careers at Feyenoord may look like. Then there is the personality research. Scouts will speak to agents, previous coaches, team-mates, schoolteachers or even local taxi drivers to build a picture of a player. They will monitor social media profiles for indications of a player’s personality.
Akkas says: “Sometimes you go to certain limits. We’ve even followed people outside their homes and see if they switch off the lights at 9pm or if they just go out partying. It tells you if he’s a committed professional which is important for us, especially in a city like Rotterdam where you have a lot of opportunities and attractions. But it is also about what the coach wants and he has a very demanding style of play in terms of physicality, but also in terms of cognitive ability. Some players even complain that you have to think too much to play in this system and you have to be physically at the top, if you see how much we run compared to the other teams. So I cannot have a player who has a very, let’s say, ‘vibrant’ private life.”
Deals are still done between people, first and foremost, which is why having Te Kloese as CEO represented a major advantage when it came to signing Gimenez from Mexico. Te Kloese has previously worked as general manager at Los Angeles Galaxy in MLS, and been director of youth football and general manager at the Mexican Football Association. Some clubs struggle in these markets, particularly when it comes to identifying the real agent of a player or the correct person to speak to at a club about a transfer.
Akkas says: “We could be more decisive about this because he knew the right people. Traditionally, when European clubs go to Latin America, they don’t know how to handle negotiations. They’re a bit shocked by the first demands of every team.”
Te Kloese smiles: “My wife is from Mexico and my kids are born there and we go somewhere and someone will say, ‘Oh, you’re from Mexico? That’s a nice country. I’ve been to Cancun twice and I like Mexican food that they serve with Dutch hot sauce’. I don’t think there are actually a lot of people that can mention more than three Mexican teams. I must say that throughout the last 10 years, because of Mexican players that have been at PSV and now at Feyenoord, there’s much more respect for their football, particularly because the national team won the Olympics in 2012 in London and beat Germany at a World Cup in 2018.”
In the case of Gimenez, the cross-pollination of departments sparked into action. As part of Feyenoord’s research into the player, the medical and performance team screened his physicality and noted that his style of running could not only be improved but may even have constituted a limiting factor to his potential at the very highest level. The club’s head of performance, Leigh Egger, explains that the average time a player may have on the ball during a match is only two-and-half minutes and, when you put it like that, everything off the ball becomes hugely significant.
As such, Feyenoord screen their player’s movement patterns: accelerations, decelerations, running at top speed, changes of direction, and then they do it again in the context of a game. With Gimenez, they noted the “control of his trunk and around his pelvis” could be improved, and, over the course of the season, it has evolved.
Vandenbroucke explains: “We came to a conclusion that we needed a few months to get him up and running. Arne agreed and he is the only manager I’ve ever worked with who would do that. It meant accepting we cannot play him from the start of the game because we needed the time to put more into him to get the output in the later stage of the season.”
Gimenez, therefore, had to be patient. He started only five games for Feyenoord before the World Cup in November — this was despite him scoring five goals as a substitute in four consecutive games in late August and early September. Yet Feyenoord’s fitness plan meant that Gimenez then started the final 20 Eredivisie and Europa League matches of the season, scoring in 12 of those games and finishing as top scorer.
For Feyenoord, gains are to be made not only in the transfer market but also from within. Last summer, Malacia joined Manchester United and this season, his place has been taken by Quilindschy Hartman, a 21-year-old academy product. The club captain Orkun Kokcu, aged 22, joined the club as a teenager and is now wanted this summer by Arsenal, Tottenham and Borussia Dortmund. In the Dutch league alone, 12,334 minutes were played by academy talent for Feyenoord during this campaign. To support a transition from the academy to the first team, as well as the process of bedding in new signings, the club have a player-care specialist in place.
Frank Boer started at the club a decade ago as a marketing intern but now runs a department dedicated to the pastoral care of players. On a given day, his job may be to find lodgings for Paixao, a Brazilian who could barely speak English upon arriving in Europe, and the six agents who accompanied the player. On another day, it may be sitting down with players who have jumped from the academy into the first team, achieving a substantial pay rise, and helping the youngsters to develop a financial plan or acquire their first property.
Boer says: “In player care, there are stories where players may call you about their wi-fi not working, or locking themselves out of their apartments, but in a bigger picture, it is about well-being and performance. It is not only about integration into a new environment but also, how do you feel? Do you feel appreciated?
“Take Sinisterra, who joined Leeds United last summer. When he went to England, he had spent three years in the Netherlands, so he then speaks English already. He has a driver’s license. He knows how to live like a professional, to cook for himself, to do the grocery shopping. But when he came here, it was his first time working in Europe, first time without his family, he had no experience with the immigration processes family. I don’t feel like I’m a colleague. I’m just one of their best friends or an older brother who wants to give them advice and use our network to help them.”
Behind the scenes, Slot’s approach has empowered specialists within the club to maximise performance from every individual. His style of play requires players to be extremely fit and Feyenoord’s player availability hit 90 per cent or over in each of his two seasons, all while physically outworking opponents on a regular basis. The medical and performance team adopt a biopsychosocial approach, as they believe the biological, psychological and social fulfilment of athletes must go hand-in-hand.
The club made some instant changes after the Sportsology audit, such as introducing the Catapult training vest that tracks thousands of metrics of physical data and, used over time, this information is used to manage the load of each player and reduce the risk of injury. For every session, staff will recommend a certain high-intensity level each individual must hit, and Slot collaborates, to the extent he will allow players to do less in a session to manage their specific load based on the recommendations.
This may seem entirely logical, based on the science, but there are plenty of coaches who would insist upon every player doing exactly the same. Other innovations were introduced. Feyenoord hired Dan Abrahams, a sport psychologist, to work with the players and the coaching staff, and one of his challenges was to help the team to win for the first time away at Ajax since 2005. This was achieved with a 3-2 victory in March. Wade says: “It was about game faces, how to take control of a high-performance mindset within games, to remember the game plan, as a group.”
Staff challenge players to go further, whether it be improving the quality of sleep or building muscle.
“Say you’re a player with us,” says Egger. “Usually we ask them, ‘Where do you want to be?’ And it is usually the big five leagues in Europe and national teams. So the starting point is to hear them explain their goals and their dreams. And then everything from there can then be referred back to it. We can say this is what you told us and it’s now our job to encourage you or persuade you to do things that you really don’t want to do at the time to get you to where you want to be. It keeps the players accountable for what they’ve admitted to themselves.
“And I’m yet to meet a player here that says, ‘Yeah, I’m just happy where I am and I want to just make some money and then I’ll retire’. Feyenoord is a developmental club and we’re in the business of developing players and selling them on. But for our team, it’s almost our job to give these players a university education for big elite football in Europe. The reality in European football is that players are getting paid so much money you have to learn how to motivate millionaires not to make more money, but to continue acquiring accolades or achieving things.”
The approach is forensic and imaginative. Take, for example, the full-back Marcus Pedersen, who staff believed would benefit from becoming more aggressive on the field, but in a controlled manner, so he was taken to a kickboxing gym.
Egger says: “When you work with other sports as an athlete, you pick up little tools that those sports use to toggle aggression or drive intensity. It can be really powerful, especially when a player enjoys it and sees differences himself. I’m a big believer that changing your surroundings can sometimes just wake you up and make you work so much harder. When you’re in the same four walls for many years, it’s good to get out, be pushed and break through plateaus. But you can also make the clear football relevance to it by saying it’s about winning duels on the field, so there is an actual endpoint on the pitch. It’s not just something that we’ve come up with.”
With other young players, the rationale can be more simple. Egger smiles: “With martial arts, for example, some young footballers, and also athletes in other sports, just need to get slapped in the face, because probably life will punch you in the face at some stage. But it’s all connected. Dan, the sports psychologist, makes these game faces with players, which is like a competitive persona.
“So with Marcus, for example, we wanted him confident and aggressive. And if he goes to the fight gym, they say ‘Show me confident and aggressive. OK, This was a five out of 10, now I want to see 10 out of 10’. And the guys who we work with in kickboxing, they will teach him if someone pushes you, you never let anyone push you around. You always push back. Or in kickboxing, you never receive a leg kick without it being answered. Otherwise, someone will kick you again. These are little lessons and maybe there’s two per cent transfer to the field that makes a difference. Obviously, we don’t want him going around leg kicking people in games, but he can then take that with him and we can say to him before games to see his competitive game face.”
Other players improved under individualised plans. Kokcu recognised that he needed to improve his explosivity over the first few yards to thrive in Slot’s midfield. He installed a gym in his home and, for 30 days, he performed exercises designed to stimulate this specific development. “And Arne was texting him constantly about it, encouraging him,“ says the director of medical and performance Vandenbroucke. Slot speaks empathetically about the current generation of footballers. He is unblemished by some of the bitterness his older peers can sometimes exhibit. He says: “There’s a big chance of earning a lot of money in football, but the pressure is much higher than it is 10 to 15 or 20 years ago.”
To build a collegiate spirit, performance staff regularly dream up challenges. To make recovery days more exciting, they split the team into groups who compete in quizzes while going through their exercises on the bikes. Egger says: “They’ll play for a €50 pot and there are times when they are screaming out ‘I know the answer!'”
He continues: “In November, we had a group of 10 players who, when they came to the training complex, had to jump in a pool which is 10C cold or less. Strip down and they have to jump in. Cold exposure has its benefits. There are some really interesting TEDx talks on it, saying when you jump under a cold shower, everything that you fear and you don’t want to do, rushes through your mind. And if you jump in there, it is a metaphor for attacking your day or attacking your problems. And there are some solid physiological changes as well.
“We did a screen-time challenge, too, because it is not helpful for your focus if you’re stuck in a virtual world when you’re about to compete fiercely in a real world. So we had a group of players who were told they could have two-and-a-half hours of screen time on their iPhones per day, and then we graphed how much they would go over by the end of the month. We did it as staff too, and the three who went over most would have to buy the rest of the group dinner. Some guys, when they started, were up to 12 hours per day across two phones. So if you’re doing that, surely there’s more time for you to productively use your time in training or something else.”
To see the extent of the team’s buy-in, Vandenbroucke paints a picture of the team’s pre-match scene in the dressing room before a game. “You will see some players meditating, other players are doing visualisation on an iPad. Another player is watching seven minutes of David Beckham crossing the ball. Another is jumping up and down to relieve anxiety. Another is doing breathing exercises. Everybody has their own ritual that we created together with them. Nobody judges or asks a question about it.”
These performance methods are complemented by a DNA project led by Ruben Peeters, the joint head of performance. The club now take samples of a players stools, urine, saliva and sweat several times per season, with the aim being to achieve more information to ensure faster repair and prevent time lost to injuries. He says: “We are taking an inner selfie of the players, their digestion, gut health and how sport-specific genes are working together. Because we can do all the things you have heard about with regard to lifestyle, movement, or visualisation, but if the inside is not working at 100 per cent, then the impact of the external training sessions will not be good enough.
“I can tell a story from my previous club (about a player) who was really good but was always finished tired after 70 minutes of a game. I had done all of my training methods and I pushed him really a lot, but it was not working. And then we started up with the Cosmo Group, which does personalised nutrition research and they could see the internal processes were not in order. And by recognising that, we could develop shakes that pertain to his individual needs and enable him to play 90 minutes of games. So that for me opened a new world.”
For Feyenoord, this summer brings challenges and opportunities.
A league title means renewed interest in their players, but this is a young squad with time remaining on their contracts, and Champions League income (Feyenoord go automatically into the group stages) further bolsters their position. So too does Slot’s decision to sign on for a further three years. The club have plans to add to their scouting apparatus and also build out an internal innovation and data laboratory. The recruitment staff are primed in the event players do leave, even drawing up different shortlists depending on the price for which players may be sold.
The club already have a 19-page internal document laid out for next season’s goals. It states the club’s vision — to provide inspiration, entertainment and connection — and every department has agreed on objectives and key results by which they will be measured, from the commercial team to the first team. The club has been shopping in the Dutch second tier once more, this time a €750,000 signing of midfielder Thomas van den Belt from PEC Zwolle.
Te Kloese says: “We will be very careful with our salaries and our incoming transfer spending but, honestly, it feels that now we can negotiate a little bit more out of strength. We’re able to keep a very highly talented coach here and we’re able to keep and extend some players who are being heavily scouted throughout Europe. We won’t go to extremes, but we have ambition. It is about stabilising and continuing our project.”
As for Slot, ambition burns brightly as he enters the Champions League for the first time. “I will only feel proud if the results are good,” he insists. “If you’re only there for listening to the Champions League League music, then I don’t feel any pride. The goal is to enjoy it and to show ourselves in the best possible way and try to go to the next round.”
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