Re-energised Arsenal find their solution from within as Renée Slegers appointed | OneFootball

Sometimes, the grass is greenest in your own back garden. That may be a little cliched but it is the reality of Arsenal’s managerial hunt. The club have been at pains to stress how thorough a process they have gone through in their search for a successor to Jonas Eidevall before settling on his assistant Renée Slegers.

There is little need to be anxious about it being suggested that Arsenal may have been lax in their search because, for anyone who has had the opportunity to sit in a press conference with Slegers during her spell as interim manager, even for the shortest amount of time, the sense that the club have a class act on their hands is evident.

For someone who doesn’t particularly like the attention – Leah Williamson said that on announcing to the team she had been given the role, Slegers was “exceptionally uncomfortable and quickly shifted on to the fact that it is Amanda Ilestedt’s birthday” – she is a natural in the spotlight. At Arsenal’s training ground in her first press conference after being named the permanent manager, Slegers was asked to describe her leadership style and three words stand out: “empowerment”, “enjoyment” and “respect”.

“I have very clear values,” she said. “I spoke to the players this morning about that, they’ve seen it, but I’ve never been specific because I was in an interim role and we just had to crack on and win our games. This morning, I showed them which values are important to me.

“Empowerment is very important: all the strength that we have in this building, let’s get the best out of those people. Enjoyment is very important for me too, because if you enjoy things in life, you’re going to get the best out of yourself and others. Then, we want to be respectful, towards coaches, staff, teammates and equipment, because we are very privileged.”

Listen to any of the players who have spoken publicly in recent months as the team have gone on a phenomenal run and those values have shone through, the buzzwords there in the interviews. Williamson, speaking shortly before Slegers on Friday, said: “I am glad she’s got the job. Obviously results have been great, but the environment’s been nice. It’s a nice place to come to work. Her greatest quality in that role is the empowerment you feel. Naturally with an interim you distribute responsibility but she has alluded to the fact that won’t change, and she won’t change.”

The strength of Slegers lies in her attention to the player. That was the focus of her role as an assistant after she swapped her head coach position at Rosengård, where she had won back-to-back titles, for Arsenal in 2023. That she was a player not that long ago helps her to connect but that is something she has had to work on.

“I feel like I’m very far away from my playing career; it was eight years ago that I played my last game, against England,” she said. “In those eight years I’ve been coaching, in the middle, maybe year four or five I was very much into understanding the technical part, understanding leadership and understanding methodologies and I maybe floated away from the player’s perspective a little bit. That’s where I’m going back to now. It’s very important to understand the player and I try to relate back to when I was playing and I tried to be in the middle of the players to get their perspective.”

Sometimes that’s literally. Williamson joked that she loves it when Slegers is in her rondo group in training because she always ends up in the middle.

How impactful can Slegers’ values and the way they are implemented and embodied be? The results speak for themselves. The former Netherlands international has presided over 10 wins and one draw in 11 games, with the team scoring 31 goals and conceding five.

Somewhat surprisingly, though a testament to her mentality, it was the one draw, 1-1 against Manchester United, that first made Slegers think she wanted the job.

“We didn’t get the three points, we get one point, but we performed really well and the fans backed and supported us. That was a critical moment for me. I could see there’s something we can create here; there’s something positive that we can create.”

That was perhaps Slegers’ biggest test, together with the 3-2 win over Bayern Munich that exorcised the ghost of their opening Champions League group game defeat in Germany, though before the latter game both teams had qualified for the quarter-finals.

The next big tests come at the end of this month and the start of the next, with back-to-back away games against Chelsea and Manchester City. They won’t just test Slegers’ coaching abilities from a tactical and technical point of view but her communication and management skills should things not go their way.

Things are rosy but will the mood remain high when performances or results dip or the dressing room fragments?

No one can answer that, but Slegers has earned the right to prove she can maintain the momentum through the highs and lows and, if her reaction to their only draw is anything to go by, she will relish it.

Header image: [Photograph: David Price/Arsenal FC/Getty Images]