Arne Slot has expressed his excitement at the prospect of facing Pep Guardiola for the first time as Liverpool manager when Manchester City visit Anfield this December.
The current Premier League leaders will host the reigning champions on December 1, just days after taking on Champions League holders Real Madrid.
This upcoming clash against Guardiola’s side marks the start of a new chapter in English football.
Slot will look to establish his own rivalry with Mn City following the numerous memorable encounters between Guardiola and former Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp during his nearly nine-year tenure at Anfield.
Slot also revealed that he has previously shown his players footage of Guardiola’s City teams, adding that he’s eager to test his tactical approach against the esteemed Catalan manager when the current top two teams in the league face off in just over a month.
“It is true I showed my players in recent years clips of Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City teams,” Slot told Men In Blazers.
“But I also showed them, many times, clips of Jurgen Klopp’s team at Liverpool and it was mostly to do with how intense both teams pressed, the work-rate these top professionals have and then compared with how we did it at that moment.
“In football I think we are all a bit similar, you try to steal ideas from different managers and at this moment in time, so many good managers are out there.
“I even faced many of them in the Premier League and Champions League as well.
“So Pep is of course not only because he is a great manager, he is a is difficult test to face but also he is leading a team with a lot of quality.
“The good thing for us is that we also have a lot of quality, so I am looking forward to that game.
“But there are also a lot of games to be played in the meantime and this will come after the Real Madrid game, which is also a massive one.”
When asked about Klopp’s singing of his name after the legendary German’s final match in charge of the Reds at Anfield in May, in front of 60,000 fans – a gesture that all but confirmed Slot as his successor – Slot added: “I didn’t see it live, because we were playing our last game at Feyenoord that day and I think I was at a party at that moment
“But I got the text messages, people came to me showing me what he did.
“Jurgen is so, so popular with the fans and the staff around the AXA Training Centre because of how successful he was, but definitely also because of the person he was.
“So to do this, which has never been done before, it might happen again in the future but I don’t expect it to happen a lot and it says a lot about him that he did this.
“I should ask him if he come up with this at that moment or he thought about it weeks before because to come up with ‘Jurgen Klopp la la la’ and then to change it to Arne Slot is quite creative.
“So I will ask him if he came up with it then or thought about it weeks before.”
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