Liverpool coach John Heitinga in talks over Ajax managerial vacancy
Liverpool assistant coach John Heitinga has been given permission to speak to Ajax about their vacant head coach's position.
The Amsterdam club's collapse in the final month of the Eredivisie title race saw Francesco Farioli resign after just one season in charge.
Heitinga, who moved to Anfield with Arne Slot last summer, is a former Ajax player and youth team manager who spent five months in interim charge of the team from January 2023 before moving to West Ham to become his ex-Everton manager David Moyes' assistant.
John Heitinga was a key member of Arne Slot's staff during their title-winning season but is wanted by Ajax to become their head coach (Peter Byrne/PA_
It is understood the club have agreed to let the 41-year-old former Everton and Fulham defender speak to Ajax.
Slot, when asked about the rumours of Ajax's interest last week, said: 'If Ajax would be smart, they would consider him.
'He is ready to take on a job like that. If John is smart, he would stay one more season.'
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The Irish Sun
an hour ago
- The Irish Sun
How Florian Wirtz will bring a new dimension to Liverpool and why the German star could be a £109million bargain
LIVERPOOL are ready to spend a huge £109million on Bayer Leverkusen superstar Florian Wirtz. They moved quickly to try to acquire the services of the 22-year-old, who has snubbed German giants 11 The Reds have bid £109m for the Bayer Leverkusen midfielder Credit: GETTY 11 Florian Wirtz is said to be keen on joining Liverpool after a productive chat with Kop chief Arne Slot Credit: AP It will be a statement signing by The Reds have already made The Liverpool for £29.5m to replace outing who is joining . The moves come on the back of extra investment in the squad with the new deals completed for Virgil van Dijk and Mohamed Salah. READ MORE IN FOOTBALL Wirtz is considered a generational talent in And he will bring a touch of the unpredictable to Liverpool 's attack next season. Tactics expert Lee Scott believes the arrival of Wirtz will help prolong the career of one of their biggest stars. Goal threat Last season saw Wirtz contribute an impressive 16 goals and 15 assists in 45 games across all competitions for Bayer Leverkusen . Most read in Football BEST ONLINE CASINOS - TOP SITES IN THE UK His ability to create space for himself and to be decisive in the final third really stood out as key for Leverkusen as they attempted to retain their Bundesliga title. He is dangerous in 1v1 situations when picking up possession wide or in the inside channel, or even centrally. And when he is moving at pace he is a threat with his shooting from distance with the ability to generate power and accuracy. Positionally when he is in the attacking third he does not really stick to one area and instead likes to drift to find himself pockets of space. Jamie Carragher reveals why PSG's Luis Enrique is refusing to speak to him and CBS Sports before Champions League final 11 Wirtz had 10 goals in the Bundesliga last season Looking at the current Liverpool squad it is likely that Slot will want to use him from the left of the three-man attack with Salah on the right. This will effectively give Liverpool true gamebreakers on either side of the attacking three. In the example below, Wirtz takes possession with the opposition, who are leading, in a deep defensive block. The thing that makes Wirtz different to most young attackers as this defensive block is not a barrier for him. He takes the ball and drives through the centre of the defensive block before scoring from the edge of the area. 11 Wirtz receives the ball wide on the left wing but has the ability to drive to goal from an unlikely starting point 11 Wirtz drifts into space but prefers the left side Increasingly we have seen teams have to worry about the performances of Salah on the right-side for Liverpool. This means that teams tend to slide their defensive blocks slightly over to that side of the pitch. They want more protection against the Egyptian international and try to stop him going 1v1 against a single defender. Now, with Wirtz on the other side of the flank, opposition teams cannot overload their defence to either side. Next season Liverpool will have one of the most balanced and dangerous attacks in football . Wirtz is also very comfortable in the inside channels when receiving the ball. With rumours that Liverpool are also looking to add an attacking left back, they could be heavily reinforced on the left-side of the pitch to help to break down deep and stubborn defensive blocks. In this second example, Wirtz is holding the width and playing on the outside of the deepest opposition defender. As he receives the ball in these positions he generates real threat with his ability to drive inside and finish. 11 Wirtz is a genuine goal threat and is able to play on the wing or in the middle Adding a player of Wirtz's quality to their attacking options will increase the output from Liverpool in front of goal. But it will also make it far more difficult for opposition teams and coaches to figure out how to defend against them. Creativity in the final third As we have already mentioned above, Wirtz finished with an impressive 15 assists in all competitions for Bayer Leverkusen last season. While his goal output will be important for Liverpool in terms of adding direct threat to their attack, his creativity in and around the final third will also bring value for Slot's team. Wirtz takes intelligent positions on the pitch to receive the ball and often finds himself in a pocket of space. The fact that he is then a threat to turn and drive at teams through the centre of the pitch makes defenders less likely to want to get tight to defend against him aggressively as they run the risk of being quickly outplayed. The fact that they will then tend to sit off against him though just gives him the time and space to find passes to outplay the defensive line. 11 Wirtz has the ability to read the game, and here picks out the run of Garcia and pulls the ball back to the edge of the penalty area Wirtz doesn't always play the obvious pass. Here, he goes out wide and gets his head up and instead of firing across goal as many other players would he identifies that the better ball is a deep cut back to the edge of the area to the incoming Aleix Garcia, who then scores. One of the things that makes Wirtz such a dangerous player around the final third of the pitch is that he seems to be able to slow the game down and find time to get his head up to identify the best option. 11 Wirtz is one of the best passers in Europe He is rarely rushed, even when under pressure, and he has the technical ability to stay on the ball and then find the correct option at the correct time. Having a player who is a creative passer in their forward options will bring another dimension for Liverpool in their attack. While they have the likes of In the example below, Wirtz is in possession with a solid defensive block ahead of him. He sees the angle to bypass the entire opposition defence with a low driven through ball to release his striker in behind. 11 Wirtz hits the killer pass to put the striker clean through on goal Liverpool are obviously looking for ways to make themselves less predictable in the attack. Signing a player who is as creative and dangerous as Wirtz will go a long way to making that happen for them. Intelligence in the opposition half We touched on the fact that Wirtz is the kind of attacking player who is able to slow the game down when under pressure and in tight spaces. This is a mark of his game intelligence and the fact that he has the technical level to be able to trust himself and his touch when under pressure. He has an innate ability to be able to take the ball and make positive decisions with the ability to hurt the opposition defence. He can get on the ball and either drive forward into the heart of the penalty area or he can play on the half-turn and combine quickly or play the final pass to break through the opposition defensive line. In the example below, he gets on the ball in the No10 position and immediately drives forward into the heart of the opposition defensive block. 11 Wirtz makes a driving run into the Dortmund defence While this may not always lead to a shooting opportunity for himself it will pull defenders towards him and create space for teammates. He scans and checks his shoulder often in the final third and this means that he will find himself in space with time to receive the ball whether that is wide or in more central areas of the pitch. This will allow Liverpool to quickly progress the ball forward and into more dangerous areas of the pitch. This time we see Wirtz occupying intelligent spaces in the final third and between the lines. As he receives the ball he has no defenders in a position to immediately get touch-tight to him and he can take the ball and turn towards goal 11 Wirtz here has found space and can turn and run at the defence With Salah perhaps being best as a front facing threat who likes to get on the ball when facing the opposition goal, it is interesting that Liverpool are adding a player in Wirtz who is more creative with his positioning. Again, this signing will make planning for matches against Liverpool a very difficult experience for opposition coaches. Conclusion While the expected fee for Wirtz will be extremely high there is a sense that Liverpool will still be getting a bargain when they sign the 22-year-old German international. They will be signing a player who can extend the effective career of Salah straight away and when they do eventually move on from the Egyptian they will have their next attacking talisman in the building already.
Irish Examiner
3 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
£10m for a month of Alexander-Arnold exposes absurdity of Club World Cup
Hmm. Ten million pounds. What does that work out to in booing, and boo-deletion? What's the exchange rate here? How much un-booing does £10m (€12m) get you, in a highly emotive run‑your‑contract-down local‑lad‑departure scenario? This and many more equally strange questions will presumably have to be debated now Real Madrid have agreed a small but significant early release payment for Trent Alexander-Arnold, which will in turn allow his participation at the most heinous footballing entity yet devised, the new Fifa Club World Cup. The whole thing seems less important now. The Trent-Exit saga was something to talk about because the league was done. Time moves on, often in deeply strange ways. For what it's worth, I for one had no issue at all with some Liverpool fans barracking when they realised their favourite player was going to leave for free at the end of his contract. That is, I could see it was illogical and irrational. The answer to which is, duh. Meet: football. This is how the game survives, why absurd amounts of money swill across its decks every day, why the good stuff about connection and collectivism and moments of beauty can also happen. If we all just sat around taking the rational view and refusing to Become Emotional the whole thing would last about three minutes before everyone cleared their throats, looked at their watches and walked off to do some more sensible activity, like picking up litter or preserving hedgehogs. For now Madrid in the mini-window feels like a good thing for everyone. Good for Trent, who is 26, who had those luminous, oddly distant years under Jürgen Klopp, the most creatively brilliant piece of elite tactical freedom in recent times, the invention of a highly new effective role, the flank-libero, the walk‑cross man, the assist-mooch king. Liverpool aren't really a Trent team in the more orderly champion era. Whereas Real Madrid remain an oddly formless entity, a divvying up of roles, super‑strengths, star-freedoms. Madrid want him to play full-back but also to act as a rewilding element, a recreation of the Kroos-era passing range, which already sounds like a recipe for a dreamy kind of chaos. Trent Alexander-Arnold was booed by some Liverpool fans after he announced he was leaving the club this summer. File picture: Peter Byrne/PA So it's good for the neutral too, good for the basic sounds and colours, the mouthwatering story arc of Trent inside that deeply vicious media‑superstar complex. This is a footballer who will always be an object of confusion, whose passing is brilliant, sui generis and thrillingly odd in its angles, but who continues to wander about the pitch like a man trying very hard not to spill his Pot Noodle. Mainly, though, this is all very good for the Club World Cup, which is of course the real story here. And at bottom this is a Fifa story, the first significant act of the CWC 2.0, a first hum of the destructor ray for this strange new source of gravity. Most immediately, it brings us one step closer to the prospect next month of a mouthwateringly inane Madrid-al-Hilal Trent-Ronaldo celebrity face-off, the descent on the Hard Rock Stadium of a vast ant colony of weeping superfans, lookalikes, holy relic seekers and confused adolescents who really do appear to spend their days poring over the weirdly robotic CR7 Instagram feed as though communing with some plasticised ideal of show, gloss, nature-less acquisitiveness. So, there's that. Otherwise, being good for the CWC is an issue for anyone who loves the game in its existing form. Because this competition is not just a sporting abomination, a skewer of leagues, a force for stratification with its vast and destabilising income stream for the top clubs, but a kind of top-down heist. Above all, the first significant piece of mini-window business is a wonderful moment for Gianni Infantino, because this really is Infantino's baby, gestated, midwifed into being and now clasped, damp and slithering, to the Fifa president's chest through the Trump-centred brand building of the last few months. There is no secret about any of this. The Club World Cup does not need to exist. It is in effect a one-man reordering of the global calendar, a product of Fifa's unique style of government whereby a single random Swiss man is given an autocratic degree of power over the global game. Infantino even looks at times as if he can't quite believe how this thing has happened to him, staring out at the world with those flat, startled eyes, as though there is actually another man inside this man, encased in some compacted substance, a blend of processed ham, varnish and mendacity, mummified into a man-shape, squeezed into a blue suit and given the keys to the world. And now we have this, a competition that exists solely because Infantino wants access to the funds currently being harvested by club football. It fails on a basic level of sporting robustness. This is an invite-only star fest, a financial grenade chucked into every league in the world, and something Fifa has no real mandate for. Here we have the game's keepers acting with entrepreneurial self-interest, creating not just a competing format, but a competing way of perceiving the sport, a setup that invites only the biggest clubs, and marketing a vision of the game as a kind of star‑driven celebrity circus, sold through the social media feeds of its star players. Why would the clubs go along with this? The obvious reason is that interestingly sourced $1bn prize fund, the first chunk of which is now on its way to Liverpool. But it isn't just greed. There is a more subtle energy in play here, a coincidence of Infantino's ambition and the dynamic of football's new breed of owners. Gianni Infantino has done a lot of Trump-centred brand building in the last few months. File picture: Alex Brandon/AP Todd Boehly gave a significant speech at the recent Financial Times Football Leaders conference. Despite giving the appearance of having been sedated shortly before taking the stage, Boehly kept turning to two key themes. First, the urge to create out of football's global cut-through some kind of future streaming platform, a tech behemoth, which is where the real Zuckerberg money is, not mucking about with Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall's sell-on value. And second, his bafflement with football's existing culture, its fan-based conservatism. Football wants to grow, to dig its teeth into the wider global market. This is the real key to the Club World Cup, and it speaks again to Trent, to extreme, irrational loyalty, to geographical ties, to all those elements that lasso this thing into its existing shape. The Club World Cup is the first competition where it makes little difference if you boycott it or simply don't watch. It's not about getting you to like it. It's about power and ownership, driven by broadcasting money that exists outside normal market rules, that is basically a bribe to the clubs. It is instead about the dissolution of those old bonds, of the ties to physical place, about players as mobile marketing tools, teams not as mobile brands. It wants you to like it enough to subscribe and click, but not to feel any sense of obstructive ownership. This is also why the booing matters. Booing at least makes sense, speaks to those old sustaining structures, the link to place, colours, family, something that is the opposite of pop-up moves and individualism as a Fifa sales technique. It will be impossible to ignore this thing, to no-platform it, because it's already here, already eating away at the ground beneath football's feet. And who knows, in time Trent to Real Madrid in the mini-window might come to look like a first step, an Archduke Franz Ferdinand moment, the day the world shifted just a little on its axis. - The Guardian Read More John Heitinga leaves Liverpool to become new Ajax head coach
Irish Independent
4 hours ago
- Irish Independent
Liverpool manager Arne Slot suffers a blow as key member of his backroom team confirms exit
The 41-year-old former Ajax and Everton defender, who was assistant to Liverpool manager Arne Slot, leaves the Premier League champions after just one year at Anfield. The former Netherlands international – who came through the youth ranks at the Dutch giants – takes over from Francesco Farioli after the Italian saw his side squander a nine-point lead in the Eredivise title race to rivals PSV Eindhoven. 'John leaves with our gratitude and appreciation for his role in our 2024-25 Premier League title win,' A statement from the English champions read. The news comes after Pep Lijnders, who was assistant to ex-Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp, has reportedly agreed to join Pep Guardiola's backroom staff at Manchester City.
