A lot of praise this Sunday for Renée Slegers who, as a trainer, manager as they say in England, managed to win the Champions League of the women of Arsenal. In Lisbon, the Slegers team, who started her football career at SSE in her birthplace Someren-Eind, defeated a towering favorite Barcelona on Saturday.
The BBC is already talking about ‘The Next Wiegman’ in an extensive portrait of Slegers this weekend, referring to Sarina Wiegman, who is considered one of the best coaches in the history of women’s football.
The Dutch Wiegman is the current national coach of the English football women. With that team she won the European title in 2022, as she did with the Oranje Leeuwinnen in 2017. And now after winning the Champions League, Slegers is compared to Wiegman.
For the portrait of Slegers, the BBC Among others with football analyst and former footballer Leonne Stentler. She praises her former teammate at Oranje, especially because of her intelligence and her capacities to forge a team feeling. “You see everything she does that she is very intelligent,” Stentler tells the BBC. “I always thought she was much too smart to do something in the coaching profession. I thought she would work in business, manage many people and have a big career in it.”
When it became clear that she was busy with the UEFA license as a coach, her name went, when a coach was fired or stopped somewhere, immediately around Stentler as the ‘ideal successor’. That it eventually became Arsenal for Slegers was not really a surprise. She and the London club are already going back to 2006 when she went to England as a player and ended up in Arsenal’s youth academy.
Read also
At the age of 29, Slegers is forced to stop football. She does not recover from a serious knee injury. In her second homeland Sweden, where she has been playing since 2011, she starts her trainer career. At the end of 2018, still 29, she has her first job as a head coach at Limhamn Bunkeflo in Malmö.
During the 2019 World Cup in France she is one of the scouts for the Oranje Leeuwinnen and in 2020 she will again work in Sweden, now at Rosengard. First with the second team and later at the first. As a head coach, she becomes champion twice with the women of Rosengard and wins the cup once. In her third season as a head coach, she is put aside after a number of defeats.
She leaves for England when she was brought to Arsenal as an assistant through the Swede Jonas Eidevall, whom she succeeded earlier at Rosengard, in September 2023. And then it goes fast. When Eidevall in turn is put aside in London, Slegers takes over from him as an interim head coach in October last year. After a draw and ten victories, the English top club can no longer be around her: in January of this year she will be appointed as head coach.
And the rest is history: Slegers has achieved the greatest success for Arsenal since 2007, when the Champions League also became a prey for the London women. For Slegers, beating Barcelona is without a doubt the biggest moment in her trainer career so far, the BBC writes. But according to the prominent English broadcaster, she was also an example for many before Saturday: ‘A Role Model for Many. ‘
With the fans of Arsenal, the still young manager, Sleegers is only 36, after winning the Champions League no longer broken. She influenced the final with a golden switch: Stina Blackstenius came in the field and calculated that Swedish scored the only goal.
After the incredible victory in Lisbon, the fans do not want to lose their coach and, according to the reporter of the NOS, who is in Lisbon, will immediately come with a new song for her after the final. “Renée, Renée, we want you to stay“, it sounds from many English throats.
Waiting for privacy settings …