Robin van Persie, the coach: Learning from Wenger and Ferguson, working with Slot and ‘development urgency’

While Mikel Arteta is leading the Premier League with Arsenal, Cesc Fabregas has taken Como to seventh in Serie A and Jack Wilshere is in his first managerial role at Luton Town, another pupil of Arsene Wenger is making coaching strides elsewhere in Europe.

In hometown Rotterdam, Robin van Persie is shaping up for his first managerial title race in his first full season in charge of boyhood club Feyenoord.

After 11 games, a 3-2 loss to defending Dutch champions PSV last month is the only blot on their record, with a 3-1 win against FC Volendam on Saturday returning Feyenoord to the top of the table by a goal difference of one. While it was a game of some tense moments, the sense of calm in the city beforehand was exemplified by the sight of one local fishing in a pond on the grounds of the club’s training complex the day before, when PSV temporarily went top.

Feyenoord had been leading the league early on, with eight wins and a draw from their first nine games — a situation the former Arsenal, Manchester United and Netherlands forward — who retired from playing in 2019 after a final season back with the Rotterdam side — envisaged months ago, even if others could not.

“When he joined in February, nobody expected him to become a champion,” Mikos Gouka, a Dutch journalist who has covered Feyenoord for 20 years, tells The Athletic.

“There wasn’t big pressure on him, but he changed that. In his first press conference (on February 24), the technical director (Dennis te Kloese) was asked what the goals for Robin were, and he said to be in Europe. Then Van Persie said, ‘We’re going to fight for second, and maybe even first place’. You saw he was used to pressure and setting big goals.”

The 42-year-old returned to Feyenoord in the second half of last season, when the club — where he spent six years across two spells as a player and four years in various coaching roles — were not in the best of states.

Arne Slot won the league as their head coach in 2022-23 but, after finishing second the following year, he left to replace Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool. Feyenoord wanted an experienced first-team coach to step in, so Van Persie did not progress as a candidate that summer. Instead, former Denmark international Brian Priske took charge. The Dane had Feyenoord fifth in the Eredivisie when he was sacked on February 10.

After seven months managing fellow Eredivisie club Heerenveen to begin his senior coaching career, it was Van Persie’s time.

When Van Persie was given the Feyenoord job, Slot said, “He has the personality to be a head coach because he is not distracted by what people say about him. He has worked incredibly hard in the last three or four years and that’s not what you see a lot — people working so hard every single minute of the day to become better.”

Van Persie had worked as a technical coach to first-team forwards, as well as an under-16, under-18 and under-19 coach during Slot’s three years in charge. One aspect of Slot’s evaluation was key: his personality.

In 2020, Van Persie told The Athletic he would list his positives and negatives as a way to improve as a player. That attitude is what took him to a level where he could win back-to-back Premier League Golden Boots in 2011-12 and 2012-13, completing a move from Arsenal to Manchester United in summer 2012 to try to win the Premier League, which he did in his debut season at Old Trafford.

Those lists give a glimpse into an obsession he had in his early twenties that has not left him now he’s in his forties.

“It created a ‘development urgency’ that every player and coach needs to have,” Van Persie said, when asked about those lists by The Athletic this year.

“Once that was inserted in my system, I started to become better and that never stopped. I was never at the level I wanted to be. Maybe that was a big reason why I arrived at a certain level, and I have that same development urgency as a coach.”

For all the talk of development, there needs to be tangible moments of progression.

Van Persie’s first big step came in 2023. After two years with Feyenoord Under-16s, he coached their under-19s in the UEFA Youth League. It was his first Youth League game in charge, a 3-0 win against Scotland’s Celtic, that got his juices flowing.

“In that moment, I realised this is becoming really close to first-team football, in terms of how we prepped the game and dealt with it,” he added in a press conference before his second game in charge of Feyenoord, the first leg of a Champions League last-16 tie against the competition’s eventual finalists Inter in March.

“I was like, ‘Ahhh, this feels really good’. It came really close to the feeling I had while I was playing in top games, when you don’t really know what’s going to happen. You have to make the right calls at the right time. Then I thought, ‘This is what I want. I’m going for it. All in’.”

Van Persie, who began his Arsenal career by fighting for a place in the team with Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp and then Emmanuel Adebayor, knows that development is not about feeling good all the time, though. That venture to Heerenveen last season was his first experience of senior management. He was their youngest-ever manager, and suffered a 9-1 defeat to AZ in his fourth game.

He had been on the end of a similar thrashing as a player in an 8-2 loss for Arsenal against United, but this was different. He was now the one who had to answer for the result.

“What I learned from that game is that you should always be ready for what is needed,” he said at his pre-Volendam press conference, with a coffee in hand.

“I learned that I should always have a safety net, a backup plan. It’s about surviving, recovering physically and mentally. Based on that experience, we created a safety-net plan that we can use at all times in a game.”

While there have been 4-0 and 7-0 wins over Sparta Rotterdam and Heracles Almelo, that need for a safety net has also reared its head.

“He’s still attacking, always playing with three forwards, but we also see he will defend a 1-0 or 2-1 by bringing in defenders,” Gouka says. “When he started, he said he didn’t want to see things that fans don’t like, but he’s more realistic now.”

That evolution has been a difference-maker for Feyenoord this season. They have conceded the fewest goals in the Eredivisie (10), while title rivals PSV rank fifth on 16. Feyenoord have also conceded the lowest xG-against value in the league (8.2) while PSV are sixth in that metric at 14.1.

Ayase Ueda has been an important player. The Japan forward has scored 13 times in 11 games, already beating his tallies from his first two seasons in the Netherlands (five goals in 2023-24, nine a year later). Albeit he only started five and 13 league games in those respective campaigns, compared to all 11 in this one.

As well as citing improved fitness as a reason for Ueda’s goal tally booming, Van Persie shared some tips — one striker to another.

“Just simple stuff. Like, when is the moment to be an option for link-up play?,” he said in a press conference after the striker’s two goals against Volendam.

“We talked about when the centre-back has the ball, what is the exact moment of becoming an option for link-up play? What are the exact moments for running in-behind? When and how to use your body in the box. Working on his dummy moves, and when to make them in connection with your team-mates. Basic stuff. But if you add all that together, he’s doing amazing.”

With 322 career goals to his name, there are certainly worse people than Van Persie to take advice from. Arsenal’s Reiss Nelson was a previous beneficiary when on loan at Feyenoord in the 2021-22 season.

These more intimate aspects of coaching seem to be just as important to Van Persie as coming up with tactical plans. A former student of Wenger, Sir Alex Ferguson and Louis van Gaal, that varied experience of man-management at the top level has made a difference.

“I notice when I’m talking to a player, I sometimes go back to that time and think, ‘What did Arsene, Ferguson or Louis say?’,” Van Persie adds. “You want to combine a lot of worlds and bring them back into one working style.

“I want to see that development urgency with everyone. Everyone can get better, no matter the age.”

As well as having an obsession with development, Slot noted Van Persie’s indifference to what others think of him as a part of his management.

Quinten Timber, twin of Arsenal’s long-time Ajax defender Jurrien, was Feyenoord captain when Van Persie arrived in February, but missed the end of the season with a knee ligament injury.

Moving into the final year of his contract this summer, the 24-year-old did not sign an extension, and Van Persie cited this as part of the reason he replaced him as skipper with new signing Sem Steijn. He was not afraid to make a big decision on a big player, and Timber has not returned to the team’s leadership group despite remaining a regular starter.

Nineteen-year-old Givairo Read is now Feyenoord’s third-choice captain, and happened to be in the starting line-up for Van Persie in that Youth League defeat of Celtic just over two years ago.

“He sticks to his plan,” Read, a right-back Bayern Munich are reportedly interested in, said of Van Persie’s qualities as a coach after the Volendam win. “He doesn’t look to what the opponents do, he looks at what he wants to do, which makes it good for us because we know what to do. It’s not a different plan every time. We can really put that plan into our minds in meetings.”

While he only played under Ferguson for a year at United, the Scot’s refreshment of his backroom staff was seen as a key part of his continued success at Old Trafford, and Van Persie has also put a big emphasis on his coaching team.

At Feyenoord, Van Persie brought Erik ten Hag’s former assistant, Rene Hake, with him upon arrival. Hake is known to be quiet but an experienced on-pitch coach. Etienne Reijnen, 38, who Slot wanted to take to Liverpool but could not due to Brexit restrictions, is also held in high regard tactically.

Van Persie ended last season with the best starting record for a Feyenoord head coach since Ernst Happel in 1969. Unbeaten, he took 22 points with a goal difference of +18 from his first eight matches. That defeat to PSV in October was his first in the league, and sets up an interesting battle at the top of the table over the coming months.

He has kept in touch with his old Arsenal classmates and may share notes with them in the near future as they all look to make a name for themselves in this new chapter of their lives.

“I spoke to Cesc last year and we agreed that if we have the time, we will connect again, share our visions and test each other in what challenges we come across,” Van Persie said in his post-Volendam press conference. “I saw Jack Wilshere a couple of months ago, just before he took his job at Luton.

“It’s quite nice that the younger players of Arsene: me, Mikel, who is a bit older, Jack and Cesc are now coaching. I’m pretty sure that we take a lot of tips we got from Arsene and put them into practice now. We grew up under Arsene and he played a huge role in our careers as players, and even now as coaches.”

And after his side converted 37 shots into just three goals against Volendam, who knows, maybe a little jog of the memory could help Van Persie get in touch with his inner Wenger…

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