Liverpool supporters will already know John Heitinga from his days at Everton, but the 40-year-old now joins Arne Slot’s Reds as a coach.
After working as a coach at Ajax for seven years, moving through the youth ranks and becoming caretaker manager, Heitinga moved to West Ham in 2023 to become head coach.
But following David Moyes’ departure this summer, Haitinga also left the club to join Liverpool’s coaching staff as assistant manager.
Here’s Dutch football journalist Elko Born.@elco_B) discusses Haitinga, his coaching career and what he can bring to the Slot staff.
Why do you think Slot and Liverpool were attracted to Haitinga?
I think it’s important that he’s still very young and that his playing career wasn’t that long ago.
Obviously, he knows England and the Premier League from his experience as a player. I think that’s very, very important. His experience in that regard. He also knows the city of Liverpool.
I don’t think Slots recruited him because of his tactical ability as a coach, but I think Slots was impressed by the way he talked to the players, built relationships and empathized with them.
Although he is still quite young, I think Haitinga is very talented on a human level, which I think is an important skill for a manager.
And when you combine that with his experience as a Premier League player, I think it’s a very valuable skill set that he has at Liverpool.
How did he become Ajax’s interim manager?
At the time, I think he had a bit of a leadership role within the Ajax squad as he was spending his final period at Ajax as a player.
His ambitions always seemed to be clear, as he started working for the Ajax youth academy pretty quickly after retiring as a player.
For a long time it looked as though he would eventually become Ajax manager, and of course he was interim manager for a while. But it didn’t work out as he had hoped.
As Ajax manager, his tenure as caretaker manager wasn’t all that bad. He became caretaker manager during a terrible season, one of Ajax’s worst seasons.
When he came in as caretaker manager, he brought something from the first team, got some results and led Ajax steadily that year.
But in the end, it wasn’t enough for the Ajax management to keep him as first-team coach.
So could this be a stepping stone like it was for Pep Lijnders?
I’m not sure yet. It could be a stepping stone for him. He always wanted to be Ajax manager, but when he was appointed as caretaker manager, it didn’t work out as well as he had hoped.
It must have been a huge professional disappointment for him. He didn’t say much about it, but I wonder how he feels about it personally now.
Does he think, ‘Okay, maybe I’m too young to be a first-team manager. Maybe I need more experience as a head coach somewhere before I take on a senior leadership role at a club?’
Or maybe he realized that being a first-team manager and taking on responsibility for himself, if not others, was not as fitting for him as he thought?
Maybe he’s more of a coach and needs an assistant somewhere, maybe at Liverpool, and that might be a job that suits his skills better.
What are his characteristics as a coach?
I think he’s very active on the sidelines. He’s a very passionate guy. He retired from football relatively recently.
He still gets very emotionally involved in the players’ actions, which I think can obviously be a very good thing for a coach or manager.
It’s a style that suits him. It’s a very involved, emotionally involved style. I think that’s his strength as a coach. I think he’s very good at building relationships with players, with the team and with the players.
I think the Ajax players really liked him on a personal level, so I think his talent really lies in that relational aspect of coaching, and maybe not so much in the more tactical aspects of being a football manager.
Thanks again to Elko Born for providing insight into Heitinga’s coaching career. You can follow Elko on X. @elco_B
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