Renée Slegers, the Arsenal coach who rescues teams and now has to rescue her own

Renée Slegers

Photo: Katie Chan / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 5, 1989 Someren-Eind
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	UEFA Women's Champions League · FIFA Women's Champions Cup · Damallsvenskan · Svenska Cupen · LMA John Duncan Award · IFFHS World's Best Women's Club Coach

Renée Slegers has a habit of arriving in the middle of things. At Rosengård she inherited a title race halfway through a Swedish season. At Arsenal she was handed the first team on the afternoon its head coach resigned, with the squad drifting and the stands restless, and by the end of that season the club were champions of Europe. In other people’s emergencies her record is nearly spotless. The question hanging over north London this autumn is how she handles one that belongs to her.

It is a question with weight behind it, because Dutch women’s football experts were calling her “the next Sarina Wiegman” while she was still working through her UEFA licences. Her methods are quieter than that label. She coaches through one-to-one conversations and careful thought about how each player needs to be spoken to, and she has let players listen to music in some training sessions to loosen the room. Leonne Stentler, her former Netherlands teammate, puts it simply: “Every action she makes on the field is intelligent.”

Slegers was born on 5 February 1989 and raised in Someren-Eind, a village in the south-east of North Brabant. She took up football because her two younger brothers played it, joining boys’ and mixed teams at the local club SSE. At 17 she moved to England to join Arsenal’s academy, living and studying at Oaklands College and training under Emma Hayes and Kelly Smith. She made one senior appearance before going home in 2007, the year Arsenal won the UEFA Cup. The club would not lift another European trophy until she was the one picking the team.

Her senior career began at Willem II in the first season of the Dutch Eredivisie for women. In 2011 she signed her first full-time professional contract, with Djurgården in Stockholm, and after their relegation she moved to Linköping, where she won two Swedish Cups and the 2016 Damallsvenskan title. For the Netherlands she was a technical, positionally clever midfielder who won 55 caps and scored 15 goals. She started all three group games at Euro 2013, and in a World Cup qualifier against Albania in 2014 she scored five, three of them inside four minutes. Alongside football she studied communication sciences and practical philosophy at university.

Injuries ended the playing story early. A pelvic injury kept her out of competitive football for around a year and a half and cost her the 2015 World Cup. On 29 November 2016, in a friendly against England in Tilburg, she tore an anterior cruciate ligament in what became her final international. Nine months later the Netherlands won the European Championship on home soil under Wiegman, without her. She announced her retirement in February 2018.

The coaching apprenticeship was Swedish and unglamorous. She won a national under-19 title with Limhamn Bunkeflo, was promoted to the senior side and was relegated on goal difference in her first season, after which the club pulled out of the second tier for financial reasons. She scouted for the Netherlands at the 2019 World Cup, co-coached Rosengård’s second team with Elena Sadiku and took charge of Sweden’s under-23s. In June 2021 Rosengård promoted her to replace Jonas Eidevall, who had left for Arsenal. She won the league that year and again in 2022, along with the Swedish Cup.

It was Eidevall who brought her back to London in September 2023, in a role built around individual player development. When he resigned in October 2024 after a poor start, Slegers took over as interim and went eleven games unbeaten. Arsenal made the job permanent in January 2025. Four months later, after comebacks against Real Madrid and Lyon, her side beat Barcelona 1-0 in the Champions League final in Lisbon, the club’s first European title in 18 years and the first won by a Dutch coach. That year she received the LMA’s John Duncan Award and the IFFHS prize for the world’s best women’s club coach, and finished second to Wiegman in the Ballon d’Or coaching vote.

The harder reading of her career sits in the follow-up seasons. At Rosengård, the team she had made champions twice took one point from the opening three games of 2023 and she left by mutual consent. At Arsenal the second campaign started slowly too, and when she signed a three-year contract in January 2026, BBC Sport noted that she still needed to show “a consistent and clearer playing style” and quiet the doubt among supporters. She did add the first FIFA Women’s Champions Cup, beating Corinthians 3-2 after extra time, but the season ended without a domestic trophy: second behind Manchester City in the Women’s Super League, a home FA Cup defeat by Brighton, and a Champions League semi-final lost 4-3 on aggregate to Lyon. Rescue has been her strongest mode, and the evidence for what she builds once a squad is fully hers is still thin.

The 2026-27 season has put that question in the open. After five league games Arsenal were tenth, their worst start in the Women’s Super League since 2014. A 2-2 draw at Paris FC in the Champions League, after leading by two goals, was followed by a 4-2 defeat at Manchester City, after which Slegers conceded that her side were not in the title conversation “at the moment”. “There’s a lot to review,” she said, listing the “training programme, bigger things in the background.” A draw with Birmingham City followed. Then, on 24 October, Arsenal came from behind to win 2-1 at Tottenham, Alessia Russo scoring the winner from the penalty spot, ending a five-game winless run in the league and lifting them to sixth. “This will definitely energise us,” Slegers said, before adding: “It’s positive energy we want to capitalise on, but it’s only a step.” This year’s Ballon d’Or shortlist for women’s coach of the year, announced in September, left her out and included Sadiku, her old co-coach at Rosengård.

Away from the touchline she keeps a low profile. Her partner is Maja Krantz, a former Linköping defender, and they have children together. After twelve years in Sweden as a player and a coach, Slegers has said she feels half-Swedish.

Her contract runs to 2029, and according to BBC Sport the club see her as central to recruiting a younger squad for the long term. The next test comes on 28 October, when Benfica visit Meadow Park in the Champions League league phase, followed by Aston Villa at the Emirates on 1 November. For a coach whose best work has come in someone else’s crisis, the weeks ahead will show what she can do with her own.

Tags: sports, athletes, football coaches, Arsenal Women, Renée Slegers, Sarina Wiegman