Virgil van Dijk

I wasn’t expecting to be met by Virgil at the reception, and having him escort me to our destination – a small cafeteria usually reserved for players and staff – feels a bit like the single-take scene in ‘Goodfellas’ where Ray Liotta takes his date to the Copacabana nightclub and uses the staff entrance. Doors open. Everyone wants to shake a hand. Everyone wants to have a quick hello. It is an uninterrupted procession of nods, fist bumps, hand slaps, pats on the arm and hugs for the dinner ladies. Familiar greetings ring out: “Virg!” “You good?” He is good.

All this attention makes sense. Virgil van Dijk is a Liverpool legend. Their talisman. When he joined the club in 2018 they were a historically huge team but they had been off the top spot for a long time. It had been nearly 30 years since they’d won the English top flight, and they were trying desperately to reclaim their ascendency. Their recently arrived and highly charismatic German manager, Jürgen Klopp, was starting to turn things around, but they were still falling short. Since Virgil’s arrival at the club he has been pivotal in their winning of two Premier League titles and the Champions League, sealing their most successful period in decades and making them the most successful club in English history in terms of trophies won. During his time there, he has also established himself as one of the best defenders of all time.

Days off are when injured players usually come in to train. Virgil sits directly in front of a large glass wall that looks down onto a gym where members of the squad currently recovering from all manner of sprains, tears and broken bones are working through their rehabilitation regimes. Virgil isn’t injured, but he likes to give himself extra homework. Later in the afternoon he has a strength and conditioning session for his knees, which has been a regular part of his routine since suffering a severe anterior cruciate ligament injury in 2020, which kept him off the pitch for 300 days. As we talk, he crosses one leg over the other and his right knee pokes up above the table. Large, deep scars are visible.

He was born in Breda, a city not far from the Dutch border with Belgium. His mother, Hellen, moved to the Netherlands from Suriname when she was young and raised Virgil and his younger brother largely on her own. He also has a sister who is ten years younger than him. He has been estranged from his Dutch father, Ron, since childhood, which is why he chooses to wear “VIRGIL” on the back of his shirt rather than “VAN DIJK”.

Growing up, he would play football all over town with his younger brother (“anywhere I could kick a ball”) which meant playgrounds, grass pitches and the small concrete cages with tiny goals that one finds throughout the Netherlands and that are partly to thank for its conveyer belt of talented players who boast excellent technical ability.

By the age of eight Virgil was good, but not outstanding. He played for the youth academy of Willem II, a local mid-table team in the Dutch first division. However, he struggled to break into the squad. By the age of 16 he was seriously considering a change of career plan.

“That was a very difficult time. I was struggling as a player, not playing well, not getting into the team,” he says. “There’s this horrible feeling of pushing yourself to the maximum of your abilities and you can still see that you are not good enough. At the same time, your friends from school who aren’t involved in football are starting to live their lives and you feel like maybe you are missing out on things. I found it really tough.”

To make ends meet he took a job as a dishwasher in a local bistro. “A lot of players sign professional contracts at the age of 16 or 17 but that wasn’t the case for me. I needed to start making some money because my mom couldn’t just support me like that. So twice a week from 5pm till just before midnight I would go to this place and wash dishes. It gave me a bit of money each month, plus a tip!”

His fortunes shifted when, over a summer break, he went through a sudden growth spurt. “I couldn’t tell you how many centimetres exactly, but it was a lot.” When he returned, the new, taller Virgil found that his game had changed. Things were coming easier; he developed his confidence. He was no longer trying his hardest and failing, and his already strong technical ability, honed as a smaller player who couldn’t rely on strength, was now matched by an imposing physicality. Eventually his performance improved enough that he had a consistent run in the academy team. At the age of 19 he left after having been scouted by FC Groningen, based in the north of the country, gaining his first professional contract.

When he was 20, Virgil nearly died. Undiagnosed appendicitis and a kidney infection left him in hospital fighting for his life. In past interviews with Dutch media, he has mentioned that things got so severe that at one point he spoke to his mother and wrote “a kind of will.”

This near-death experience marked something of a turning point in the player’s fortunes. He recovered from illness and after a run of successful games was scouted by the Scottish giants Celtic. After two strong seasons there, he was signed by Southampton in the English Premier League. After yet another two years of excelling in his position, he had become one of the most sought-after defenders in the world. Liverpool signed him in 2018, aged 26, for £75 million, making him the most expensive defender in history at the time.

This gradual, often precarious, rise has had the effect of grounding Virgil. He takes nothing for granted. “I think everything – the injuries, the growth spurt, the appendix, then the transfers – they’ve all shaped me and help me appreciate what I have,” he says. “Everyone knows the stories of Ronaldo and Messi, playing at the highest level from the age of 15 or whatever, but my journey is very different. I hope that what I’ve gone through might give motivation to young players out there, so they can think, ‘Even if I don’t make it right now, there are still other ways to get there.’”

Upon meeting him, one immediately gets a sense of why he must be so difficult to play against. He has crazy proportions. He is tall: 6-foot-5, or 195 centimetres. I have met many people taller than him, but his combination of size and athletic heft make him look superhumanly large. When he is standing in close proximity, he almost completely fills your field of vision and you have to actively peer around his sides to see behind him.

He looks like a handsome suit of armour that has come to life. Or like at any moment his chest will pop open to reveal another, smaller man piloting him. And yet he isn’t beefy or overly muscular. Modern footballers can’t afford to be, given the speed of the game. He is intensely lean and his upper body is slim. And all the same, he exudes vastness. This sense of being physically imposing comes from somewhere else: it’s a hard-to-define aura that he carries with him.

Virgil is a rare exception to this rule. He is one of only a few defenders to have won the PFA (Professional Footballers’ Association) Players’ Player of the Year award – a prize in which Premier League footballers vote on whom of their peers they think is the best. He is also the only defender to have ever won the UEFA Men’s Player of the Year Award, which goes to the best player playing in any club in Europe, winning it in 2019 when he beat Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, who finished second and third, respectively. Kids walk around with “VIRGIL 4” shirts in a way that they wouldn’t with most players of his position.

This speaks volumes about his unique qualities as a player. He has the physicality and speed required to be a tough centre back, coupled with an incredible level of technical skill. He can play hyper-accurate passes, and he can score goals. Perhaps most impressively, he has an almost supernatural ability to read the game. It is this latter quality that Virgil highlights as his most defining characteristic as a player.

“I think the thing I’m most proud of is being able to be one, two steps ahead of what’s taking place around me, looking at the situation, judging it and then dealing with it before the danger happens. It’s a very difficult thing to do.”

This is Minority Report defending: sensing and snuffing out the crime before the culprit even has a chance to think about it. Indeed, watching Virgil at his best can be a confounding experience, because at times you hardly notice him. Famously, he has incredibly low statistics for tackles (the act of dispossessing an opponent who has the ball) because he doesn’t need to make them in the first place. Tackles are what happen when you have no other choice, when you have lost control.

When he’s in a one-on-one duel, he will often completely stand off or retreat from an attacker rather than engaging them head on. He stares into his opponents’ eyes, rather than at their feet – attackers will often try to trick and bamboozle with their feet, whereas Virgil says their eyes will often give them away. At times it can seem as though he is running telepathic interference. Jamming an attacker’s brain signals and decision-making capabilities simply by being there.

For Musa Okwonga and Ryan Hunn, hosts of the ‘Stadio’ football podcast, it is his sheer breadth of qualities that pushes Virgil into another tier of greatness. “He combines so many things to such an obscenely high level, and he has maintained that over such a long period of time, that I think it’s kind of incredible. I think he’s going to go down as one of the all-time best centre backs,” says Hunn.

“I think he now enters the first rank,” concurs Okwonga, naming him alongside legendary players such as the Frenchman Lilian Thuram and the Italians Paolo Maldini and Franco Baresi. “He’s in that league. I think he’s that good.”

Aside from all his physical and technical attributes, one of Virgil’s greatest qualities is his leadership. And this is key in placing him alongside the all-time greats. He talks constantly to his teammates, corralling them, willing them on in an uninterrupted stream of instructions and encouragement. It is as though, if he were to stop talking, the spell would break and everyone would come to a standstill. At the same time, he also protects his players and exudes extraordinary levels of calm. This is part natural charisma and part carefully crafted skill. His calmness is like a suit he can wear, a mask he can don, knowing that it will elevate those around him.

“The season has been inconsistent so far,” says Virgil. “We’ve had good performances, but we’ve also had periods where we haven’t been able to play well for the whole 90 minutes, and this has led to some poor results.”

Having been champions last year, they are now effectively out of the running. There are persistent rumours of discontent in the dressing room; of their only recently arrived manager, Arne Slot, being at risk of losing his job. One of the truths of being an elite footballer is that the higher the level you perform at, the more intense the scrutiny you will face. Liverpool, as one of the sport’s biggest clubs, and Virgil, as its captain, receive a lot of noise.

It is hard to overstate how over the top the football news machine has become in the last decade. The slightest non-event gets packaged and repackaged into soundbites, talking points. Underpinning this is a media economy dictated by a raft of influential former professionals turned pundits and driven by financially incentivised clicks and impressions. As with so much in wider culture, this drives a move towards sensationalism, over-the-top opinions and binary takes.

Because of their immense wealth and the fact that they get paid to do something that many people can only dream of, there can be a tendency among fans and the media to dehumanise players. The ripple effects of this can be severe: racist abuse, death threats, not to mention the endless pendulum swing of declaring players DONE one minute, BACK the next. Virgil takes an active role in insulating his teammates from this external noise. He gives virtually all post-match player interviews, and while this looks like it must be exhausting, he rarely lets it show.

“Nobody has asked me to do this. It’s very much my own thing,” he says. “I just feel responsible for each and every person at the club and I want to do everything I can to help them and protect them. The extreme way that players’ performances are discussed in the media and online is in a dangerous place at the moment. More than anything, I’m worried about the new generation of younger players and I think we need to do more to protect them.”

What is particularly jarring about all the talk of Liverpool’s poor performances is that it often neglects one of its most significant and traumatic root causes: that in the summer during the team’s off-season, Diogo Jota, Liverpool’s Portuguese striker, was killed, aged 28, in a car crash in Spain along with his brother, André Silva.

The sudden loss has been immense. Understandably, Virgil and his team have never used the tragic loss of a teammate as an excuse for poor performances on the pitch. But to an external observer, it is hard not to see a team processing grief in the glare of the public eye.

“Losing such a significant member of our…I would say, brotherhood…is very difficult. It’s something we are all going through. But then alongside that, you have to be as good as you can be on the pitch, as quickly as possible,” he tells me. “We know you can’t control what is being said out there. There are certain people that will never forget the impact that the summer has had on our players and staff, and there will be people that will downplay it. That’s just a fact.”

Within the club, Virgil and other senior players have set up support groups that meet regularly where the players can talk to one another and discuss the often-unpredictable ways in which grief expresses itself. “You can feel fine and then all of a sudden it pops up. We’ve learned that we just have to keep speaking about it,” he says. “There will be days that are tough and we know that we can count on each other for support.”

As the teams play I keep an eye on Virgil. He seems content and in the groove. A few days earlier he had told me he was excited about playing against a team who are aiming to take Liverpool’s crown. “The atmosphere is going to be really against us, and that’s something I’m looking forward to. I like to be in a hostile environment. It’s a nice pressure.”

For much of the second half, Liverpool are effectively camped out in the Arsenal half, slowly moving the ball in a semi-circle around the perimeter of the Arsenal box, waiting for an opening. Nothing happens.

The game finishes 0-0. Many people around me declare it terrible, but I like it. In many ways it is a textbook defender’s performance. I look up Virgil’s statistics for the game. He played all 90 minutes. He made zero tackles, two clearances and one interception. He was dribbled past zero times. He completed 92% of his 83 passes. These are Virgilian numbers. His perfect game is a form of minimalism. Almost unnoticeable.

He will arrive at his home outside Liverpool at around 1am. Then he will head immediately to the ice bath and sauna that he has installed in his house. The next day he will be back at the training centre doing yoga, breathing exercises, stretching and some work with an exercise bike. Then, before you know it, he will be back in training for the next game.

Afterwards his kids wanted to go shopping in Soho. They stopped off at Our Legacy and a few other places, although Virgil didn’t buy anything for himself. He is famous to the extent that trying things on in shops is impractical. “It sounds silly, doesn’t it? But obviously when people recognise you it can get a bit busy, a bit tricky.”

I get the sense that the particularities of being a footballer can sometimes get in the way of Virgil fully indulging his inner fashion fan. “I never have time to go to fashion shows, but I would like to be able to go to more of them in the future,” he reflects. “You know, Milan and Paris fashion weeks are coming up but there are so many games. It would be amazing to find a moment to go to one of the shows. If I’m over in Europe for a game I’d try to go to a show, or if I have a day off I’d definitely fly over.”

At the start of December he was due to attend the British Fashion Awards, but a poor run of results forced him to change his plans at the last minute. “It wouldn’t have looked so good if I was seen at something like that when we needed to be focusing on the pitch. I was completely ready though. I had a nice suit from Wales Bonner. I still have it; I’ll get to wear it when the timing is right.”

On the day we meet, Virgil is dressed in full Liverpool training kit: shorts and a long-sleeved top emblazoned with the team crest and his shirt number, 4. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he takes an almost abnormal level of interest in the clothes he wears for work, which is driven partly by his aesthetic preferences and partly by the demands of a sport where marginal gains and small psychological advantages are everything.

“I’m very involved with these things, particularly with things like the fit. With my shirts, my upper body is actually quite skinny for my height, so I’m not an extra-large, but I’m also not a large because that’s too tight,” he says. “It’s a funny fact but I get the kit man to take extra-large shirts and wash them so that they shrink a little bit to get that size between large and extra-large. You wash it two, three times and the fit is perfect.”

When he’s on the pitch, Virgil opts for a long-sleeved base layer under a short-sleeved top. This is a look he has gone with since his earliest days as a professional and it gives him the faint air of someone in a 1990s indie band. I ask him why he doesn’t just wear a long-sleeved top, but he insists it’s not the same. “It’s funny you ask that, because I actually thought about switching to a long-sleeved top this season, but then I decided not to. A base layer really is what I like. It’s just to do with the fit. It’s tight, it feels nice.”

Some of this is due to the practicalities of how regularly kits change throughout a season, where a team will cycle between home kits, away kits, third kits, variations of these kits for specific cup competitions and an increasing number of one-off, special-edition kits. “Like, even our kits for the Premier League and the Champions League, they look the same, but they have different emblems on them, different fonts on the back,” he explains. Virgil is a man who likes consistency, so having a base layer helps to create a feeling of continuity. “Really it means the tops can change but I will still have something that feels familiar.”

Often between seasons a club will switch manufacturer. Liverpool’s kits are currently made by Adidas, but last season they were with Nike and a few seasons before that, New Balance. “This is our first season with Adidas, and I found their base layers tighter than I was used to, so we had to work to find some options in different materials and now we’ve found one that’s a good fit,” he says. “You always notice little things, like this season our shorts have drawstrings at the front, whereas last season they didn’t. So you do have to think about these things. Do you leave them hanging loose? Do you tie them? Personally I like tying the knots quite tight.”

Unlike many football-obsessed nations (particularly the English, who have a chronically outsized sense of their own importance), the Dutch have a more pragmatic perspective on their team. They are historically successful, with a habit of punching above their weight for a nation of 18 million. For the upcoming competition, expectations are hopeful but not wildly optimistic, explains political journalist and Dutch football expert Simon Kuper. “There’s a sense that Holland are a good team, but haven’t been a top team for some time. There’s about six or seven world-class players in there, but that’s not enough. People understand that and are quite realistic.”

Virgil has also been keeping a close eye on the progress of Suriname, who are in with a strong chance of qualifying for the first time ever. He even recently stayed up into the middle of the night to watch a crucial qualifying game against Guatemala. “Next they have a play-off game against Bolivia, and if they win that, a game against Iraq,” he informs me. “I would love for Suriname to qualify. And otherwise I would love to have a friendly game against them. I’ve mentioned it to the Federation. Let’s see what they say.”

Suriname is a former Dutch colony, and, like Virgil, many of the Netherland’s best ever players – the likes of Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard and Clarence Seedorf – were either born there or have parents who were. Indeed, like many European nations, the Dutch national team has a number of players who can trace their roots elsewhere – often following the country’s colonial past and the waves of immigration that have shaped its present.

When Virgil and his teammates take to the pitch this summer, they will be wearing a special warm-up jersey made by Nike and Dutch label Patta, whose founders Gee Schmidt and Edson Sabajo also have Surinamese roots and who wanted to make a kit that felt representative of their team’s diverse make-up. “So many of our greatest players come from different nationalities,” says Schmidt. “They might be part Surinamese, or from Ghana, or Curaçao or Morocco. So we wanted to think, ‘What does it mean to be Dutch? What does a Dutch person look like?’”

While this could easily come across as a shallow gesture, within the context of the Dutch team it carries significance. “Thirty years ago there was a lot of discussion around race in the national team,” explains Simon Kuper. “There was a generation of Black players who were coming into the squad who were all paid less than their white teammates at their club teams. That’s partly because they were younger, but I think there was also some racism involved there. This caused tension in the squad, and that led to a national debate. After that the Dutch team became very anxious to make sure nothing like that ever happens again. There has been a real effort to better integrate people from all nationalities.”

It is also worth noting that the upcoming edition of the World Cup will take place within the anti-immigrant and globally antagonistic setting of the US, who are co-hosting along with Canada and Mexico. Controversial hosts are nothing new for the World Cup. Its grubby and sycophantic organising body – FIFA – increasingly awards the competition to authoritarian nations with an interest in using the sport as a means of burnishing their self-image. Its last two iterations were held in Russia (before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but post-annexation of Crimea) and Qatar (a country where homosexuality is illegal and where there was little football infrastructure prior to its being awarded the competition, leading to the deaths of thousands of migrant workers in the rushed completion of stadiums).

When Virgil and I meet, the dominant talking point around the competition is the recent announcement of extraordinarily high ticket prices and the vast distances that fans will have to travel between games. “It looks like it’s going to be so expensive for people. I really hope the prices will go down a bit,” Virgil says. “I was looking at the difference in prices between the last World Cup and this one and it’s so extreme.”

In the days after Virgil and I meet, Donald Trump invaded Venezuela to oust president Nicolás Maduro and seize control of their oil production. Then he threatened the annexation of Greenland. Then his ICE agents shot and killed civilian Renée Good in the streets in Minneapolis, followed by the homicide of Alex Pretti just weeks later. Calls to boycott the World Cup are growing, and the Netherlands is currently one of the most outspoken countries on the matter. A petition to withdraw the national team from competition has reached over 150,000 signatures at the time of writing.

The actual likelihood of a boycott is slim, however, and it will only be brought about by a significant act of US antagonism towards the Global West. “The only scenario that would likely lead to a boycott would be if Trump invaded part of the EU,” says Kuper. “But there is a wider sense of unease around the political actions of the US. The Dutch king is a big football fan. When asked yesterday if he would be going to the World Cup, he said, ‘We’ll see.’ So that was actually quite remarkable. I think it’s going to be like 2018 in Russia, where European countries don’t send their dignitaries, don’t send their Prime Minister, but the team goes.”

David Sims is the photographer who took the images for this story. He is also a lifelong Liverpool supporter – having been encouraged to support them, from the age of four, by his Liverpudlian grandmother. He says watching Virgil makes him feel calm. “He’s just so consummate. To describe someone as chic in that position sounds mildly insane, because usually you should be out there smashing down players. But he’s so intelligent, so well spoken.”

When asked, Sims singles out Virgil’s debut match on 5 January 2018 as one of his favourite moments. It comes in a cup game against their fierce city rivals, Everton. Virgil has only just joined the club and he finds himself in the starting team having barely had time to train with the squad. The game is tough. Attritional. Then in the dying minutes, Liverpool win a corner. Virgil joins the throng of players, the ball comes flying in, and he leaps high above everyone to head the ball into the net and win the game. Cue riotous celebrations and the making of an instant hero.

“That debut, it was such an incredible way to announce his arrival, and it stunned me,” says Sims. “From that moment onwards he was always going to be our leader. Before he arrived, Liverpool were struggling without the quality or the charisma that he possesses, that character, that really innate sense of himself. And our fortunes completely changed because of his signing.”

Virgil tells me that when he was young the most he dreamt about was getting a professional contract and having his name on the back of a shirt. Now he has his name sung each week by thousands of fans who adore him. “I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but there’s a huge mural of me near the stadium,” he says. “That was amazing. It also felt really surreal because you see these things when you are young: murals of other players, legends of the game. Then, all of a sudden you see yourself painted massive on the side of a house and you’re, like, ‘Wow, this is incredible.’ I will never take those kinds of things for granted.”

His contract with Liverpool is due to expire next year. After that, it is unclear what comes next. I ask him if he ever thinks about what his career might look like, post-football. “Not so much at the moment,” he replies. “But obviously it comes through my mind sometimes.” He has the tactical intelligence to be a good coach, which he says he has considered but isn’t sure about. He adds that he is almost entirely certain that he doesn’t want to be a pundit. “I’m really not sure, to be honest. But I definitely see some- thing in football happening. That door will always be open to me.”

For now he has more pressing things on his mind. He has games to play. More seasons in him. More strikers to dominate. “When the time does come,” he adds, “the only thing I’m certain of is that I want to take time to enjoy what life is about. I want to be with my kids. I want to travel the world… I want to finally go skiing.”