When Virgil van Dijk is mentioned in the pantheon of great Premier League defenders, it occasionally comes with a caveat.
Yes, he has the trophies, the class and the longevity that are the traditional hallmarks of all-time greats. But has he always been confronted by the very best?
Football has changed and even before his emergence at Liverpool it was said that the classic No 9 was disappearing from the game. Van Dijk has not had to deal with an Alan Shearer-type, a human cyclone who would wear his opponent down, going one-to-one, testing them physically as much as technically.
Shearer is the Premier League’s all-time top scorer yet a quick look at the list of players below him reminds you that Van Dijk has not avoided such challenges.
In second place is Harry Kane, not only a potent goal threat but also a physical menace to defenders. After joining Liverpool in January 2018, Van Dijk played against Kane eight times and never lost. Maybe that says more about Tottenham Hotspur than Kane, who scored four goals during that run, but it is not the record of someone cowed by confrontation.
Van Dijk has generally enjoyed his duels with Harry Kane (Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP via Getty Images)
The defining image of their duels came in the opening minute of the 2019 Champions League final, when Van Dijk barged past Kane — admittedly only just returning to fitness — to win the ball, setting the tone for the rest of a match Liverpool won 2-0.
Yet Kane can console himself with the fact that a potentially even more formidable modern striker, albeit one representing a better team, has also not mastered Van Dijk. In eight games against Liverpool for Red Bull Salzburg and Manchester City, Erling Haaland has scored three times but he has won only once, and that was in a Carabao Cup tie when Van Dijk did not feature.
Haaland’s ‘Kane moment’ arguably came in the teams’ meeting at Anfield in March 2024 when a Liverpool attack broke down and Haaland moved towards goal from the centre-circle. Van Dijk was the only man standing between him and the Liverpool goal but, rather than panic, the Dutchman — showing remarkable poise, both in his feet and his brain — kept pace with Haaland and eased him wide of goal, where he could only hit a tame shot straight at Caoimhin Kelleher.
Attack vs Defence. Haaland vs Van Dijk. 🍿 pic.twitter.com/s18d8dNdBK
— Premier League (@premierleague) March 13, 2024
These are key battles which tend to define the outcome of important encounters. The fact that they will be a feature of Premier League games for at least the next two years, courtesy of Van Dijk’s new Liverpool contract, should be welcome news to everyone, with the possible exception of those in east Manchester.
Only the most unreasonable observers would dispute Van Dijk’s status as a Premier League legend, and the fact that Liverpool have seen fit to maintain his position as Europe’s best paid defender on around £400,000 a week until 2027 is testament to his enduring class. There is equally no quibbling that someone of his size, speed and personality would have been able to cope with English football’s more bruising era.
In September, Van Dijk will have been a Premier League defender for a decade. At his very best, both at Liverpool and his previous club Southampton, he has been like a planet with a gravitational pull so strong that the ball ends up being consumed by his orbit. Knowing this, managers have seemed to instruct their teams to avoid him, instead targeting other perceived weaknesses in a Liverpool defence that otherwise streamed forward, especially under Jurgen Klopp, leaving Van Dijk alone at the back to sweep up because they knew they could (much like in the Haaland clip above).
Just because the test for him has been different to central defenders in a bygone age does not mean it has been any easier. With inverted wingers and inverted wing-backs zooming in from both sides of the pitch, Van Dijk’s concentration and footwork have been tested a lot more because of the amount of twisting and turning he has to do. Meanwhile, simply stopping someone from getting past you is not enough any more.
Despite often being the last line of Liverpool’s defence, he has played a significant role in build-up play, both for Klopp and his successor, Arne Slot, who has asked Van Dijk to step higher up the field to help launch attacks with his precise passing.
“Everybody here in England would tell you that Virgil van Dijk is the best defender in the world,” Slot told the BBC in January. “In Holland, he got a bit more criticism than he gets over here in England. I was, in a very positive way, surprised how good he was on the ball and how he could play football through the lines. From the first day I was like, ‘Wow, this is definitely another level that I’m used to’.”
He averages a goal roughly every 10 games, too, and there have been some pivotal ones, perhaps most memorably in last season’s Carabao Cup final against Chelsea, a day when he helped Liverpool defy an injury crisis by leading a callow team to a 1-0 win. It was his 89th-minute header which defeated West Ham last Sunday.
Van Dijk heads in Liverpool’s winner against Chelsea in the Carabao Cup final (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
It is a marker of his ability and character that four regular partners alongside him have chopped and changed over the years and it hasn’t affected his own performance and, by extension, the team’s. The serious right knee injury in 2020 and his struggles to return to his best form only served to remind just how imperious Van Dijk could be. Since becoming captain in 2023, his level of assurance has been comparable to his pre-injury state.
In terms of foreign defenders and being a leader with enormous influence, only Vincent Kompany compares to him in the Premier League this century. In the context of modern Liverpool, he has to be remembered as the club’s most important signing. It is true that Mohamed Salah’s goals made supporters dream the impossible following his arrival in 2017, but Van Dijk was coming anyway and, without his recruitment, you cannot imagine Klopp’s team reaching the Champions League final at the end of that season.
Though they lost to Real Madrid in Kyiv, the run was a signpost of Liverpool’s upward trajectory and that ultimately helped Alisson decide to choose Anfield in a world-record move for a goalkeeper, despite interest from Chelsea.
Van Dijk has been a Premier League lynchpin for a decade (Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)
Van Dijk pins that story together, just as he did Liverpool’s defence. The best defender in the club’s history? He is surely the most complete. In terms of presence, he is rivalled only by the late Ron Yeats — the Scot who Bill Shankly described as a “colossus” and bestrode Anfield throughout the 1960s. In terms of style, there is Alan Hansen, a lithe figure and before his time in terms of the way he used the ball, albeit not always with the certainty of Van Dijk.
In his position, Hansen tends to be thought of as Liverpool’s greatest but when he arrived in 1977, the club were English champions as well as having recently been crowned European Cup winners for the first time. The culture of success was already well established for Van Dijk. There was more pressure on him, not least because of the record-breaking price tag, but also because there was more for the club to do, as the fanbase lurched between raw hope and fatalism.
Eighteen months later, Liverpool won the Champions League for the first time in 14 years. Eleven months after that, they were crowned English champions for the first time in 30 years. Van Dijk was integral to each of these achievements and maybe more than anything, he would bring a quality not offered by any individual player since Graeme Souness captained the team.
With Van Dijk leading them from the back, Liverpool suddenly possessed an overwhelming sense of superiority. That is some legacy — and he is not finished yet.
(Top shot: Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)