How Inter away changed Virgil van Dijk forever
Liverpool star Virgil van Dijk wasn’t always so highly rated, and this is a story of how a game against Inter Milan away changed him forever.
The Liverpool defender wasn’t always considered one of the best in the world. In fact, there was a time when Virgil van Dijk was being turned down by the biggest in the world.
After being rejected as a kid to finally making the grade with Groningen and then Celtic, before Southampton eventually brought him to the Premier League, van Dijk’s long journey to world-class status has finally been completed.
Within two-and-a-half seasons at the Saints, van Dijk was being sold to Liverpool for a world record fee. However, it was nearly so different had Ronny Deila had his way.
Deila was the Celtic manager when the Dutchman first came to prominence, and admitted that he offered the defender to Manchester City.
But, City didn’t want to take a punt on someone who had just done well in the Scottish Premier League. The only way to see his true quality, they thought, was to see how well the target had performed in Europe.
This put Deila in a bit of a situation, because the manager reckoned Celtic’s performances in Europe hadn’t been of a high enough quality and to make matters worse, van Dijk got sent off during a Europa League game against Inter Milan.
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As a result of that, the deal was off.
Interestingly, Xherdan Shaqiri started that game for Milan. Who would have guessed that five years later they would be in the same squad.
"Deila revealed, via the Express: “Did I get in touch with City? Yes. I said you have to take him. They said, ‘okay, tell me the best European game he has played and we will watch it.“I couldn’t tell them what game that was because he hadn’t any real good European games. He was really dominant in Scotland but he got sent off against Inter away.“That was a big test. I think if he had played fantastically in that game, he would have been bought. I think the big clubs think Scottish football is too low level and they don’t want to take a chance on a player for that kind of money.”"
However, if City had been truly interested they would have done some digging and gone back to 2013 and Celtic’s Champions League run. It was a bit unfortunate for the Bhoys, who were grouped with Barcelona, AC Milan and Ajax and managed to win one game out of six.
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Things could have been so different had van Dijk played differently on that night in February 2015. He could have emerged from the SPL as one of City’s greatest ever buys, or the pressure situation van Dijk would have been walking into could have left him on the scrapheap.