Do we like them?Do we like Virgil van Dijk?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Clean on harm and decent off the pitch, with some real giving, but the record we could read is thin and he has a prickly side.
Van Dijk is the captain of both Liverpool and the Netherlands, and one of the best-known defenders in the world. We couldn't open a full profile of his early years, so we're skipping the origin story rather than guessing at it. What we can say is what he has said and done in public, and that record is mostly clean.
The awkward bit is the 2022 World Cup. Seven European captains planned to wear the rainbow OneLove armband in Qatar, but FIFA threatened yellow cards. The Dutch team said its number one priority was winning games, and Van Dijk told NOS he would have loved to wear the band but not at the expense of a yellow card. Plenty of fans read that as backing down; he rejected the idea that players lacked a backbone.
On the harm check, nothing turned up: no slide into conspiracy theories, no remarks about LGBTQ+ people, women or migrants, and no dodgy company. In December 2023 he wore the Premier League's rainbow armband for Liverpool at Sheffield United, while the opposition's stand-in captain became the first player in seven years not to wear it. It was a league requirement for the campaign, so we won't oversell it, but it is a point in his favour.
The recent stoush is a classic football sulk. After the Netherlands' World Cup exit, Dutch columnist Valentijn Driessen accused him of destroying Dutch football and a colleague claimed he had pushed for a back five. At a September press conference Van Dijk shot both down, saying “That is utter nonsense” and that the team simply failed at the tournament. It was tetchy but not nasty, and it was a row over football, not over people.
On the pitch, the Football Association charged him in August 2023 over his reaction to a red card at Newcastle, alleging he acted improperly and used abusive or insulting words towards a match official. We couldn't find the outcome, or his response, in what we read, so treat it as an allegation. It is a sporting charge, not a pattern we could document.
The good stuff is real. In 2022 he made a large donation to get the Dutch deaf football team to the Deaflympics and donated his League Cup final shirt for auction. In 2019 he handed UEFA's €100,000 donation to the Red Cross for its work reuniting separated families, telling UEFA he thought it was important because few other organisations did that work. That is a modest list, but it is on the record.