Speaking on The Overlap, Gary Neville has been discussing his perceptions of Virgil van Dijk when he first signed for Liverpool.
Back in January 2018, Liverpool signed van Dijk for £75m – a world record fee for a defender at the time, and eyebrows were certainly raised by this move.
Indeed, at the time, van Dijk was, with all due respect, a mid-table defender plying his trade for Southampton, and many thought that the Reds had overpaid here.
However, the defender has since made swift work of proving each and every one of his doubters wrong – including Neville.
The Manchester United legend has now come out and admitted that he underestimated just how talented van Dijk was.
Neville’s admission
The pundit told van Dijk personally that he misjudged him.
“I remember the first time I did an interview about your move to Liverpool. It was a night game and they’d paid £75m for you and I thought ‘I’ve seen Virgil van Dijk at Southampton, he’s good, but that’s a lot of money that. I think I underestimated how good you would become,” Neville said.
Hard to predict
To be fair to Neville, he’s not the only one who underestimated van Dijk at the time.
Not many would’ve predicted that the Dutchman would go on to become arguably the greatest centre-back in Premier League history when he joined Liverpool in 2018.
Yes, he was seen as talented, but this was a player who’d spent most of his senior career at Celtic and Southampton – he was hardly regarded as a generational talent.
However, Jurgen Klopp unlocked something in van Dijk and turned him into a superstar, and if it weren’t for a certain Lionel Messi, he’d be a Ballon d’Or winner too.
Neville did underestimate van Dijk, but most people were guilty of doing the same at the time.
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