Virgil van Dijk's Future: His Key Stats, Potential Longevity & Performances in 24/25

The discussions regarding the contract extensions of three key Liverpool players won’t go away until a definitive solution is reached. One of them is the club captain Virgil van Dijk. The Dutch skipper, who turned 33 in the summer, has his contract running out at the end of this season just like Mohamed Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold.

In the September international break though, he did say in an interview that there is a desire to lead the club and country for “another two years”. Salah did his version of talking on the topic after Liverpool’s win over Manchester United earlier in the month, saying nobody from the club has spoken to him yet about the extension. Even Alexander-Arnold talked about his future and stated his desire to become the club captain one day (but did not commit to anything in public). 

We will stick with van Dijk for this article and take a look at his numbers over the past few years. There will be a section on analysing how well the Dutchman has started this season and whether he is one of those defenders who could play at the highest level till 36-37 years of age, hence deserving an extension at Anfield.

First up, let’s look at his playing time in the last six seasons (since his first full season at Liverpool) -

Barring the 2020/21 season which was ruptured by Jordan Pickford’s nasty challenge that made him miss nine months of football, van Dijk has been consistently playing over 4500 minutes of football for club and country every season. Although centre-backs generally cross the 4000 mark in minutes played per year because they run comparatively less than midfielders, attackers or fullbacks, to maintain that amount of playing time after a bad ACL injury is a testament to how fit and maintained he is physically and mentally.