Virgil van Dijk currently occupies an interesting position, both in his career with Liverpool and in the Premier League as a whole. Most observers would agree that he has been playing at his best level since his ACL injury, even if he may not reach the heights that he appeared to scale so effortlessly in the two seasons prior to that fateful clash at Goodison Park.
Yet he is playing so well that many would assign him the title of the best center-back in the Premier League at present. It shows how good Van Dijk was between 2018 and 2020 that he can be a tier below that period and still be ahead of the rest in England.
It’s also fair to wonder if peak Virgil would have struggled behind the porous midfield Liverpool had last season; chances are he would have. The stronger structure throughout the side has enabled the Netherlands captain to get his defending back on point, and in turn we appear to be seeing a renaissance in his contributions in the other direction.
While it’s important to remember the 2023/24 season is a small sample, something interesting has occurred with Van Dijk’s passing. His accuracy rate in the Premier League is 91.6 per cent, higher than it has ever been before. Yet he has had better campaigns for short passes (those of no more than 15 yards in length) while his medium (15 to 30 yards) and long (over 30) efforts have never been more accurate.
The latter in particular has seen a notable improvement; he is around 10 per cent up on his post-injury form in the last two seasons and over six per cent more accurate than his previous best (2018/19). In the recent matches with Luton and Brentford, Van Dijk has made excellent use of his long-range passing to link up with Mohamed Salah.
In their 625 minutes of shared playing time prior to the trip to Kenilworth Road, Liverpool’s number four had found the Egyptian with a total of five passes. Of those, one led to Salah taking a shot against Bournemouth, another enabled him to create a first half chance for Luis Díaz at Tottenham (but no, not that one). While occasionally useful, such passes were not a frequent occurrence.
However, Van Dijk then found Salah with five passes at Luton and another four last weekend. The latter quartet were all among the nine successful long passes the 32-year-old completed against the Bees, from nine attempts, with three classified by Opta as switches of play. This means they travel more than 40 yards of the width of the pitch.
It is rare for Van Dijk to even attempt three switches in a match — it has occurred 14 times in 215 games in league and Europe for Liverpool — much less complete that many. This resurgence could be a sign that his confidence has fully returned after a tricky spell last term.
While there can be no causation with the correlation, it’s interesting to look at which sides have made most use of switch passes in recent times. Liverpool’s title winners of 2019/20 logged the most the Premier League has seen in the last six seasons (283), with Manchester City’s champions for the preceding two campaigns also among the division’s top seven sides for switch passes since 2017/18.
If the Reds are going to return to that level of switch play, much may depend on Van Dijk. Trent Alexander-Arnold led the top flight for these passes for three seasons between the summers of 2019 and 2022 yet is now averaging his fewest per 90 minutes since establishing himself in the Liverpool team.
And this is entirely understandable; it’s harder to play passes across the width of the pitch from a central position than it is at right-back. With Van Dijk spraying passes to open up play, the drop from Alexander-Arnold won’t matter as much, and if the Dutchman can repeatedly find Salah, the league’s leading player for creating big chances, all the better.
