Tag: Virgil van Dijk

There is no question that Liverpool right winger Mohamed Salah is the favorite to win the Premier League Player of the Season for the 2024/25 campaign, and, at this point, it's a foregone conclusion that both the Reds will win the Premiership and Salah will be crowned as the league's best players. His statistics are a wonder to behold. Salah has scored 27 goals with 17 assists this season already, producing numbers at the age of 32 that are unlike anything we have seen in Premier League history and wouldn't look out of place next to prime Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi numbers. But beyond Salah, Liverpool have another player who, in literally any other season, would have a compelling case to win the Premier League Player of the Season honors. That is none other than center bac...

Defenders often don't get their due in world football, and it's a conundrum that has impacted the position, especially the center back position, for several decades; it's not a new phenomenon. Fabio Cannavaro, Franz Beckenbauer, and Mattias Sammer are the only defensive players to have won the Ballon d'Or. In addition to just being underrated in general, defenders are hurt by the fact that defensive output and impact are much more difficult to measure objectively and statistically than attacking impact. Even the new-age analytics often do a poor job of adequately evaluating or contextualizing the value of defensive performances. As Paolo Maldini liked to say, the best defenders often don't have to make an intervention at all. Virgil Van Dijk was worth the record transfer fee at cent...