Virgil van Dijk made the transition from William II to FC Groningen in 2010 and continued to build on his career. The defender broke through the North Lease Stadium and through Celtic and Southampton he reached Liverpool on Wednesday for a record sum of 84.5 million euros. However, the career of 26-year-old Van Dijk could also have taken a completely different turn.
The Dutch national team’s sixteen-fold international team was close to a transfer to Metalist Kharkiv in the summer of 2013, but chose to move to Scotland at the last minute. Broker Aleksei Lundovsky was given a written mandate by Henk-Maarten Chin to negotiate on behalf of Van Dijk with clubs in Russia and Ukraine and finally tried to get him to Metalist.
Van Dijk could have ended up in Ukraine in 2013. I remember exactly how things went,”says Lundovsky in an interview with Sport Arena,” I went to Groningen with sports director Evgeni Krasnikov and we met Van Dijk and his manager in the VIP lounge. We negotiated something and Van Dijk had no objection to a transfer to Metalist. He came across as a modest boy.
Metalist would pay three million euros, but Celtic later offered the same amount. Van Dijk then chose the Scots, and Metalist would work with the Brazilian Rodrigo Moledo,”At that moment there was little known about the Ukrainian competition in the Netherlands. I think that when Jeremain Lens or another’ Surinamese friend’ had played in our country, Van Dijk might have come as well,”concludes Lundovsky. Metalist went bankrupt after the departure of owner Sergiy Kurchenko in 2016.
Metalist Kharkiv had been a suitable club for Virgil van Dijk’ s’ Metalist Kharkiv’.
