Liverpool's Vital Dutch Masters
Liverpool have employed a steady stream of Dutch talent over the last quarter century. They have rarely won silverware without a player from the Netherlands.
There is a famous piece of trivia surrounding Liverpool Football Club. The second most successful English team in terms of league titles - who could draw level with Manchester United this season - have never won the crown without a Scottish player in their side.
Much was made of this when Andy Robertson signed for the Reds from Hull City in 2017. At that point it had been 27 years since Liverpool had been kings of England, but within three seasons the Premier League flag was flying over Anfield.
Correlation must be causation here, right? Hardly. If players from north of the border were as magical as that, Charlie Adam would’ve ended the title drought rather than playing for one of the worst Reds sides of the modern era.
As is often the case when getting an idea for the newsletter, this one was sparked by seeing a fact or statistic shared by the marvellous Michael Reid. He works for Opta, appears on LFCTV and has a Substack you should really check out.
Reid recently highlighted that Cody Gakpo had become the sixth Dutch player to make at least 100 appearances for Liverpool. Thanks to the presence of him, Ryan Gravenberch and Virgil van Dijk, there has been a flavour of the Netherlands at the club for a while. Pep Lijnders was assistant manager for a long time, before the arrival of Arne Slot intensified the Dutch influence further still.
Seeing that list of players set the mental cogs into action. While there have been occasional gaps, the Reds have been relying on players from the Netherlands since before the turn of the century.
Disregarding Great Britain and Ireland leaves only Spain, with 11, as the one country who have had more internationals who were playing for Liverpool than the Dutch (10). Have they been as important to the Reds as Scots? There haven’t been many trophies won without them in the last quarter century, as we shall see.
In total, 12 players from the Netherlands have represented the club, collectively amassing over 1,300 appearances and 180 goals (per Transfermarkt). They have inevitably not all been successful, with Erik Meijer, Ki-Jana Hoever and Sepp van den Berg leaving little imprint upon the history of Liverpool.
The other nine have certainly played their part to varying extents. The first to join was Sander Westerveld, who arrived two weeks before Meijer in the summer of 1999. Signed from Vitesse Arnhem, he was integral to the first serious success the Reds had enjoyed since the glory days had ended.
Westerveld’s Liverpool career came to what must be one of the most abrupt stops of any footballer at any club ever. His final five appearances for the Reds were:
A UEFA Cup final (won 5-4);
A 4-0 victory at Charlton which secured Champions League football for the first time;
A Charity Shield win against Manchester United;
A Super Cup triumph versus Bayern Munich;
A 2-1 defeat at Bolton.
Make no mistake, the Dutchman was poor in that final game, but talk about a fall from grace. Westerveld had clearly put Gerard Houllier off players from the Netherlands, as the next to arrive at Liverpool did so under Rafa Benitez.
Indeed, the Spaniard signed four men from the country in an 18-month period: Boudewijn ‘Bolo’ Zenden, Jan Kromkamp, Dirk Kuyt and Ryan Babel. As tended to be the case with Benitez’s transfers, the success rate was mixed.
Kromkamp only made 18 appearances for the club in a stay which lasted under eight months. However, as one of them was in the 2006 FA Cup final, he ensured half of Rafa’s major trophy wins featured a Dutchman.
Zenden made a greater impact, albeit without adding anything more significant to his résumé than a European Super Cup or Community Shield. He did though grow in influence over the latter half of his final season with the club, starting the 2007 Champions League final and both legs of the semi-final against Chelsea, one of his former teams.
As for Kuyt, his time with Liverpool may not have produced much silverware but he was part of one of the best Reds teams of the modern era in 2008/09. The most capped Netherlands international with the club, Kuyt scored in the 2012 Carling Cup final to help end a six-year trophy drought.
(I was in the end behind the goal for this moment. A very important goal to me personally, if far from the most significant strike in the great history of the club).
Rafa’s final Dutchman, Babel, passed through the club within the timeframe that Kuyt was there. Signed from Ajax at the age of just 20, he never quite delivered what was hoped. There were flashes of greatness, mostly as a substitute; Babel scored a winner against Manchester United and settled a titanic Champions League clash with Arsenal, for instance.
Four years of Dutchlessness (definitely a real word) commenced when Dirk left. When sons of the Netherlands returned, their importance was not up for debate.
Gini Wijnaldum was the first to arrive under Jürgen Klopp. He stayed for five years, barely missing a match. While sometimes accused of leaving little impact on games at times - he often registered little of note in the statistics - Wijnaldum was a key cog in the midfield machine which enabled the full-backs and front three to torch opposition defences to the ground.
He also scored the goal to break the deadlock in the final game of 2016/17, which got the club back into the Champions League, then netted what proved to be the decisive goal in the semi-final of the same competition the following season. By this time, Virgil van Dijk had joined him at Anfield. Little needs to be said about his value to the team.
Widely considered the best defender in the world through much of his time with the Reds, van Dijk played every single minute of the 2019/20 Premier League campaign. Wijnaldum featured in all-but-one of the games too, as Liverpool became champions of England after a three-decade wait.
Gini left at the conclusion of his contract in 2021. Virgil remained, with Liverpool securing a double dose of Dutch to join him in 2023, in the shape of Cody Gakpo and Ryan Gravenberch. The trio all started the Carabao Cup final earlier this year, helping a very callow Reds side to secure the final silverware of the Klopp era. All three have been in fantastic form since the start of Slot’s tenure too.
Liverpool have won a lot of major trophies since they and Everton secured the two domestic cups in 1995. They have picked up two Champions League crowns, one Premier League title, a UEFA Cup, three FA Cups and a quintet of League Cups.
Of those 12 triumphs, only Istanbul (‘only’) and the 2003 League Cup were secured without a Dutchman featuring in the final or every game of the league season in question. Slot looks likely to secure more trophies for the club, but in some ways he is merely continuing a long line of success for people from Netherlands with Liverpool.
Hup, Holland, Hup!