Why Virgil van Dijk is Brilliantly Boring

MLB star Francisco Lindor and Virgil van Dijk have little in common at face value. They play their sports the same way though.

It’s funny how things work out. How the lines of your life can cross before you even knew they existed.

Francisco Lindor, shortstop for the Cleveland Indians (now Guardians) baseball team, visited Liverpool FC in December 2018. It was a promotional crossover thing for New Balance. He met Jürgen Klopp and Sadio Mané, posed for the usual pictures, touched the sign in the tunnel. All the regular stuff.

Lindor also got to watch a game at Anfield. Not just any game, a Merseyside derby. And not just any Merseyside derby either.

He was at the Divock Origi derby.

With the Belgian scoring six goals against Everton, more than versus any other club for the Reds, a number of matches might feasibly fit that description. But there is only one clash with the Toffees befitting that name. Lindor was present for the 1-0 win which was secured thanks to a ludicrous goal in the 96th minute. It looks like he had a fine time.

About four months later, the 2019 Major League Baseball season began. It was the point at which I began following the sport seriously, having had a vague interest for years before (thanks to Moneyball, unsurprisingly). I picked New York Mets to be my team. Overshadowed by a behemoth in the same city and last title winners in the mid-1980s, they are MLB’s Everton.

Or they were. The team was taken over by Steve Cohen in 2020, a fan of the team who is estimated to be worth around $21bn. Probably more since that sentence was typed. Lindor was the first big acquisition of the new era, signing a 10-year, $341m contract. In football terms, it’s Robert Lewandowski’s current salary for a decade. Nice work if you can get it.

The Mets’ shortstop is flamboyant. He dyes his hair, has colourful cleats and custom made gloves. Lindor takes fashion very seriously. But he also aspires to be boring, with comments on the matter immediately bringing to my mind thoughts of Virgil van Dijk.

It was his shot that looped onto the Everton crossbar in 2018, enabling Origi to score after a comical misjudgment by Jordan Pickford. The lines of my sporting interests crossed in advance of me becoming a Mets fan, years before Lindor joined the team.