Virgil van Dijk said that Arne Slot‘s arrival at Liverpool last summer gave the team a “good challenge” after nine years of Jurgen Klopp.
Klopp, who sent a congratulatory message to his former club after it wrapped up the Premier League title last weekend, sprung a huge surprise in January last year when he revealed that he would be leaving Anfield at the end of the 2023-24 season, after an exhilarating near decade-long spell that saw the team win every major honor available to it.
Klopp’s Reds reached three Champions League finals in five years between 2018 and 2022, and also racked up more than 90 points in the Premier League on three separate occasions.
With his achievements at Anfield, Klopp attained the status of being virtually unfireable, and his love for the club and the city meant few people were expecting him to depart of his own accord — not least the players who he had forged incredibly strong bonds with over the years.
Virgil van Dijk was one of those players, having been brought to Anfield by Klopp in January 2018, and in a new interview with GQ he discussed how difficult it was to deal with the news of the German’s departure.
“We only found out Jurgen was leaving a couple days before everyone else,” Van Dijk said. “It was very tough to hear. The day he told us, we were all being called into the dressing room.
“We never do that. We were like, Why are we here? It was a bit of a shock, really. For some of the players in that dressing room, they’ve never even experienced any other manager.”
Van Dijk revealed how Klopp contributed to his leadership qualities, saying: “Confidence is like a flower. Jurgen taught me that. It is delicate. It can be easily crushed. So I know I have to communicate leadership just by someone looking at me.”
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Eleven months on from Klopp’s departure, the Reds are the English champions under Slot, and Van Dijk noted the differences he quickly picked up on between the two managers.
“Arne’s very calm,” Van Dijk said. “It’s different. With Klopp, what you see is what you get. You could come to him with anything. But Arne is more specific.
“He has a clear idea of the way he wants his teams to play, which is different to how we were under Jurgen, which was already obviously super successful… It was a challenge [to adapt to], but it has been a good challenge.”
