Neil Lennon has slammed Liverpool’s recruitment team for not being alive to the possibility of signing Virgil van Dijk years earlier.
The Hibernian manager has insisted that the Merseyside giants could have saved themselves £65million if they had bought the giant Dutchman straight from Celtic a few years earlier.
Lennon brought Van Dijk from Groningen in Holland to the Glasgow giants for £1.5million and could not believe how reluctant Liverpool and the other elite Premier League clubs were to sign him.
“Big club scouts would ring me and I said: ‘What are you thinking about?’ What are you waiting on?’ Lennon said, as quoted by the Scottish Sun.
“Some of the answers I got back were absolutely baffling. I just could not believe what they were waiting on. Southampton did the right thing. They came in and did the business.
“Van Dijk hasn’t changed that much. People say he’s got better. Well, he was like that when he was 22. Now he’s captain of his country.
“In the end Liverpool have won a watch, maybe an expensive one, but it’s one they could afford. It’s half the money they got for Philippe Coutinho, and they are in the Champions League Final.
“So Virgil is halfway to paying his fee back already. If they win, it might cover it.
“But they could have had him for £10-12million two or three years before if they had done their jobs properly.”
OPINION
Liverpool technical director Michael Edwards and his staff have bathed in glory in the last season or two after convincing Jurgen Klopp to sign Mohamed Salah from Roma, as well as pushing through outstanding captures such as Andy Robertson and Sadio Mane. Van Dijk has also been a huge hit at Anfield since his arrival in January, but it does not reflect well on Edwards, who has been at Liverpool since 2011 and was appointed technical director in 2015, that the centre-back the club needed for so long was ripping it up at Celtic and available for the bargain of the century. The same goes for other elite Premier League clubs, whose recruitment teams, like those of Liverpool, had Van Dijk on their radar but they held back on pushing the button. In an era of extensive data analysis and statistics, it is a mystery scouts can overlook what is staring them so blatantly in the face. Clearly, Van Dijk is a brilliant defender and one of the best in Europe. But Liverpool and others shouldn’t have needed to pay £75million to discover that, given he had already been in British football for four years.
