Virgil van Dijk is the most heavily loaded player at the start of the upcoming World Cup. This is evident from research by international players’ union FIFPro. The captain of the Dutch national team has played no fewer than 7597 minutes over a period running from July 2021 to October 2022, with which he trumps every other selected player for Qatar. The statistics about Van Dijk come from a report in which the FIFPro sounds the alarm about player overload.
The report not only shows how many playing minutes players have made in total, but also to what extent back to back matches affected. Those are matches with less than five rest days in between. 67 percent of Van Dijk’s matches were of that caliber. The numbers two and three in the ranking of the total number of minutes played, João Cancelo (7347) and Sadio Mané (7266), accounted for percentages of 59 and 70 percent respectively.
Van Dijk is not the only one in the top twenty. Daley Blind is in nineteenth place with 6528 minutes of play, making him one of six players outside the European Big Fivecompetitions on the list. Fellow Ajax player Dusan Tadic is in tenth place with 6721 minutes of play. The FIFPro also investigated which country has accumulated the most minutes. Portugal leads the list with a number of 135,237. The Netherlands (118,820) is number eleven there.
Simon Colosimo, deputy secretary general of FIFPro, hopes lessons will be learned from the report worldwide. “The data highlights the mental and physical pressure placed on the players due to a packed schedule that does not take into account their health and performance. I have no doubt that every team will put on an outstanding show Still, all professional stakeholders in football need to rethink their priorities,” said the director.
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