Why Southampton Could Sell Virgil Van Dijk to Liverpool

You are an emotional person. And the constant push and pull of the transfer window messes your stuff up something fierce. You’re high and then you’re low and up and down we go. Now the malaise is setting in and you find that concerning the ongoing saga over Virgil van Dijk you are both deeply interested and unquestionably spent. Every new churn of that butter is another moment you realize that the exhaustive churning will continue until deadline day. Twists and turns. New information. Updated scenarios. Reported bids. Floated swaps. Enormous blunders. We’ve seen them all as Liverpool have attempted to bring the player in this summer.

Today’s new twist spins out from reports by Matt Hughes in The Times. Hughes states that Southampton’s new owner Jisheng Gao will tell manager Mauricio Pellegrino that he won’t be getting any money this summer to buy new players. The Saints will have to sell if they want the funds to bring in anybody new in the next couple of weeks.

“Gao’s backers are demanding a return on their investment,” writes Hughes, “and will not grant him a transfer budget so the club will continue to operate as it has done throughout the Liebherr family’s ownership.”

Southampton will stress that this changes nothing about their stance on keeping Virgil van Dijk at the club. But an injection of £70million could very quickly change the recruitment landscape on the south coast if Pellegrino finds it acceptable to lose their club captain if he can get three or four players in on that fee.

Right now, van Dijk is still training away from the first team, still awaiting his move to a Champions League club. But his manager is still publicly insisting that the Dutch center half will eventually return to the fold.

“The Virgil situation, nothing has changed,” said Pellegrino. “It is the same like last week. I don’t have anything to say.”