Pat Nevin says he recommended Virgil van Dijk to Chelsea but they didn’t want to pay £10m | OneFootball

Astonishingly, it appears that Chelsea did not want to pay the £10m to sign Virgil van Dijk before he became a world class centre back.

And it also seems to appear that former Chelsea winger Pat Nevin might have mentioned van Dijk to both Chelsea and Manchester United, but he had an interesting response from them both.

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Before 2024, Nevin was working regularly for Chelsea writing a column on the website and also working on Chelsea TV. But for whatever reason, he no longer appears to do any work for the club, but he is often doing interviews speaking about Chelsea and is still a huge fan of the club.

As we know, van Dijk is now THE best centre back in the world, in my humble opinion, but it needed some clubs to take a chance on him at the time, and it was Southampton who did that in the end.

Nevin is also Scottish, so he has a lot of links to Scottish football and follows the leagues over there closely, and that is why he knew all about van Dijk when he was playing for Celtic.

Chelsea didn’t want to pay £10m for the defender

Imagine if Chelsea signed him?

It looks like Nevin is saying that Chelsea, and other clubs, did not want to pay the required £10m to sign van Dijk from Celtric at the time, and he went to Southampton instead.

In words cited on X yesterday, Nevin said:

“I remember being told by Manchester United and Chelsea that Virgil van Dijk made too many mistakes – but that’s because he was bored.

He ended up at Southampton and then Liverpool but teams didn’t want to pay the £10million when he was at Celtic.”

I bet Chelsea regret not taking that risk now!