Why Rushing Van Dijk, Gakpo and Alisson Back Would Be a Mistake

Pre-season stories usually fall into one of two categories: manufactured panic about a player being behind schedule, or reassuring detail that gets ignored because it is not dramatic enough. The latest update on Virgil van Dijk, Cody Gakpo and Alisson Becker firmly belongs in the second group, and we think it deserves more attention than it is getting.

A Staggered Return by Design

According to Lewis Steele of the Daily Mail, Liverpool are deliberately phasing the returns of all three players after their summer commitments rather than forcing them straight back into full training alongside the rest of the squad. Andoni Iraola addressed it directly last week, explaining that Van Dijk and Gakpo would begin their pre-season with a smaller group at the club’s Kirkby base instead of travelling out to join the main party in the United States. Given how much football Van Dijk has played for club and country over the last twelve months, and the personal circumstances behind Gakpo’s later start, that looks less like caution for its own sake and more like a manager who has actually thought about workload before making a decision.

Timing That Still Works

Neither player made the trip for the Wrexham friendly, and both are targeting the Monaco game at Anfield on August 9 as their effective starting point, which leaves a sensible runway to build fitness without anyone cutting corners along the way. Alisson’s situation follows a similar logic. He is expected back at Kirkby later this week or early next after Brazil’s World Cup exit, having played every minute of the tournament on top of thirty five appearances in an injury hit domestic campaign. There is no reason to treat that as anything other than routine man management, and supporters shouldn’t need convincing that a goalkeeper of his standing deserves that kind of care.

The Squad Isn’t Short in the Meantime

It also helps that Liverpool are not short of senior options while this plays out. Ryan Gravenberch has already been working alongside Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak in Chicago, which gives Iraola plenty to work with before the returning trio are fully integrated back into first team sessions. None of this reads like a squad scrambling to cover gaps. It reads like a club sequencing a genuinely busy summer properly, which is not something we could always say with confidence in recent years.

Our Take

This is the sort of story that should reassure supporters rather than trigger a fresh transfer panic. There was speculation over the summer linking Alisson away from Anfield, and none of it ever squared with how the club or the player have actually behaved since. Protecting Van Dijk’s body after another gruelling year, giving Gakpo the space his situation clearly required, and letting Alisson return on his own timeline are all small decisions individually, but together they add up to something bigger: a coaching staff that values preparation over spectacle. After the disjointed stretches of last season, that kind of calm is exactly what this squad needs heading into a new one, and it is worth noticing even when there is no drama attached to it.

There is a wider point here too. Managing a European Cup winning squad through a summer with a World Cup and multiple international commitments folded in is genuinely difficult, and clubs get it wrong more often than they get it right. Bringing players back too early invites injuries once the season starts to bite. Bringing them back too late risks match sharpness by the time the fixtures come thick and fast in September and October. Splitting the difference by staggering the group, rather than treating every senior player the same regardless of what they have just been through, suggests a level of planning that has sometimes been missing at Anfield in recent windows. If Iraola keeps making these kinds of unglamorous, sensible calls through the rest of pre-season, the loud transfer headlines will start to matter a little less than the quiet ones.