Van den Berg: My gratitude to Van Dijk after difficult Liverpool start | OneFootball

Brentford defender Sepp van den Berg has detailed his difficult start to life at Liverpool when he moved to Merseyside as a 17-year-old, available to read in the Bournemouth programme this weekend.

The centre-back moved to England from Holland as a teenager, living alone, with his friends and family over 300 miles away. He discussed this and the other hidden challenges that come with being a professional footballer.

“I know I’m very privileged. I’m living the dream,” Van den Berg acknowledged.

“But it’s not always as easy as it looks. For example, when I first moved to Liverpool as a 17-year-old... looking back, it was very difficult. I had some tough times there.

“At first, I was training with the first team and everything was amazing, it couldn’t get any better. My dreams came true: I was playing for one of the biggest teams in the world.

“But then I got dropped into the reserves and people started to forget about me a little bit.

“And then you come home… I lived alone, I had no one to talk to. That was hard for me.

“I struggled with that quite a lot because I was used to being surrounded by a big family where there’s a lot going on and there was always lots of people around me.

“I didn’t talk to anyone about my feelings at the start, which made things really hard. I was just in my own head, coming home and just staring at the walls with nothing to do."

But, fortunately, a fellow Dutch defender, Virgil van Dijk, was there to support him - on and off the pitch - during a difficult time as a youngster living in a new country.

“Van Dijk made me feel really welcome,” Van den Berg stated.

“I remember, on my first day, he said to the kit man, ‘Make sure his place in the dressing room is next to mine’ and it was those small things that made me feel more at home.

“From a footballing perspective, it was just watching him in training and in matches, he was the best defender in the world at that stage… those moments will always stay with me.

“Watching what he does, how he plays, how he speaks, how he leads the team - to see that up close was priceless.”

You can read the full Long Read with Van den Berg, where he talks through the psychological toll injuries take, the pressure he places on himself and the mental hurdles he’s had to overcome.