Not messing around: Liverpool chiefs will attend to ‘A1 priority’ as soon as the season ends

Liverpool’s powerbrokers intend to get straight to work on a ‘priority’ task as soon as the 2023/24 season is over.

According to Football Insider, the club will hold contract talks with Virgil van Dijk at the immediate end of the current campaign, which concludes for the Reds in 13 days’ time.

Negotiations are set to commence within a week of the season finale at home to Wolves, with a ‘well-placed’ source at LFC indicating that tying down the captain’s future is the ‘A1 priority’ for Michael Edwards and Richard Hughes.

The centre-back is deemed an ‘irreplaceable’ player at Liverpool, and his existing deal now has little more than a year to run.

Should these reports prove accurate, then Edwards and Hughes clearly aren’t messing around when it comes to boxing off Van Dijk’s future quite early in what’ll be a summer of significant transition at Liverpool with Jurgen Klopp leaving.

The player himself has said that he intends to be ‘part of’ the immediate future at Anfield, which serves as an open invitation for club chiefs to dive into contract negotiations and dispel any lingering doubts over the captain’s status.

Despite the Reds being on a head-scratching run of 10 home games without a clean sheet in the Premier League, it’s been a redemptive campaign for the 32-year-old, who’s been immense in the team’s resurgence since last summer, with Champions League qualification safely assured with matches to spare.

Even with the responsibility of captaining his country at Euro 2024 in a few weeks’ time, it seems that Van Dijk is ready to sit down with Liverpool chiefs and hopefully come to a swift agreement which’ll see him remain an integral part of the team for another few years.