Mitchell Dijks on His Weight Struggles in Vietnam
Mitchell Dijks leans back in his chair on ESPN’s Transfer Deadline Show and drops a line you rarely hear from an active professional.
“I weighed 104 kilos.”
No excuses. No softening. Just a blunt confession from a 33-year-old left-back without a club, talking about how badly things went during his spell at Nam Dinh FC in Vietnam.
“When I'm fit, I normally weigh 92 kilos,” Dijks says. “There were quite a few kilos on me.”
The studio goes quiet for a moment. Presenter Milan van Dongen looks at him as if he’s heard the punchline to a joke that never comes. He even suggests Dijks must be pulling his leg.
“No, it's serious. I really was quite chubby,” Dijks replies, deadpan. The former Ajax, Vitesse and Fortuna Sittard defender knows exactly how it sounds on live television. He says it anyway.
Vietnam, pasta and seven kilometres
Hans Kraay junior, sitting alongside him, can’t hide his surprise and pushes the conversation towards the obvious question: what on earth happened in Vietnam?
“The intensity there is all a bit lower,” Dijks explains. “But you just eat good pasta there. And then during matches you only run seven kilometres.”
It’s an astonishing picture: a modern wing-back, a position built on lung-busting runs and repeat sprints, describing a league where the tempo drops, the pasta piles up and the GPS numbers stay low. For a player whose game once relied on power and drive down the flank, the combination proved brutal.
The honesty lands with a thud across social media. Clips of the interview start doing the rounds, the quotes pulled out and shared with a mix of laughter and disbelief.
“Hilarious, man, a player throwing away his own career,” one user posts on X, summing up the harsher verdicts flying around.
De Telegraaf reporter Jeroen Kapteijns strikes a more measured tone but raises the same underlying concern. “It's honest and sincere,” he notes, “but whether this is the wisest interview when you're looking for a club now?”
That’s the tension at the heart of Dijks’ appearance: the rare, refreshing candour of a professional footballer versus the cold reality of a transfer market that rarely rewards vulnerability.
A career at a crossroads
Dijks is currently a free agent, his contract in Vietnam behind him, his future undecided. At 33, he is not finished, at least not in his own mind. He talks openly about wanting another adventure in Asia. A return to the Netherlands? Not a necessity.
He has played for some of the biggest and most traditional clubs in Dutch football. Ajax. Vitesse. Fortuna Sittard. He has felt the weight of expectation at the top and the grind lower down. He knows how quickly the game moves on from players who let their standards slip.
That is what makes his on-air confession so striking. Most players in his position would gloss over the details, blame circumstances, talk about “different conditions” or “a period of adjustment”. Dijks goes the other way. He puts a number on the scales, admits he was “testing” his fitness and concedes, with a shrug, that it went badly wrong.
For some sporting directors, that clip will be a red flag. For others, it might be something else: a sign of a player who has taken his hit, owned it, and is now willing to do the hard work to put things right.
Dijks is betting that somewhere in Asia, a club will see the value in that kind of honesty—and believe that the next time he steps on the scales, the numbers will tell a very different story.
