Mitchell Dijks Opens Up About Weight Struggles and Career Reflections
Mitchell Dijks laughs as he says it, but the numbers are brutal.
“I weighed 104 kilos. When I'm fit, I normally weigh 92 kilos,” he admits on ESPN's Transfer Deadline Show. “There were quite a few kilos on me.”
On live television, a 33-year-old former Ajax left-back calmly detailing how he turned up at 104 kilograms. Not in a tell-all documentary years after retirement, but now, while he’s out of contract and looking for work. It’s the kind of honesty football rarely hears — and the kind that can come back to bite.
Milan van Dongen, hosting the show, almost refuses to believe it. This has to be a joke, he suggests. Dijks shakes it off.
“No, it's serious. I really was quite chubby,” he replies, deadpan. No excuses. No spin.
The story takes shape in Vietnam, at Nam Dinh FC, where Dijks last played. Hans Kraay junior leans in, baffled, and asks what exactly he was doing over there.
“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.”
Seven kilometres. For a modern wing-back, it sounds like half a shift. The contrast with the demands of European football could hardly be sharper, and Dijks doesn’t try to dress it up. He paints a picture of a slower rhythm, heavier plates, and a body quietly drifting away from elite condition.
The reaction outside the studio is swift and ruthless. Clips of the interview land on social media and start to circulate. One user on X doesn’t bother with nuance: “Hilarious, man, a player throwing away his own career,” he writes, summing up a harsher public verdict.
Inside Dutch football circles, the tone is more measured but no less concerned. De Telegraaf reporter Jeroen Kapteijns sees the value of such openness, but questions the timing.
“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 running through Dijks’ appearance. On one hand, a rare, unfiltered look at what can happen when a player leaves the European treadmill and steps into a league where the pace drops and the temptations rise. On the other, a defender in his thirties openly confessing to losing control of his fitness, right when he needs to convince someone to trust him again.
Dijks, though, is not talking like a man desperate to come home and repair his image in the Eredivisie. At 33, he’s clear: he wants another adventure, preferably in Asia. A return to the Netherlands is not a necessity.
He has played for Ajax, Vitesse, Fortuna Sittard and more. He has known full stadiums, title races, the sharp end of European football. Now he is a free agent, carrying both that CV and this brutally honest interview into his next negotiation.
Some clubs will see a warning sign. Others might see something else: a player who has already confronted his own worst professional mistake on live television.
The next contract will show which view wins.
