Mitchell Dijks Admits He Let Himself Go: A Candid Look at His Career

Mitchell Dijks leans back in his chair on ESPN’s Transfer Deadline Show and drops a line you rarely hear from an active professional: he let himself go. Badly.

“I was testing my fitness. But that didn't quite go well. I weighed 104 kilos. When I'm fit, I normally weigh 92 kilos. There were quite a few kilos on me,” the 33-year-old wing-back says, matter-of-factly.

For a moment, presenter Milan van Dongen thinks he’s being played. A former Ajax left-back, a one-time Eredivisie mainstay, turning up 12 kilos over his playing weight? It sounds like a punchline.

Dijks doesn’t blink.

“No, it's serious. I really was quite chubby,” he replies, owning the word before anyone else can throw it at him.

This is the fallout of his stint at Nam Dinh FC in Vietnam, a move that barely made headlines at the time but is making plenty now. Not for his performances, but for what he admits happened to his body and his standards.

Hans Kraay junior, sitting alongside in the studio, wants to know how a professional ends up that far off the mark. What was he actually doing 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 a brutal contrast to the image of the modern full-back: high-octane, relentless, living off GPS data and marginal gains. Dijks paints a different picture – slower sessions, shorter distances, heavier plates.

The clip races around social media. Not as a heartwarming tale of honesty, but as a cautionary snapshot of a career veering off course.

“Hilarious, man, a player throwing away his own career,” one user writes on X, capturing the harsher side of the reaction.

Others are less mocking and more puzzled. How does a player with Ajax, Vitesse and Fortuna Sittard on his CV sit in a studio, out of contract, openly talking about being “quite chubby” in his last job?

De Telegraaf reporter Jeroen Kapteijns voices what many in the game are thinking: “It's honest and sincere, but whether this is the wisest interview when you're looking for a club now?”

That’s the tension running through Dijks’ appearance. His candour is refreshing in a sport where players are trained to speak in clichés and safe lines. It is also potentially damaging in an industry where perception can matter as much as performance data.

Clubs want to believe a free agent is hungry. Not that he has been eating too much pasta and cruising through seven-kilometre outings.

Yet Dijks does not sound like a man ready to drift into retirement. At 33, he is between clubs, but not between ambitions. He’s clear: his next step does not have to be in the Netherlands. He is eyeing another adventure in Asia.

Whether sporting directors in that part of the world see a risk or a reclamation project is another matter. They have now heard the story from his own mouth. The weight. The lower intensity. The self-deprecating humour.

What they decide next will show how much room there still is in modern football for a player who tells the unvarnished truth about where he went wrong – and believes he still has time to put it right.