Mitchell Dijks Opens Up About Weight Struggles and Future Plans

Mitchell Dijks doesn’t bother with the usual football clichés. Live on ESPN’s Transfer Deadline Show, the 33-year-old wing-back simply laid it all out.

“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,” he admitted, almost laughing at himself. “There were quite a few kilos on me.”

The studio fell silent for a moment. Then came the disbelief.

Presenter Milan van Dongen stared at him, convinced he was being wound up. A former Ajax, Vitesse and Fortuna Sittard left-back, turning up at 104 kilos? It sounded like a joke.

“No, it's serious. I really was quite chubby,” Dijks replied, deadpan. No escape, no excuses.

Vietnam, pasta and seven kilometres

The story behind those extra 12 kilos lies in Vietnam, at Nam Dinh FC, where Dijks last played. Hans Kraay junior, equally stunned, wanted to know what on earth he had been doing there.

“The intensity there is all a bit lower,” Dijks explained. “But you just eat good pasta there. And then during matches you only run seven kilometres.”

For a modern wing-back used to bombing up and down the flank, seven kilometres is a stroll. Dijks turned that reality into a punchline, but the implications were serious enough.

His honesty lit up social media. Not with sympathy, but with scorn.

“Hilarious, man, a player throwing away his own career,” one user wrote on X, summing up the harsh verdict many were quick to deliver.

De Telegraaf reporter Jeroen Kapteijns struck a different note. He praised the openness, but raised the obvious question: how smart is this level of candour when you’re out of contract and looking for a new club?

“It's honest and sincere,” he noted, “but whether this is the wisest interview when you're looking for a club now?”

No regrets, just the next move

Dijks is currently without a club, his Vietnamese chapter closed, his weight battle public. Yet he didn’t sound like a man desperate to run back to the safety of the Eredivisie.

Now 33, he’s aiming for another adventure in Asia. No urgent need to return to the Netherlands. No attempt to polish the story.

He has laid his numbers, his mistakes and his ambitions on the table. The question now is simple: which club is willing to bet that the next version of Mitchell Dijks looks a lot more like the 92-kilo full-back than the 104-kilo tourist?