Virgil van Dijk is still not having a contract offer made to him, even though this is the last season of his deal with Liverpool.

Liverpool beat Sevilla 4-1 at Anfield on Sunday, with Luis Diaz scoring twice and Diogo Jota and teenager Trey Nyoni also scoring. It was Liverpool’s fourth straight win in front of a crowd to start the Arne Slot era.

It was Van Dijk’s first minutes under Slot since coming back from a three-week break after the European Championship. Plus, the back says there’s still no sign of a new deal at the club.

When asked about the problem, Van Dijk groaned and laughed a little because it’s something that people ask him almost every week during the club season. He then said, “There is no change right now.”

It’s a problem for Liverpool and their new sporting director, Richard Hughes. Hughes hasn’t made a first-team deal since moving to Liverpool from Bournemouth in June and starting his job as sporting director.

Both star forward Mohamed Salah and vice-captain and local boy Trent Alexander-Arnold have only 11 months left on their contracts. It means that three of Liverpool’s best players will not be at the club this time next year if nothing is done.

In the spring, Van Dijk said that he wanted to wait to promise his future to the club until he saw how things went with the new coaching staff. When asked about his first thoughts on Slot, he said, “So far, so good.”

“Of course, we do a lot of work at the training ground, both tactically and physically to stay in shape.” We didn’t have another big test until today. I think we’re ready for the real thing. We hope to be able to show that too, because it will be hard to go to Ipswich on Saturday.

“We talk to each other and have a lot of tactical meetings where we talk about how to make things better.” The little things matter a lot if we want to get better at our game, which I think is what we all want. We all need to show that we want it, and so far, so good.

Van Dijk was asked what has changed since Slot took over and said, “We focus a lot on the build-up. Our center-backs have a lot more responsibility with and without the ball.” But it’s clear that our midfielders are also very important.

“And I think we try to figure out patterns in what the other team does to us.” I think you can tell from the way we play that the good parts of the game are coming up. It’s clear that they still need work, and we need to be able to adapt.

When they go man-v-man, you have to think about overplaying that first and second line and then run to get the second ball. That’s what we tried to do. But I think we need to find the right mix in that area. You can see the patterns, though.

When England beat Netherlands in the Euros semifinals, Ollie Watkins scored a last-second goal to win for England in Germany. Van Dijk said it hurt a lot to lose. “I took three weeks off, and I think the first week was the hardest for me.”

“We had just lost the semi-final to England, which hurt a lot, and you’re going to think about the whole year and how we played as a team with Liverpool in particular.”

“Towards the end, we were lacking experience and quality. We also had some injuries and other things that didn’t go our way, but hopefully we can learn from that and use it this season to be more consistent in the last part of the season.”

There’s more to it than just playing the games. How you handle it when you’re not playing is also very important and not easy. Everyone will think back on last year. I know I did. I’m excited about this season in many ways. Let’s see what happens.

I agree that we should make some deals based on how long the season is going to last, but I think they are too busy to talk about it. There is no doubt in my mind that the club will do the right thing and put together the best team possible to fight in every game.