Erik Meijer played 27 games for Liverpool and scored two goals, both on the same night at Boothferry Park. On paper, that is not much of a Liverpool career.
But numbers have never told the story of the big Dutchman. He ran, he chased, he shouted and he put himself about, and the supporters loved him for it. In 2006, six years after he left, the fans voted him in at No. 99 in the club’s 100 Players Who Shook The Kop.
A butcher’s son from Limburg
Meijer was born in Meerssen, in the far south of the Netherlands, on 2 August 1969. His father ran a butcher’s shop, and before football took over, young Erik trained as a butcher himself.
He began with his local club, SV Meerssen, moved into the MVV youth set-up and made his professional debut for Fortuna Sittard. His first full contract was with Antwerp in Belgium, but he played his football on loan at Eindhoven and back at Fortuna before he really made his mark at MVV Maastricht. His goals there earned him a move to PSV Eindhoven in 1993, the year he won his only Netherlands cap, in a 6-0 win over San Marino on 24 March.
Making his name in Germany
In 1995 he moved to the Bundesliga with Uerdingen, and a year later Bayer Leverkusen signed him. Standing 6ft 2in and strong in the air, he became a regular in a Leverkusen side that finished as Bundesliga runners-up in 1996-97 and again in 1998-99.
In the summer of 1999 Gérard Houllier was building a new Liverpool, and he wanted a big target man. For Meijer, a Liverpool fan since he was a boy, it was a dream move. He arrived on a free transfer from Leverkusen in July 1999, one of a wave of summer signings that included Sami Hyypiä, Stéphane Henchoz, Didi Hamann, Vladimír Šmicer, Sander Westerveld and Titi Camara.
Off the mark at Hull
Six of those new boys made their debuts on the opening day at Hillsborough on 7 August 1999, Meijer among them. He came off the bench in the 89th minute of a 2-1 win over Sheffield Wednesday.
His big night came on 14 September 1999, in a League Cup second-round first leg at Third Division Hull City. Danny Murphy scored his first goals for the club with two in the first half, and soon after the break Meijer made it 3-0.
Hull pulled one back, but with a quarter of an hour left Meijer ran on to a through ball from Vegard Heggem and scored his second. Steve Staunton added a fifth near the end and Liverpool won 5-1. It was also the night Djimi Traoré made his Liverpool debut.
Up against Owen and Fowler
Those were the only goals Meijer scored for Liverpool. He played 24 times in the league across that season and the next, with Michael Owen and Robbie Fowler ahead of him. When Emile Heskey arrived from Leicester in March 2000, his chances grew even thinner, and Meijer has always been honest enough to say that all three were better players than him.
What he never lacked was effort. Jamie Carragher summed him up: “He was just a great fella to have around the place and a great fella to have on the pitch when he did play, a real team player who’d really put himself about. He was just unfortunate at the time that we had so many good strikers and he was probably No.4 choice before he got the chance to move on.”
After three appearances off the bench early in 2000-01, he went on loan to David Moyes’s Preston North End in October 2000. In December he was released by Liverpool and joined Hamburg.
A party in Dortmund
Meijer was still a Hamburg player when Liverpool reached the UEFA Cup final against Alavés in Dortmund in May 2001. He made the trip with a couple of friends, who were all wearing Liverpool shirts with his name on the back. Once the travelling Reds worked out who was with them, that was that. He spent the afternoon before kick-off in the square, drinking and singing with the fans.
It was exactly the kind of thing that turns a fringe striker into a cult hero.
Captain of Aachen
At Hamburg he scored 11 goals in 58 Bundesliga games, and in 2003 he moved to second-tier Alemannia Aachen, close to where he grew up. It turned out to be the best spell of his later career.
He was made captain, and in 2004 he led Aachen all the way to the German Cup final in Berlin. On the way, his 81st-minute header beat Bayern Munich 2-1 in the quarter-final on 4 February 2004. In the final they lost 3-2 to Werder Bremen, with Meijer scoring Aachen’s second in stoppage time. Because Bremen had also won the Bundesliga, Aachen took their place in the UEFA Cup.
Two years later, in 2006, Aachen won promotion to the Bundesliga for the first time in 36 years. Meijer, by then 36 himself, had already decided that season would be his last, and he went out on a high.
On the screen
He stayed close to the game. He had a short spell as Aachen’s assistant coach, and from December 2009 he was the club’s sporting director. He also became a patron of AFC Liverpool, the club formed by Liverpool supporters.
These days he is a familiar face as a pundit on Sky Germany, covering the Bundesliga, sometimes alongside his old Liverpool team-mate Didi Hamann.
Once a Red
Meijer was never going to be Liverpool’s first-choice striker. But he gave everything every time he pulled on the shirt, and he never stopped being a Red.
Two goals at Hull, a lot of hard running and a famous afternoon in Dortmund. Not many players have done so much with so few games.
