The Bundesliga club's former assistant coach Hendrie Kruzen has suggested BVB were in talks to sign the Dutch centre-back in 2017
Kruzen has been assistant to Peter Bosz at Maccabi Tel-Aviv, Ajax, Dortmund and now Leverkusen, with the pair's tenure at BVB cut short after just five months at the helm having taken over from Thomas Tuchel.
And in discussing what went wrong, Kruzen suggested that too many players did as they pleased and that a failure to be able to recruit effectively didn't help the situation.