Andy Robertson Reflects on Liverpool's Grief and Loss of Diogo Jota
Andy Robertson says Liverpool “didn’t care about football” last season as the club tried to function through the grief of losing Diogo Jota, laying bare the emotional toll of a year that unravelled on and off the pitch.
The Scotland captain, now at Tottenham, spoke candidly about the impact of Jota’s death in a road accident last July, which also claimed the life of his brother, Andre Silva. Inside Liverpool’s dressing room, he said, the season was played out in the shadow of a tragedy that left the squad “heartbroken”.
“You've just lost one of your best mates in the changing room,” Robertson said on the Stick to Football podcast, in a clip released this week.
The words land heavily, because they explain more than just a dip in form. They explain a team running on empty.
He described a group stripped of its usual edge, a side that had started the campaign as champions but quickly lost its bite. “All footballers, we have that edge don't we? And I think last season we lost the edge, when I look back on it now,” he admitted.
The competitive instinct that had driven Liverpool to titles and European nights under the lights at Anfield faded under the weight of grief. “We lost that determination a little bit because there were times where we were going like, well what's the point? Look at what Jota's family are going through, look at his kids. We were grieving. He was a team-mate, he was a friend. It was incredibly difficult.”
For Robertson, the pain carried a particularly brutal twist. “The week before he died I was at his wedding. That's one of the most difficult things you'll ever go through,” he said. “Seeing him on the happiest day of his life and then the next week you're seeing his family torn apart.”
The shock did not just hit the established core of the squad. It also shaped the environment that greeted Liverpool’s new arrivals last summer, including Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz, who walked into a club trying to process the unthinkable.
“What we went through, it was horrendous,” Robertson said. “The new signings, they're coming into a club that is heartbroken and that's where I felt sorry for those guys. They'd signed for big money and it took them months to settle in because we didn't care about football. That was the truth of it.”
On the outside, the story of Liverpool’s season was told in numbers: nine defeats in 12 league games between September and November, a title defence collapsing, and a slide to fifth place. Arne Slot paid with his job as head coach, dismissed at the end of a campaign that never truly recovered from its emotional rupture.
Inside the dressing room, though, the narrative was different. It was about trying to train, to compete, to perform, while a friend’s empty peg sat a few feet away.
Robertson had spoken about Jota before, in more hopeful times. Last November, after captaining Scotland to the World Cup, he recalled how both of them had dreamed of reaching the tournament after missing out in 2022. That shared ambition will now belong to Robertson alone.
For Liverpool, the question is no longer why last season went wrong. Robertson has answered that. The real test is what comes next: how a club that lost far more than a football match finds a new edge without ever forgetting the teammate who isn’t there.
