Andy Robertson has laid bare the depth of Liverpool’s anguish last season, admitting the squad “didn’t care about football” in the months after the death of Diogo Jota.
The Scotland captain, who left Anfield for Tottenham in the summer, spoke candidly about how the loss of his close friend and former team-mate tore through the club and stripped away the edge that had defined Jürgen Klopp’s side at their peak.
“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. “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.”
Jota died in a road accident last July, a crash that also claimed the life of his brother, Andre Silva. The news hit Liverpool like a thunderbolt. A title defence that had begun with optimism quickly sagged 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?” Robertson recalled. “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.”
One detail still haunts him.
“The week before he died I was at his wedding,” Robertson said. “That’s one of the most difficult things you’ll ever go through. Seeing him on the happiest day of his life and then the next week you’re seeing his family torn apart.”
The emotional shock did not stay confined to the dressing room. It seeped into performances, preparation, the day-to-day rhythm of a squad expected to compete for everything. Liverpool, who started the campaign as champions, unravelled between September and November, losing nine of 12 league games and tumbling out of contention. They eventually finished fifth, a collapse that cost head coach Arne Slot his job.
Inside the club, the mood was far from the usual post-title hangover narrative. It was something darker.
“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.”
Players such as Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz arrived into a squad still reeling, tasked with justifying hefty fees while their new team-mates were struggling simply to get through the week. Results dipped, criticism grew, but inside the camp the priority had shifted to something more basic: coping.
This was not the first time Robertson had spoken publicly about Jota. Last November, after captaining Scotland to World Cup qualification, he referenced the forward again, explaining how both had dreamt of reaching the tournament together after missing out in 2022. One made it. One never got the chance.
For Robertson, that gap — between what should have been and what actually happened — still defines last season more than any league table or sacking ever could.
