Andy Robertson Reflects on Loss of Diogo Jota and Its Impact on Liverpool
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 with striking honesty about how the loss of his former team‑mate and close friend tore through the dressing room and bled into a campaign that unravelled on the pitch.
‘What’s the point?’
Jota died in a road accident last July, a crash that also killed his brother, Andre Silva. The news shattered a club that had begun the season as champions and ended it a shadow of itself.
“You've just lost one of your best mates in the changing room,” Robertson said on the Stick to Football podcast. The left-back, normally one of the game’s most relentless competitors, described a group stripped of its usual edge.
“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 said. “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.”
The pain was raw and personal. Robertson revealed he had been at Jota’s wedding just days before the tragedy.
“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.”
A club in mourning
Liverpool’s season never truly recovered. A team expected to defend their title instead lurched through a brutal autumn, losing nine of 12 games between September and November. The slide cost head coach Arne Slot his job, and the club eventually limped home in fifth.
Inside the dressing room, Robertson said, the emotional toll was overwhelming. The standards that had defined Liverpool’s rise under pressure simply slipped away under a different kind of weight.
“What we went through, it was horrendous,” he 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.”
Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz were among the players arriving into that turmoil last summer, walking into a club still reeling, trying to adapt while the core of the squad grieved.
A dream left unfinished
Robertson had spoken about Jota before, in more hopeful times. Last November, after captaining Scotland to World Cup qualification, he recalled how it had been a shared dream for both of them to reach the tournament after missing out in 2022.
That dream now belongs to one man instead of two.
The statistics of Liverpool’s season will sit in the record books: the defeats, the fifth-place finish, the sacking of Slot. The story Robertson tells runs deeper than that – a reminder that even in the elite game, there are seasons when the table can’t explain what a team has really been through.
