Andy Robertson Reflects on Emotional Toll of Liverpool's Last Season
Andy Robertson says Liverpool “didn’t care about football” last season as the club tried to navigate the grief of losing Diogo Jota, laying bare the emotional toll of a campaign that unravelled on and off the pitch.
The Scotland captain, who left Anfield for Tottenham this summer, spoke candidly about how Jota’s death in a road accident last July – an incident that also killed his brother, Andre Silva – ripped the heart out of the dressing room and stripped the team of its competitive edge.
“You've just lost one of your best mates in the changing room,” Robertson said on the Stick to Football podcast. “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.
“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 still raw as Robertson recalled how quickly joy turned to devastation.
“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.”
Liverpool entered the season as champions, expected to defend their title with the usual ferocity. Instead, the campaign fell apart. Between September and November they lost nine of 12 games, a collapse that set the tone for a year in which they never truly recovered their rhythm and eventually slipped to fifth place. Head coach Arne Slot paid the price with his job.
Inside the club, Robertson says, the atmosphere was heavy, suffocating. New signings such as Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz walked into a club still in shock.
“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.”
The results told one story. The dressing room, it seems, was living another. A squad used to feeding off intensity and togetherness found itself staring at something far bigger than form, tactics or league tables.
Robertson has spoken before about Jota’s influence on his career and their shared ambitions. Last November, after captaining Scotland to the World Cup, he dedicated the achievement to his former team-mate, explaining that playing at the tournament had been a dream for both of them after missing out in 2022.
Now, with a new chapter beginning at Tottenham and a new era under way at Liverpool, his words offer a stark reminder: some seasons are not defined by trophies or positions, but by the weight of what a team has to carry just to get through them.
