Andy Robertson Reflects on Liverpool's Loss of Edge After Jota's Tragic Death
Andy Robertson admits Liverpool “lost their edge” last season – and says the death of Diogo Jota left a dressing room that simply stopped caring about football.
The Scotland captain opened up on the scale of the trauma inside the club after Jota was killed in a car crash in July 2025, along with his brother Andre Silva, as they travelled across Spain on their way back to England for the start of pre-season.
Liverpool were reigning Premier League champions, rolling into a new era under Arne Slot. On paper, they were set up to defend their title. In reality, Robertson says, the game itself suddenly felt irrelevant.
“It’s difficult to describe or talk about, really, because what we went through, it was horrendous,” he told the Stick to Football Podcast on Disney+. “Say if I'm talking about the new signings, they're coming into a club that is heartbroken.
“They’re trying, and that’s where I felt so sorry for these guys because they’d signed and they were signing for big money and all that, if I’m talking about football. It took them months to settle in because we didn’t care, we didn’t care about football.
“That was the truth of it. We didn’t care about football because you’ve just lost one of your best mates in the changing room.”
A broken dressing room
Robertson painted a picture of a squad that had gone from relentless, high-performing machine to a group simply trying to get through the day.
“That’s why I probably have so much sympathy in football terms towards the new signings, because I think they came into a team that was, like... we were elite in everything that we did for years.
“And maybe we couldn’t be that because of what had happened. And then they then started getting quite a lot of criticism. And that’s why I think these lads will be absolutely fine at Liverpool. I would treat this season as their first season. That’s the way I would do it.”
For Robertson, the drop-off was not tactical or physical. It was emotional.
“I think all footballers, we all have that edge, don’t we? And I think when you lose that edge sometimes then you can’t perform to the best. And I think last season we lost the edge.
“I think when I look back on it now, I think we lost that determination a little bit and things like that because I know at times we were maybe going, ‘You know what, what’s the point?’
“Like look at what Jota’s family are going through. Look at his kids. But yeah, we were grieving. It was our mate at the end of the day. He’s not a footballer to us, he was a teammate, he was a friend.”
The personal toll hit Robertson hard. The timeline still haunts him.
“The week before he died, I was at his wedding. So 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.”
Slot’s handling and a season that slipped away
Liverpool’s season never truly recovered. They finished fifth in the Premier League, and Slot lost his job at the end of the campaign. Robertson, though, was adamant the Dutchman did as much as anyone could in impossible circumstances.
“We spoke a lot (in pre-season). The manager was really good, to be fair,” he recalled. “Like our pre-season was barely anything because, to be fair to Arne, he was like, ‘If you don’t want to train, you don’t train.’
“Say one day you come in and you’re struggling or whatever, that was his attitude of the pre-season.”
The club leaned on existing support structures. A psychologist already working at Liverpool set up small, informal groups.
“It would just be like, if you want to grab a coffee and come round and talk and things like that. So we did that quite a few times, and I think that helped. But it was incredibly difficult times.”
Robertson kept circling back to Jota’s family, insisting that whatever the players felt, the deepest pain lay away from the pitch.
“But then you always just feel sorry for his family, for his wife. At the end of the day, their life got flipped completely upside down.
“Ours, we were heartbroken and everything like that, but for them daily, it must be so difficult even now.
“We managed to get through it together, I think, and we always just said, ‘Look, we’ll always remember him,’ and everything like that.
“But we had to play football at the end of the day. We didn’t have a choice in that. We tried to do it as best we could and that’s why last season was so tough.”
From open-top bus to funeral flight
Robertson did not shy away from the brutal contrast between Liverpool’s highest high and their lowest low.
“It’s a difficult one. At the end of the day, football’s based on results, and we didn’t get enough results. And that was the fact.
“But if you go back to the summer before, we have the biggest parade in Liverpool’s history, right? We’re on the open-top bus, we’re going through the city centre, and I think over a million people had come out and seen us.
“The next day, we all shake each other’s hands, we all go off for the summer. The next time we see everyone is at the airport heading over to Porto for his funeral. That’s the next time I see all my teammates.”
The contrast still stuns him.
“So, from going from the highest of highs in terms of being on a parade with the Premier League trophy, and you’re parading it round thousands and thousands of fans, to then seeing staff and players the way we were, like that, it’s not normal.
“It’s not normal what we went through. So, I think could it have been factored in? Yeah, maybe it could have.”
The sympathy, though, has its limits. Inside the dressing room, the players knew the reality of elite sport.
“But then when the season goes on and things like that, we know that we then have to do better and we need to win games and things like that.
“And I get why then there was a lot of frustration around the way we were playing, the results that we were getting. I can understand it.”
Robertson reserved particular praise for Slot’s sensitivity in those early weeks.
“What I would say is at the time at the start, the manager was really good and he helped us a lot. He understood the situation in terms of pre-season, in terms of not pushing us too hard, not trying to cause too much competitiveness or whatever, in case somebody was struggling that day or whatever.”
Cracks beneath a perfect start
On the surface, Liverpool began the league campaign like champions again. Five wins from five. Talk of another title surge.
Underneath, Robertson insists, the foundations were already shaken.
“And, we then were starting slow, but we then go and win the first five games, and everyone thinks Liverpool are going to win the league again.
“We won the first five games but we were probably covering over the cracks at that point. And then after the international break, the cracks came.”
The results told one story. The dressing room lived another. Now, with distance, Robertson has put words to what many suspected: this was a team playing through grief, trying to compete at the highest level while dealing with the loss of a friend whose absence still hangs over Anfield.
