Milos Kerkez: From Wedding Misunderstanding to Liverpool's New Star
Milos Kerkez leans back in his chair on a rooftop in Chicago and laughs. He has spent half the summer correcting the same misunderstanding.
No! This is wrong, everyone gets this wrong!
The Liverpool full-back is still fielding congratulations for a wedding that was never his. A photo from his hometown of Vrbas, him escorting a bride into church, tore through social media. Serbia assumed their local boy had tied the knot. So did plenty at Liverpool.
“It was my oldest brother,” he says. “In Serbia it is normal for the younger brothers to take the bride to the church. That’s what I did and now everyone thinks I got married. It was Rade, not me.”
He reels off the family order – “Rade is the oldest, I’m the youngest and Marko is the middle one” – like a man who has had to do this a few times. Even at the training ground, when the squad returned, team-mates lined up with handshakes and best wishes.
“I keep having to explain to people that I never got married. I was going around the club when we started back and people were congratulating me. I’m like: ‘No, I’m not ready for this yet!’”
Marriage can wait. Responsibility cannot.
From Robertson’s shadow to Iraola’s spotlight
Kerkez is 22, loud, energetic, and suddenly one of the louder voices in a young Liverpool group. On the club’s pre-season camp at Chicago Fire’s performance centre, staff have noticed how he and Dominik Szoboszlai, his fellow Hungary international, naturally step to the front of drills and warm-ups, barking instructions, setting the tempo.
This is no longer the wide-eyed kid arriving to replace a legend. This is a full-back who knows the league, knows the club and, crucially, knows the new man in charge better than anyone else in the dressing room.
Andoni Iraola’s appointment jolted Liverpool’s summer. For Kerkez, it felt more like a reunion than a reset. Two seasons at Bournemouth under the Spaniard turned him into a £40m left-back and a member of the PFA team of the year in 2024-25. Those years also convinced Liverpool to bring him to Anfield.
“I was delighted, honestly,” Kerkez says of the decision to replace Arne Slot with Iraola. “He helped me and improved me a lot in the two years I spent with him. I was really happy, obviously for myself but also for the team. Everyone knows what type of football he plays so I think he is the perfect fit for us.”
The description comes quickly, almost rehearsed from experience.
“It’s the intensity. He’s not scared to play one-on-one all over the pitch, to press high and to be on the front foot always. If you see footage of how we all are after training, all lying down, then you can see what he is preparing us for. You definitely need legs and good condition for what he wants us to do, but we will be all right.”
The players already know about “consequences”. Small-sided games, three or four teams, and no hiding place.
“When we play games with three or four teams he calls it ‘consequences’ and the losing team and the team that finishes second has to run. How much you have to run depends on what he decides in that moment, but there is always running for the team that loses.”
The message is blunt: compete or suffer.
“He’s intense and he likes details. He’s very professional. He likes to talk sometimes but not a lot. I think maybe he doesn’t want to get too close to some players and wants to show that everyone is the same in the team, so he doesn’t want to get too close to anyone in particular. He keeps it professional, with a lot of hard work.”
Built for the touchline, not the half-space
There were spells last season when Kerkez looked like a player caught between instruction and instinct. Slot’s insistence on building from the back, with full-backs drifting inside, often left him braked in midfield rather than flying down the flank.
His game, the one that lit up Bournemouth, is all running lanes, underlaps, overlaps, and the repeated sprint to join attacks. That is exactly what Iraola demands.
“As he explains: “The gaffer likes to play more with the full-backs down the line, underlapping, overlapping. It worked well for me at Bournemouth, so I think it will also work well for me here.”
The foundation, though, is non-negotiable.
“He always told me that defending is really important, for him that is first of all, and because you are a full-back you need to defend really hard. Everything you can do in front of you is like a bonus. So I was always focused first on defending and then running forward to help the wingers.”
The reward for doing the dirty work?
“He showed me that when you do your job then you are free to do what you want, so I felt really free with him. He lets you be more free to do your stuff.”
Kerkez is not throwing stones at Slot. Far from it. The Dutchman delivered a Premier League title and still messages his former left-back. His exit, though, underlined the volatility of elite football.
“I was surprised,” Kerkez says of Slot’s sacking. He was home in Serbia when the news broke. As he slept, his brother hammered on the bedroom door.
“I was back in Serbia, I was sleeping and my brother woke me up. He knocks on my door and it was a big surprise. Nobody knew. I couldn’t believe it, I was like: ‘Wow.’ I have been in touch with him since, we have exchanged a few messages.”
A hard season, a hard edge
Kerkez does not sugarcoat the last campaign.
“Tough for everyone,” he admits. Each time Liverpool appeared to have fixed one issue, another surfaced. For a club that had spent heavily, the spotlight fell harshly on the new faces. Some wilted. Kerkez did not.
He insists he barely noticed the noise.
“Honestly, I don’t care about pressure,” he says, the words landing with the certainty of someone who genuinely believes them. “I don’t like ‘pressure’ and that stuff. I grew up a bit different in Serbia. We grew up different. You could say maybe we are built a bit different.”
Then comes the story that explains a lot.
“For example, I started to drive a truck when I was 10 years old.” He sees the raised eyebrow and laughs. “It was with my dad. I climbed in and then I took the wheel. He was doing the pedals, I was only quite small so I couldn’t reach them.”
The image fits the player: a kid steering something big and heavy, learning to handle responsibility before he could even reach the pedals.
His father, Sebastijan, still plays chauffeur now, sometimes driving his son to Liverpool’s training centre. Both parents, Sebastijan and Tijana, have moved to England to help their youngest navigate Premier League life.
“They are very important,” Kerkez says. “My brothers have their own lives now but my parents are with me and I am much happier they are with me.”
The role has not changed. His dad remains the enforcer.
“My dad is here to smack me sometimes on the top of the head and to remind me. Sometimes you play a few good games and maybe you start to get a bit carried away. But my dad is here to smack me. I come straight back down and I switch straight back on.”
Learning from a Liverpool great
There is another figure whose shadow still stretches over the left side of Anfield: Andy Robertson. The Scotland captain, now at Tottenham, is the man Kerkez was bought to succeed and the standard he will always be measured against.
Far from being cold with the new arrival, Robertson invested time in his heir.
“Throughout the year he helped me,” Kerkez says. “We had a few conversations about crosses and about the big lungs we need to have so we can run until tomorrow. He did a lot of seasons, I should also have the same.”
They spoke about the details that separate good from great.
“We had conversations like that. Also, where to put the last ball, to focus, to put your head up and sometimes put better crosses in.”
When the end came in May, when Robertson said goodbye to Anfield, Kerkez kept his distance.
“I didn’t want to get a lot on to him. He was a bit emotional as everything was coming to an end. I didn’t want to get on to him too much.”
He is not naïve. He understands the scale of the shoes he is expected to fill.
“We all know what Andy did for the club. I’m not running away from that. I want to make my own way. I’m going to work hard. I know what it means to play for Liverpool. I showed it a bit last year and I am going to show it more this year.”
In the meantime, he is embedding himself in the fabric of the dressing room. He became close to Mohamed Salah last season, another marker of how quickly he has settled.
Before Liverpool flew from the AXA Training Centre to Chicago, a television in the building flashed up Salah’s staggering numbers.
“Before we left the Axa I saw on TV a show about how many goals and assists Mo had, it was something like 380. I just walked out! ‘What is this?’ I was thinking.”
The stat hammered home the speed of change. One era closing, another forming around players like him.
Time flies. A new generation comes. The question now is simple: how far can Milos Kerkez drive this one?
