Liverpool players ‘stopped caring about football’ after Diogo Jota death | Football

Andy Robertson has admitted Liverpool ‘lost their edge’ as they struggled to cope with the loss of teammate Diogo Jota.

The Portugal international and his brother Andre Silva were killed in a car crash in July 2025 as they travelled from Spain to return to England for pre-season training.

The forward had celebrated winning the Premier League title just two months before his tragic passing.

After losing their beloved teammate, Liverpool struggled on the pitch last season, finishing fifth with their bid to defend their title falling away early in the campaign.

Big-money signings Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak struggled in their first seasons on Merseyside with Robertson believing they walked into an impossible situation at the club.

The Scotland international, who left Liverpool this summer to join Tottenham, explaining how the whole club was ‘heartbroken’ throughout a grief-stricken campaign where they simply stopped caring about football.

‘It’s difficult to describe or talk about, really, because what we went through, it was horrendous,’ Robertson told the Stick to Football Podcast. ‘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.

‘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.’

He continued: ‘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.

‘So, yeah, for us it was incredibly difficult. 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.’

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