Andy Robertson Reflects on Grief After Diogo Jota’s Death

Andy Robertson has laid bare the depth of Liverpool’s grief last season, admitting the squad “didn’t care about football” in the months after the death of Diogo Jota.

The Scotland captain, now at Tottenham, spoke candidly about the emotional toll on the dressing room after Jota was killed in a road accident last July, an incident that also claimed the life of his brother, Andre Silva.

“You've just lost one of your best mates in the changing room,” Robertson said in a clip shared by the Stick to Football podcast. The words land heavily. This wasn’t just a team-mate. It was someone woven into the fabric of their daily lives at Liverpool.

A club in mourning

Liverpool’s season never truly escaped that moment. The players, Robertson said, were “heartbroken”, and that feeling seeped into everything: training, matches, even the basic drive to compete.

“All footballers, we have that edge don't we?” he said. “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 personal for Robertson in a way that still clearly stings.

“The week before he died I was at his wedding,” he recalled. “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.”

New signings walking into heartbreak

The emotional weight did not just bear down on the old guard. It shaped the environment for those trying to start new chapters at Anfield. Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz were among the arrivals that summer, players signed with big expectations and bigger price tags.

They walked into a club in mourning.

“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.”

On the pitch, Liverpool paid a predictable price.

They began the campaign as reigning champions but unravelled between September and November, losing nine of 12 games in a damaging run that stripped away their title defence and any sense of normality. They never fully recovered, sliding to a fifth-place finish and prompting the dismissal of head coach Arne Slot.

For outsiders, it looked like a collapse in form. For those inside, Robertson suggests, it was something far more human: a group of players trying to perform while carrying a loss that made the sport itself feel small.

A shared dream cut short

Robertson had spoken publicly about Jota before. Last November, just after leading Scotland to the World Cup, he referenced their shared ambition. Both had missed out in 2022. Both had dreamed of walking out at the tournament together.

Only one of them lived to see that chance.

In stripping away the usual clichés and exposing the raw reality of a grieving dressing room, Robertson has offered a stark reminder: sometimes a bad season is not about tactics, transfers or tired legs. Sometimes it starts with a phone call no footballer ever wants to receive, and a team that suddenly finds the game they love no longer feels like it matters at all.