Robertson reveals Liverpool 'didn't care about football' as grief over Jota consumed the squad

Andy Robertson has admitted that Liverpool’s players “didn’t care about football” last season in the wake of Diogo Jota’s death, revealing the depth of grief that engulfed the club and contributed to their dramatic collapse from champions to fifth place in the Premier League.

Jota died in a road accident in July 2024, alongside his brother Andre Silva. Speaking on the Stick to Football podcast, Robertson — who joined Tottenham this summer — described the emotional toll on a squad that lost nine of twelve league games between September and November before head coach Arne Slot was eventually sacked.

“You’ve just lost one of your best mates in the changing room,” Robertson said. “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.”

Robertson added a deeply personal detail that underlined the shock of the loss. “The week before he died I was at his wedding. 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.”

The Scotland captain also expressed sympathy for the high-profile new signings who arrived at Anfield that summer, including Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz, who walked into a club still raw with 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.”

Robertson had spoken about Jota last November, immediately after captaining Scotland to the 2026 World Cup. He revealed that qualifying for the tournament had been a shared dream for both men after they missed out in 2022. Jota’s widow, Rute Cardoso, wrote Robertson a letter before the tournament urging him to carry her late husband’s dream with him to North America.