At Anfield, the grief that followed Diogo Jota’s death left little room for football, with former Liverpool defender Andy Robertson saying the club’s broken atmosphere also made life harder for Hugo Ekitike and the other major arrivals of 2025.
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Ekitike, the former Reims and Paris Saint-Germain forward, was the clear exception among Liverpool’s high-profile signings during a difficult 2025-26 campaign. The Reds had invested close to €480 million after winning their 20th English title, but Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak were among the new recruits who struggled to settle.
Robertson, who joined Tottenham this summer, believes the circumstances surrounding the squad help explain why the expensive rebuild never properly clicked.
Speaking to Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher on The Overlap, the Scotland international revisited the death of Jota and his brother in a road accident on 3 July 2025. More than a year later, he said the loss remained deeply felt inside the Liverpool dressing room.
“It is difficult even to explain because what we went through was horrible,” Robertson said. “The new signings arrived at a club with a broken heart. I felt for them because they had joined for huge fees, but it took months for them to adapt because football was not important to us.
“We had lost one of our closest friends in the dressing room. We had lost the spark and could not perform. At times, you would wonder what the point of it all was when you thought about what Jotsy’s family and his children were going through.”
For Robertson, Jota was far more than a teammate. He described the Portugal international as a friend who meant everything to the group.
His most painful memory is the contrast between seeing Jota on his wedding day and witnessing the devastation of his family only days later. “To see him on the happiest day of his life, then see his family destroyed the following week…” Robertson said.
Liverpool’s season ended with a fifth-place finish in the Premier League, a sharp fall after the title-winning campaign that had preceded the summer spending spree. Robertson’s account puts the failure in a wider context: a squad attempting to absorb new stars while mourning one of its own.
