The football never stopped for Liverpool after the Diogo Jota tragedy. A difficult season became about far more than results alone…
IT WOULD have impacted anyone.
The best Alex Ferguson side. Any Pep Guardiola iteration. The sturdiest mentality monsters led by Jürgen Klopp.
Whatever the team, manager or club and from whatever era, losing Diogo Jota would have impacted anyone.
It’s impossible to do any sort of season review without it being front and centre. Not as an excuse or mitigation, but because it was always going to be the single biggest defining factor of 2025/26 regardless of how the campaign unfolded.
Hearing the news of Diogo and Andre Silva’s death on July 3 last year shook everyone to the core. There rightly remains such a process to their passing.
But Liverpool’s footballers know that grace only goes so far. They know in competitive sport that vulnerability ultimately equals weakness. They know the season will kick off in August regardless.
They didn’t want to train or play. Andy Robertson said so himself. But they arrive at the defence of a title and are okay until they aren’t.
Until they don’t have the legs for the last 30 minutes. Until the song starts bellowing around Anfield. Until things start going horribly wrong on the pitch.
Mohamed Salah says he’s scared to come back to Liverpool. Robertson is in his room alone with Scotland dealing with the grief of losing his mate. Both needed to get away from the club they love, and it was apparent early on.
Liverpool still needed Salah to pull them out of the shit against Crystal Palace. They needed Robertson to come on the pitch after 56 minutes away at Chelsea and inject some gumption. That they didn’t or couldn’t is not a loss of ability or legs as much as it is simply loss.
Nobody can stop what follows. Losing 10-1 over three games to Manchester City, Nottingham Forest and PSV Eindhoven, the latter two at Anfield, plunges the entire football club into crisis.
This cannot happen at Liverpool. It is rightly alien and unacceptable in every sense. There is no precedent for results like that, especially when the squad has been assembled in such a manner.
Arne Slot has been treated unfairly but his name is over the door of an awful season. Despite winning a league title and dealing with the most difficult period in the club’s history since Hillsborough, Liverpool lost games of football badly and did not perform well. It remains a supporter’s prerogative to focus solely on such facts if they wish.
Questions have been raised about Slot’s treatment and the concept of whether the unspoken rules applied to ‘The Liverpool Way’ have now become vastly subjective. Liverpool’s self proclaimed exceptionalism has never been as unified as romantics suggest.
Outlandish content creation and digital fire poking is an evolving problem for all major supporter bases, and this might be the first season Liverpool have been fully caught in the eye of fake outrage baiting.
Yet internal warfare, divided supporters and managerial dissatisfaction have been around since day one. We are not suddenly exposed to a pathogen of Arsenal Fan TV culture. It just was not a thing under Gerard Houllier or Rafa Benitez.
By the end, there is so much wrong that the sensible conclusion may be to relieve Slot of his duties. But if the Dutchman and those above him truly believe that a summer reset and some necessary squad additions can isolate 2025/26 as the most imperfect of storms, then I am willing to mentally start afresh come mid August.
Five weeks from today will mark the first anniversary of Diogo and Andre’s passing. As ever, all our thoughts should be with Rute, their children and the brothers’ family.
We can only remember Diogo our way and we should. Anyone who says we should not use him as an excuse is right. But we can acknowledge his loss still lies heavily within the football club and with every single one of us.
It was a shocking, unimaginable period for everyone. We will rightly never know how much it impacted his teammates and those around them, nor should we. They have been through the most challenging season of their careers.
We should remember that, even if being Liverpool never, ever stops.
