Liverpool FC | Our Year Of Loss - Losing Diogo Jota And Ourselves

Forgive me if you’ve heard this before. 

It’s July 2025 and Liverpool FC are suffering another tragedy. 

It’s May 2025 and Liverpool FC are suffering another tragedy. 

On and on it goes. 

To be a Liverpool fan is to be intimately familiar with tragedy, with loss. It just simply is a part of the fabric of the club’s fandom. I don’t have to tell you, if you’ve been following the club for any amount of time, what has happened to the fans. 

No one expected to lose a current player. 

Last July, Diogo Jota and his brother Andre Silva were driving through Spain. It was late, the roads were dark and not as well maintained, and they were trying to make it to the port of Santander to catch the ferry to England. Diogo had been told not to fly, after lung surgery following a rib injury earlier in the season. Pre-season was starting soon, and he had to get back to Liverpool somehow. Car, ferry, train instead. 

Diogo and Andre crashed after overtaking a truck, when a tire blew and they lost control. Both of them died at the scene. 

If you’re reading this, you probably already know. None of this is new information to you. I don’t have to reiterate how well loved Diogo Jota was within Liverpool Football Club, within the football world as a whole. Tributes poured in from fans, rival clubs, former and current teammates, even people who had never played with him. His Baby Shark goal celebration, or controller celebration, in leagues he hadn’t stepped foot in. 

The first match of last season, and even some of the preseason matches, were wrapped in the sort of collective grief that is unfortunately all too familiar to Liverpool fans. Fans in the stands took up the job of singing Diogo’s song at the 20th minute - the number he wore for the Reds - to bring him back to the game. Then-coach Arne Slot said at the time that he looked to the bench to bring Diogo on, and was immediately reminded that he’ll never be able to do that again. 

Senior players like Mohamed Salah openly wept after the first match of the Premier League season. Virgil van Dijk told the press that they’ll be dealing with the grief for a long time and the season won’t be easy because of it. 

And it wasn’t an easy season, not by a long shot. 

Liverpool's Season of Losses - Diogo Jota And Bad Results

Somewhere in September of last year, the tides began to turn and the effects of the delayed preseason treatments started to take their toll. The injury train rolled through Merseyside once again and took a lot of players from the squad.  Liverpool began losing, looking a shell of the team that had secured their 20th league title the season before.

When the results turn sour, Liverpool fans actually pride themselves on their patience and understanding. We’re not like the other teams that tend to call for a sacking upon the first sign of trouble. We don’t (generally) boo a manager or a player unless things get pretty dire. The only recent manager we’ve sacked in less than a year was Roy Hodgson, who was in the job for little more than six months. We’ve seen some bleak times with some players that were just unequipped to play at the level that the club demands. Even in the social media age of the Premier League, we’ve been pretty steadfast in supporting the squad and the manager or coach when things are tough. 

The 2025-2026 season saw that shift, for whatever reason. 

Usually when Liverpool go on a bad run, there is an underlying faith that they will pull themselves out of it. At least, in the past decade that faith has been there. Even when things looked bleakest, the faith in our history and club setup to find the players we need, to use our mental strength to push through whatever adversities are in our way, is a comfort. Those dark Hodgson days of 2010 showed me as a new fan that we can pull ourselves out of anything. 

Last season we lost the faith. When Liverpool struggled to pull themselves from the trenches, kept getting beaten down by inconsistency, the fans lost that comfort. 

I’ve written a lot for Liverpool Offside about how the grief had affected the squad and the club itself. Grief is one of the most unifying experiences in humanity, and if you’re lucky it doesn’t touch you for a very long time. It literally rewires our brains, because humans have to adjust to the loss of someone that was in their lives, learn new routines around the old ones. 

Somewhere along the way of the season, fans started to forget that, and it felt ugly. We could celebrate the show of emotion like Salah crying in front of the Kop, or Konate being surrounded after scoring just two weeks after losing his father, but when the players stopped being able to produce the performances we expected of them because of the heavy mental and emotional weights they were carrying, the fans turned on them. Fans started booing after poor performances, letting their displeasure be known. 

We turned on the coach, too. Arne Slot had brought us the Premier League title in his first season at the club, and then was dismissed at the end of his second season. He was asked constantly by other journalists if he expected to be at the club next season. Fans booed when subs were made, at halftime, and full time.

We were no longer special, or a good standard of fandom. We were no longer the believers that Jürgen Klopp reminded us we were. 

I’m not exempt from this either. I wrote fairly often during my match recaps that it felt like Slot had run out of ideas - and that was the truth. His tactics that had been semi-successful in his first season, and had been fully found out by the second season, allowed teams to take advantage of our poor standards of conditioning and decision making. If we’re speaking objectively, taking the grief out of the equation, he wasn’t fit for the job at hand anymore. He provided no solutions to the growing tactical problems and oftentimes in press conferences sounded more and more defensive and grasping at straws for excused. 

In his defense, he had done a stellar job of stewarding an obviously hurting club during the first two months after losing Diogo. He did his best with what he had. 

All of these things can be true at the same time. Slot had been given a very tough hand of cards to play, didn’t play them well enough, didn’t deserve a third year as coach. 

Grief can make being a professional athlete very hard. Players can continue to grieve all season, not feel supported, but also be part of the problem when the season goes to hell. 

A New Season - A Fresh Start For Liverpool And It's Fans

Really, the loss of Diogo exposed a lot of more unsavory undercurrents at the club. The bad results exacerbated the most toxic parts of fandom, chief of them all a lack of empathy. 

Liverpool fans lost the empathy that was a hallmark of the identity of being a fan of this club. 

Men’s sports goes on though, doesn't it. Everyone is expected to get on with it, regardless of how deep or tragic or heartbreaking the loss is. 

So here we are looking down the slide from the top platform of the new Premier League campaign. Slot was sent home at the end of May, barely a week after the end of the season, after limping into fifth place and at least ensuring that Liverpool would participate in the Champions League once again. His replacement, Andoni Iraola, has already started to win over fans in a way that Slot struggled to do. 

A clean slate. A fresh start. A time to shed the weight of the last year and go again. 

Do we move on from Diogo? Of course not. There is a new memorial statue outside Anfield, his number has been retired, and he has been added to the new coverings on the travel bus for the season. The players have said they kept his locker in the dressing rooms, and there are pictures of him everywhere they are. His song will still be sung at the 20th minute. 

The new season is a chance to right what we did wrong last go around. To return to being those believers, and get back behind a squad that needs our support more than ever. 

Return to the Liverpool fans we should be, that we know we are. It’s the only way to get through the marathon - by caring for each other, and the club, and the squad.