Milos Kerkez: Ready to Step Out of Andy Robertson’s Shadow
Milos Kerkez laughs before he even sits down. Not about Liverpool, not about Arne Slot, not about Andoni Iraola. About his supposed wedding.
“No! This is wrong, everyone gets this wrong!” he bursts out, when the congratulations arrive on a rooftop terrace at Liverpool’s team hotel.
The photo that did the rounds back home in Vrbas – the young Liverpool full-back escorting a bride into church – had social media tying bows on his marital status. In reality, the groom was his oldest brother, Rade.
“In Serbia it is normal for the younger brothers to take the bride to the church,” Kerkez explains. “That’s what I did and now everyone thinks I got married. It was Rade, not me. There are three of us – Rade is the oldest, I’m the youngest and Marko is the middle one. I keep having to explain to people that I never got married. I was going around the club when we started back and people were congratulating me. I’m like: ‘No, I’m not ready for this yet!’”
He isn’t ready for marriage. He is ready for something else.
Out of Robertson’s shadow
Kerkez is 22, humorous, restless, full of nervous energy. He arrived last summer as part of Liverpool’s expensive reset, a £40m left-back who had torn up the flank at Bournemouth and forced his way into the PFA team of the year in 2024-25. Then he walked into Andy Robertson’s house.
Not literally, but that is what Anfield’s left side has been for the past decade: Robertson’s territory, his legacy, his standard.
Kerkez doesn’t flinch from that comparison; he doesn’t run from it either. He wants to step out of the Scot’s shadow, not erase it.
“We all know what Andy did for the club. I’m not running away from that,” he says. “I want to make my own way. I’m going to work hard. I know what it means to play for Liverpool. I showed it a bit last year and I am going to show it more this year.”
Robertson, now at Tottenham, did not leave with a grand farewell speech to his heir. The moment was too raw.
“I didn’t want to get a lot on to him,” Kerkez says. “He was a bit emotional as everything was coming to an end. I didn’t want to get on to him too much, but throughout the year he helped me. We had a few conversations about crosses and about the big lungs we need to have so we can run until tomorrow. He did a lot of seasons, I should also have the same. We had conversations like that. Also, where to put the last ball, to focus, to put your head up and sometimes put better crosses in.”
The baton has been passed, quietly. The expectation has not.
A summer of shocks
This has been no ordinary off-season for Kerkez. Time at home in Serbia. Holidays in Montenegro and Spain. Then the knock on the door that changed everything.
“I was back in Serbia, I was sleeping and my brother woke me up,” he recalls. “He knocks on my door and it was a big surprise. Nobody knew. I couldn’t believe it, I was like: ‘Wow.’”
The news: Arne Slot, the coach who had just delivered the Premier League title 12 months earlier, had been sacked.
Kerkez does not lash out. He does not hide either. He calls last season “tough for everyone” at Liverpool, a campaign where every time one problem seemed solved, another emerged. For a new signing in a new back line, under a coach demanding full-backs step inside and build play, it was hardly the easiest introduction.
There were times when he looked constrained, pinned by structure, his natural, surging game dulled by the need to step into midfield and start attacks from deep. He doesn’t blame Slot for that. The pair are still in contact and have exchanged messages since the dismissal.
But the contrast with what came next could not be clearer.
Iraola and the ‘consequences’
Kerkez knew before anyone else in the Liverpool dressing room what Andoni Iraola would bring. He had already lived it at Bournemouth, where the Basque coach took his raw, aggressive running and turned it into one of the most dangerous left flanks in the league.
So when word filtered through that Iraola was the man chosen to replace Slot, the reaction was instant.
“I was delighted, honestly,” Kerkez says. “He helped me and improved me a lot in the two years I spent with him. I was really happy, obviously for myself but also for the team. Everyone knows what type of football he plays so I think he is the perfect fit for us.”
What type of football? The answer arrives with a grin and a wince.
“It’s the intensity. He’s not scared to play one-on-one all over the pitch, to press high and to be on the front foot always. If you see footage of how we all are after training, all lying down, then you can see what he is preparing us for. You definitely need legs and good condition for what he wants us to do, but we will be all right.
“When we play games with three or four teams he calls it ‘consequences’ and the losing team and the team that finishes second has to run. How much you have to run depends on what he decides in that moment, but there is always running for the team that loses.”
The word “consequences” hangs there. In Iraola’s world, mistakes have a cost and the cost is measured in metres.
“He’s intense and he likes details. He’s very professional,” Kerkez continues. “He likes to talk sometimes but not a lot. I think maybe he doesn’t want to get too close to some players and wants to show that everyone is the same in the team, so he doesn’t want to get too close to anyone in particular. He keeps it professional, with a lot of hard work.”
For a full-back who thrives on space and chaos, this is home.
“The gaffer likes to play more with the full-backs down the line, underlapping, overlapping. It worked well for me at Bournemouth, so I think it will also work well for me here. He always told me that defending is really important, for him that is first of all, and because you are a full-back you need to defend really hard. Everything you can do in front of you is like a bonus.
“So I was always focused first on defending and then running forward to help the wingers. He showed me that when you do your job then you are free to do what you want, so I felt really free with him. He lets you be more free to do your stuff.”
At Chicago Fire’s performance centre, in the thick, heavy air of a Midwestern summer, that freedom is being drilled into Liverpool’s new era. Double sessions. A pre-season win over Sunderland in Nashville. And, tellingly, Kerkez and his compatriot Dominik Szoboszlai stepping into leadership roles among a young group.
The hierarchy is shifting. The intensity is not.
Built a bit different
Ask Kerkez about pressure and he almost shrugs it off the terrace.
“Honestly, I don’t care about pressure,” he says. “I don’t like ‘pressure’ and that stuff. I grew up a bit different in Serbia. We grew up different. You could say maybe we are built a bit different.”
Then comes the line that explains a lot.
“For example, I started to drive a truck when I was 10 years old.”
He sees the raised eyebrow.
“It was with my dad,” he adds quickly. “I climbed in and then I took the wheel. He was doing the pedals, I was only quite small so I couldn’t reach them.”
His father, Sebastijan, still drives him now – only the route has changed. On some mornings he takes his son to Liverpool’s training centre. He and Kerkez’s mother, Tijana, have moved to England to help their youngest settle into Premier League life.
“They are very important,” Kerkez says. “My brothers have their own lives now but my parents are with me and I am much happier they are with me. My dad is here to smack me sometimes on the top of the head and to remind me. Sometimes you play a few good games and maybe you start to get a bit carried away. But my dad is here to smack me. I come straight back down and I switch straight back on.”
There is something disarmingly old-fashioned about that image: the £40m full-back, the Premier League champion, still being clipped round the ear by his dad when he gets ahead of himself.
It fits the player. Direct. No fuss. No fear of hard work or running until his lungs burn.
New generation, same demand
Kerkez will line up against Wrexham in New York on Wednesday, the second game of Liverpool’s US tour. The friendlies matter less than the patterns, the partnerships, the sense that Iraola’s Liverpool will look more like his Bournemouth: front-foot, aggressive, with full-backs unleashed down the line.
Inside the dressing room, the Hungary international has grown close to Mohamed Salah, another of the old guard whose numbers almost defy belief.
“Before we left the Axa to come to Chicago I saw on TV a show about how many goals and assists Mo had, it was something like 380,” Kerkez says. “I just walked out! ‘What is this?’ I was thinking. Time flies. A new generation comes and hopefully everything will be good.”
That is the challenge now. Robertson gone. Slot gone. A new coach, a new structure, a new left-back ready to play on his own terms.
Kerkez insists he does not feel the weight. He has driven trucks, faced Serbian winters, endured “consequences” under Iraola. He has already lived through one turbulent Liverpool season and come out of it more trusted than many of last summer’s recruits.
Now the flank is his. The standard, though, remains the same.
Can he turn that restless energy, that fearless running, into a legacy to stand alongside Robertson’s? The answer will not come in a wedding photo from Vrbas, or in a pre-season jog in Chicago, but across nine months on that Anfield touchline, with nowhere to hide and everything to chase.
