What’s more important

I do not know Andrew Robertson. I will almost certainly never know Liverpool Football Club’s left back, who earlier this week captained the Scotland national team to a preposterous, historic 4-2 win over Denmark in Glasgow to qualify for its World Cup since 1998 (which Andy Robertson is too young to remember). And I will not even if we meet in person, so large are the barriers of age and background and celebrity between even a familiar acquaintanceship and the intimacy required for “knowing.”

But this is not a blog about what words mean or parasocial relationships. This is a blog about how, after seeing and hearing Andy Robertson bare his soul – after 90-plus minutes of running himself into a frenzy on a football pitch in his hometown, in the biggest game (to date) of his international career and maybe his footballing career, stripped away the layers of ego and reserve media-trained athletes must display in the social-media age – I think I can say I love Andrew Robertson.

Here again for the ages:

"I've hid it well, but today I've been in bits. I know the age I'm at, this could be my last chance to go to the World Cup,” Robertson told BBC Scotland anchor Kelly Cates (who, as Kenny Dalglish’s daughter, counts as family.)

I couldn't get my mate Diogo Jota out of my head today. We spoke so much together about the World Cup. He missed out in Qatar because of injury and I missed out because Scotland never win. And we always discussed what it’d be like going to this World Cup. I know he’ll be somewhere smiling over me today.

I just couldn’t get him out of my head the whole day. I was in a bit of trouble in my room earlier but I…  I’m just so glad it ended up this way.

I won’t try to argue that “because it’s Liverpool” the bizarre one-way links sports fans have with their favorite athletes – weird enough in the ages of radio or print media, now magnified and twisted even more through the parasitic arrangements we have with our phones, where these larger-than-life characters exist – also “mean more” for us somehow.

But it was impossible to see Andy Robertson take a few minutes after his historic success to process in real time the death of his friend – which is and can’t not be defining moment of the 2025-2026 Liverpool Football Club season – and not feel something very real and very close to philia, if not agape.

Andrew Robertson spoke for himself but he also spoke to the elephant in our room. It needs speaking about. Grief is the corollary of love, and the greater Liverpool galaxy remains stuck yet in some stage of collective grief. (I am very ambivalent about the 20th-minute tribute; while it still feels cathartic and for fans without power to do much else, “doing something” feels appropriate and necessary, I’m not sure the lads need that reminder at that moment.) Even though the grief that Robertson and his teammates feel is unknowable to us – in the same way he can’t know what it’s like to be Rute Cardoso or one of the three sons she shared with her husband Diogo Jota – we know a little something. And we know what he spoke to is the very heart of the matter of this season.

This blog is no stranger to death and love and how football can help navigate relationships as well as life’s good and very bad milestones. It’s obvious and it’s trite but it must be acknowledged that whatever happens this season will be tinged with melancholy, for the club and for the most important players in the drama – the players.

Because they, gifted and wealthy young people for whom most everything in life has gone right, have had a close encounter with things going terribly and irrevocably wrong. They know – as we do, when we care to admit it to ourselves – that stinking it up at Brentford on a Saturday night doesn’t really matter too much, any more than winning the first five games of the season does.

One is certainly less enjoyable than the other. But when you’ve just won the league and lost your friend, you are bound to pick up some perspective. I doubt anyone on the squad will say it out loud this season. I’m sure they’re already talking about it, in Whatsapp groups or at the Kirkby coffee bar. But as the sadness broke through Andrew Robertson’s joy, as Sportscene’s Neil McCann put an arm around his shoulder and told him Diogo Jota could see him from heaven, this international break was also a fine reminder that for more than a few key members of LFC’s men’s team, there are also things in football that are bigger than Liverpool Football Club.

That is an enviable position to be in, in the long term – it means you’ve won stuff – even if it will not make an understandable struggle with Crystal Palace enjoyable. Cates asked-but-didn’t ask this of Robertson, who’s won the league and won the cup and won in Europe too and will now, barring some unfair cosmic disruption, walk onto a pitch in North America next summer in front of the Tartan Army wearing the captain’s armband. That is some feeling, just like Tuesday must have been. Was it “better” than Madrid in 2019? Playing silly games like that are how you get silly answers, but Robertson “said he wanted his 90th cap to be special,” McCann said later on the broadcast. “It doesn’t get any better than that.”

Sports speaks in superlatives and not nuance. You can’t rank these things on any rational, quantifiable scale. But you can look at the imaginary trophy room of your life and notice the holes, the things you’d like to do and haven’t done. You see the things you’d like to do beacome the things you no longer can. Mohamed Salah can and would very much like to win Egypt a major trophy. Andrew Robertson can and will play in a World Cup now. Dominik Szobozslai must wait four long years to try again. Diogo Jota should have and probably would have, and forever cannot.

I don’t want this season to go poorly for Liverpool FC on the field, in the league or in the two tournaments left. That’s not fun, or rewarding. I’d appreciate it if Florian Wirtz hit a long-range pass to a teammate making a perfect run into the box against Nottingham Forest the way he did for Germany. If he doesn’t? Andy Robertson reminded us what can be more important. I want to say I love him for that. I want to say it after a win on Saturday, but he’s had quite the week already. I know that much.