Milos Kerkez: From Wedding Misunderstanding to Liverpool's New Left-Back
Milos Kerkez leans back in his chair on a rooftop in Chicago and laughs. He has spent the summer being congratulated on a wedding that never happened.
“No! This is wrong, everyone gets this wrong!” he says, still slightly exasperated by the mix‑up. The photographs from his hometown of Vrbas showed him escorting a bride into church. Social media did the rest.
“It was my oldest brother. In Serbia it is normal for the younger brothers to take the bride to the church. That’s what I did and now everyone thinks I got married. It was Rade, not me.”
He reels off the family order – “Rade is the oldest, I’m the youngest and Marko is the middle one” – like he’s had to do it a hundred times. Because he has.
“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!’”
The misunderstanding has at least served one purpose: it has broken the ice everywhere he’s gone this summer. Home in Serbia. Holidays in Montenegro and Spain. Back at Liverpool. And, in the middle of it all, the knock on his bedroom door that changed his working life.
Slot out. Iraola in. All while he was half-asleep.
A new boss he already knows
Kerkez’s summer has had the surreal feel of a player fast-forwarding through chapters of his own career. The sacking of Arne Slot, the man who made him part of a Premier League title-winning side. The return of Andoni Iraola, the coach who turned him into a £40 million left-back at Bournemouth. A reunion no one at Anfield saw coming, least of all the player himself.
“I was delighted, honestly,” he says of Liverpool’s decision. “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.”
That knowledge gives Kerkez a head start as Liverpool grind through double sessions at Chicago Fire’s performance centre and tick off pre-season fixtures, including a win over Sunderland in Nashville and Wrexham to come in New York on Wednesday. While others are learning Iraola, Kerkez already speaks the language.
“It’s the intensity,” he says. “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.”
There is a glint in his eye when he talks about Iraola’s favourite punishment game.
“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 running is only part of it. The Basque coach is demanding and meticulous, a combination Kerkez clearly enjoys.
“He’s intense and he likes details. He’s very professional. 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.”
From constraint to freedom
There were long spells last season when Kerkez looked trapped in a system that didn’t quite fit him. Slot’s insistence on building from the back, on full-backs stepping inside to help dictate play, often dulled the very qualities that had persuaded Liverpool to sign him from Bournemouth in the first place.
At the Vitality Stadium he was a blur of red and black on the left flank, a relentless runner whose pace and aggression earned him a place in the Professional Footballers’ Association team of the year in 2024-25. At Anfield, he sometimes looked like a player trying to colour inside the lines.
Under Iraola, those lines move.
“The gaffer likes to play more with the full-backs down the line, underlapping, overlapping,” Kerkez explains. “It worked well for me at Bournemouth, so I think it will also work well for me here.”
He is quick to stress that with Iraola, freedom is earned.
“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.”
None of this is a criticism of Slot. Kerkez is careful there. The Dutchman delivered a title in his first season and left with the respect of the dressing room.
“I was surprised,” Kerkez says of the decision to sack him, taken barely 12 months after lifting the Premier League trophy. “I really didn’t know. I was back in Serbia, I was sleeping and my brother woke me up. He knocks on my door and it was a big surprise. Nobody knew. I couldn’t believe it, I was like: ‘Wow.’ I have been in touch with him since, we have exchanged a few messages.”
A hard season, a hard edge
“Tough for everyone” is how Kerkez describes last season. It fits. Every time Liverpool seemed to patch one hole, another opened up. Injuries, form, tactical tweaks – the champions never quite found a steady rhythm.
For the new arrivals, the glare was harsh. A big-money recruitment drive struggled to deliver, and while Kerkez emerged with more credit than most, the scrutiny never softened.
He insists he barely felt it.
“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 a story that explains plenty.
“For example, I started to drive a truck when I was 10 years old.”
He sees the raised eyebrow and laughs.
“It was with my dad. 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.”
The family theme runs through everything. His father, Sebastijan, still drives him to Liverpool’s training centre sometimes. His parents, Tijana and Sebastijan, moved to England to help their youngest son settle into life as a Premier League footballer.
“They are very important,” he says. “My brothers have their own lives now but my parents are with me and I am much happier they are with me.”
His dad’s role is not just chauffeur.
“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.”
Stepping out of a legend’s shadow
If parental discipline keeps his feet on the ground, the shadow on his flank is a different kind of weight. Kerkez was signed to be the long-term successor to Andy Robertson, a player whose name is stitched into Liverpool’s modern history.
Robertson is now at Tottenham, but his influence lingers around Anfield and, more specifically, around the young man taking his place.
“I didn’t want to get a lot on to him,” Kerkez says of the Scot’s emotional farewell in May. “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.”
The help was specific, practical, the type of detail that only someone who has lived the position at this club can offer.
“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.”
Kerkez doesn’t pretend he can erase what Robertson did. He doesn’t want to.
“We all know what Andy did for the club. I’m not running away from that. 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.”
Inside the dressing room, he has found his own corner. He became close to Mohamed Salah last season, another reminder that this is still a dressing room shaped by giants. The scale of what has been done before him hit home in a quiet moment at the training ground.
“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 recalls. “I just walked out! ‘What is this?’ I was thinking.”
He shakes his head, half in disbelief, half in admiration.
Time, he knows, moves quickly at a club like this. One title-winning coach gone. Another familiar one in. A legend leaves. A new left-back steps forward. A new generation, as he puts it, comes.
The question now is simple and unforgiving, the kind Liverpool always ask of their players: under Iraola, with the shackles off and the flank his to own, how far can Milos Kerkez run?
