Milos Kerkez: Clearing Up His Marital Status and Embracing New Challenges
The first thing Milos Kerkez wants to clear up this summer is not tactics, not expectations, not pressure. It’s his marital status.
“No! This is wrong, everyone gets this wrong!” he laughs, almost before he’s sat down on the rooftop terrace of Liverpool’s team hotel. The viral photos from his hometown of Vrbas, him escorting a bride into church, triggered a flood of congratulations from friends, team‑mates and strangers alike.
It wasn’t his wedding.
“It was my oldest brother,” he says. “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. 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!’”
Marriage can wait. Responsibility cannot.
From Slot’s shock exit to an Iraola reunion
Kerkez’s summer has been a blur: time at home in Serbia, holidays in Montenegro and Spain, and then a frantic knock on his bedroom door. His brother again. This time with news that landed like a punch.
Arne Slot had been sacked.
“I was back in Serbia, I was sleeping and my brother woke me up,” Kerkez recalls. “He knocks on my door and it was a big surprise. Nobody knew. I couldn’t believe it, I was like: ‘Wow.’”
Twelve months after delivering the Premier League title, Slot was out. Liverpool were back in flux. Kerkez, part of last summer’s expensive rebuild, knew what that could mean for players who had not yet fully convinced.
Only this story twisted quickly in his favour.
Not long after the shock came the reunion. Andoni Iraola, the coach who had turned him into a £40m left-back at Bournemouth and pushed him into the PFA team of the year in 2024-25, walked through the door at Liverpool.
“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.”
At Chicago Fire’s performance centre, where Liverpool are running through gruelling double sessions on their US tour, the 22-year-old suddenly looks like a man in his element. He knows the demands. He knows the language of Iraola’s football. And crucially, he knows he does not need to audition for this manager.
Iraola’s demands: legs, duels and ‘consequences’
Talk to Kerkez about Iraola and the words come out quickly. Intensity. Duels. Details. Running. Lots of running.
“It’s the intensity,” he explains. “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.”
Training games are never just training games under Iraola. They carry what he calls “consequences”.
“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,” Kerkez says. “How much you have to run depends on what he decides in that moment, but there is always running for the team that loses.”
He smiles as he says it, but the message is clear. Iraola’s Liverpool will be built on work without the ball as much as brilliance with it.
“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.”
For Kerkez, that framework feels familiar. At Bournemouth, Iraola gave him licence to attack the flank relentlessly, but only once the defensive job had been done.
“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 says. “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.”
Out of Robertson’s shadow, into his own light
Last season never really settled for Liverpool. Every time one issue seemed fixed, another flared up. For Kerkez, signed as part of a lavish recruitment drive, the scrutiny was sharp. His adaptation under Slot was complicated by a system that asked full-backs to step inside and help build from the back. The qualities that had lit up the south coast – raw pace, energy, constant surges up and down the touchline – were not always front and centre.
There is no bitterness in his voice when he talks about Slot. Quite the opposite.
“I was surprised,” he says of the Dutchman’s dismissal. “I have been in touch with him since, we have exchanged a few messages.”
The respect is mutual. But the fit with Iraola is obvious. A coach who wants his full-backs high, wide, overlapping and underlapping feels tailor-made for a player whose game is built on running.
Kerkez is also stepping into a space that carries its own weight. Andy Robertson is a Liverpool legend, a serial winner, and now a Tottenham player. The man who once owned the left flank at Anfield is gone. The vacancy is more than positional; it is symbolic.
Robertson did not deliver a big farewell speech to his heir. He did something more valuable over the course of the season: he taught.
“I didn’t want to get a lot on to him,” Kerkez says of those final days 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.
“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.
“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.”
Built different: trucks at 10 and a father’s reminder
Pressure? The word barely registers with him.
“Honestly, I don’t care about pressure,” he says, with a shrug that suggests he’s been asked about it too many times already. “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 story that explains the mindset.
“For example, I started to drive a truck when I was 10 years old,” he says. 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.”
His father, Sebastijan, still drives him sometimes – now to Liverpool’s training centre rather than through Serbian backroads. Both parents, Sebastijan and Tijana, have moved to England to help their youngest son settle into life as a Premier League footballer.
“They are very important,” says Kerkez. “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.”
The grounding is constant. The ambition is, too.
On tour in the United States, he and fellow Hungary international Dominik Szoboszlai have emerged as loud, driving voices in what is, by Liverpool standards, a relatively young squad. In Nashville on Saturday, Liverpool opened the Iraola era with a pre-season win over Sunderland. Next up is Wrexham in New York on Wednesday, another step in a summer that feels like a reset.
Kerkez will be in the thick of it. He intends to stay there.
He talks about Mohamed Salah with a mixture of awe and friendship, having grown close to the Egyptian last season. Before the squad flew out from the AXA Training Centre to Chicago, he caught a TV segment charting Salah’s staggering output.
“Before we left the Axa I saw on TV a show about how many goals and assists Mo had, it was something like 380,” he says. “I just walked out! ‘What is this?’ I was thinking. Time flies. A new generation comes and hopefully everything will be good.”
The old guard’s numbers are on the screen. The new guard are on the pitch, running through Iraola’s “consequences”, lungs burning, legs heavy, eyes fixed on the season ahead. For Milos Kerkez, no one is confusing the occasion this time. The bride can wait. The left flank at Anfield is available now.
