Milos Kerkez Embraces New Role at Liverpool Under Iraola
Milos Kerkez leans back in his chair on a rooftop in downtown Chicago and laughs the kind of laugh that tells you he has already heard this one too many times.
“No! This is wrong, everyone gets this wrong!”
The Liverpool full-back is still batting away congratulations on a wedding that never happened. A photograph from his hometown of Vrbas, suited up and escorting a bride into church, ricocheted around social media earlier in the summer. The internet married him off. Serbia did not.
“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.
This has been a restless, shapeshifting summer for Kerkez: family time in Serbia, holidays in Montenegro and Spain, a frantic knock on his bedroom door with the news that Arne Slot had been sacked, then an unexpected reunion with Andoni Iraola as Liverpool’s new head coach. Somewhere between the beaches and the bombshells, the 22-year-old has stepped into a different role.
On Liverpool’s pre-season camp at Chicago Fire’s performance centre, staff have noticed how Kerkez and his fellow Hungary international Dominik Szoboszlai have started to act like pillars in a young group. Voices in meetings. Standards in sessions. Not the kids any more.
From Bournemouth to the big stage – again
Kerkez arrives in this new era with a built‑in advantage. He knows Iraola better than anyone in the Liverpool dressing room. Two seasons together at Bournemouth turned him into a £40m left-back and a fixture in the Professional Footballers’ Association’s team of the year in 2024-25. Iraola knows exactly what he is buying into. So does Kerkez.
“I was delighted, honestly,” he says of hearing Iraola would replace Slot. “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.”
The description that follows sounds like a manifesto for organised chaos.
“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.
“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 detail and intensity unlock something that felt slightly caged last season. Slot’s insistence on building from the back and asking full-backs to step inside often left him looking inhibited, stripped of the raw, vertical aggression that had lit up the left flank at Bournemouth and caught Liverpool’s eye.
The new brief sounds far more like the old Kerkez.
“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.”
Slot shock and a turbulent year
None of this is a swipe at Slot. Far from it. A year after delivering the Premier League title, the Dutchman’s dismissal still jars with Kerkez.
“I was surprised,” he says. He was back in Serbia when the news broke. Asleep. “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.”
The surprise was matched by the strain of a campaign that never quite settled. Every time Liverpool appeared to fix one issue, another sprang up. Kerkez, part of an expensive recruitment drive that misfired as a whole, carried a spotlight from the moment he walked through the door. Others struggled badly. He emerged with far more credit, but the glare did not dim.
He insists it never bothered him.
“Honestly, I don’t care about pressure,” he says, with the shrug of someone who means it. “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.
“For example, I started to drive a truck when I was 10 years old.”
He sees the raised eyebrow and grins.
“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.”
That father, Sebastijan, still drives him now – literally. Kerkez’s parents, Sebastijan and Tijana, moved to England to help their youngest son settle into life as a Premier League footballer. Some mornings, his dad still takes him to Liverpool’s training centre.
“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.”
That grounding will matter again this week. Liverpool face Wrexham in New York on Wednesday in the second game of their US tour. Pre-season friendlies, on paper. Fitness tests, in reality. Auditions, too, for those who want to be central to Iraola’s high-wire act when the real football starts.
Living in Robertson’s shadow – and stepping out of it
Kerkez knows exactly whose boots he is expected to fill. Andy Robertson is no longer the man ahead of him in the queue but the shadow on the wall at Anfield. The Scotland captain, now at Tottenham, did not deliver a grand farewell speech in May. He did something more useful over the course of the year.
“I didn’t want to get a lot on to him,” Kerkez says of Robertson’s final days at the club. “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.”
He pauses, respectful but not reverential.
“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.”
There is another figure who looms large in Kerkez’s Liverpool life. Mohamed Salah, whose professionalism and numbers remain the gold standard in the dressing room, became a close friend last season. Before flying out from the AXA Training Centre to Chicago, Kerkez caught a television graphic that stopped him in his tracks.
“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. I just walked out! ‘What is this?’ I was thinking. Time flies. A new generation comes and hopefully everything will be good.”
Time does move fast at a club like Liverpool. Managers change in their sleep. Legends depart. Roles shift. One summer you are the understudy; the next, you are the man expected to own the left flank, to match the standards of Robertson, to thrive under a coach who demands that you run until your legs give out.
Kerkez says he is not ready for marriage. Liverpool, under Iraola, are about to find out if he is ready for something even more binding: becoming the long-term left-back in a team that refuses to stand still.
