Milos Kerkez: From Wedding Mix-Up to Liverpool's Left-Back Star

Milos Kerkez laughs before he even sits down. “Everyone thinks I got married,” he says, shaking his head on the rooftop of Liverpool’s team hotel, the Chicago skyline behind him. “No! This is wrong, everyone gets this wrong!”

The photo that did the rounds back home showed the Liverpool left-back escorting a bride into church in Vrbas. Serbia saw a wedding. Social media saw a wedding. Even his own club saw a wedding.

“It was my oldest brother,” he explains. “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!’”

The mix-up breaks the ice, but it also tells you something about Kerkez. He’s 22, restless, quick with a joke, and nowhere near ready to settle down. Not in life, and certainly not in his football.

From Slot’s surprise exit to an Iraola reunion

His summer has been anything but quiet. Time at home in Serbia. Breaks in Montenegro and Spain. Then a frantic knock on the bedroom door.

“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.’”

Arne Slot, the coach who had just delivered Liverpool the Premier League title 12 months earlier, had been sacked. A jolt for the club. A jolt for a dressing room still processing a turbulent first year under him. Yet for Kerkez, the shock was quickly followed by something very different: familiarity.

Liverpool turned to Andoni Iraola. For most of the squad, a new voice and a new demand. For Kerkez, a reunion with the coach who had helped turn him into a £40m left-back at Bournemouth and into a member of the PFA team of the year in 2024-25.

“I was delighted, honestly,” he 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.”

If there is one player in this Liverpool squad who doesn’t have to wonder what Iraola will ask of him, it is Kerkez. Double sessions at Chicago Fire’s performance centre, a hard-running win over Sunderland in Nashville, and the same relentless demands he remembers from the south coast.

“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 come with a sting. Iraola calls them “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. 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 message is simple. You either compete, or you run.

“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.”

Out of Robertson’s shadow

Kerkez arrived at Anfield last summer with a heavy label: the man bought to succeed Andy Robertson. The Scotland captain, now at Tottenham, had set a standard at left-back that few in Europe could match. Any dip, any misstep, was going to be noticed.

Last season, amid an expensive recruitment drive that misfired for several of the new faces, the scrutiny was sharp. Liverpool lurched from one issue to another; every time a problem seemed solved, another surfaced. Kerkez, though, insists he didn’t feel weighed down by 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 the story that underlines the point.

“For example, I started to drive a truck when I was 10 years old,” he says, almost casually.

Sorry?

“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 to Liverpool’s training centre sometimes. Both parents, Sebastijan and Tijana, moved to England to help their youngest son adjust to 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.”

Robertson’s influence has been just as valuable, in a different way. The outgoing left-back made a point of pulling Kerkez aside during the season, passing on the lessons of almost a decade at the top.

“I didn’t want to get a lot on to him,” Kerkez says of their final days together. “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 doesn’t flinch from the scale of the shoes he’s expected to fill.

“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.”

A system built for his strengths

There were moments last season when Kerkez looked constrained. Slot’s insistence on building from the back, with full-backs stepping inside and helping in midfield, never quite played to the strengths that had made him such a force at Bournemouth.

It was his pace, his energy up and down the flank, the underlaps and overlaps, that had first caught Liverpool’s eye. Under Iraola on the south coast, he had licence to run and a clear defensive structure behind him. He expects that version of himself to reappear more often now.

“The gaffer likes to play more with the full-backs down the line, underlapping, overlapping,” he says. “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, he insists, is not the villain of the piece. Far from it. The Dutchman’s dismissal still jars with him.

“I was surprised,” he says. “I really didn’t know.” The two have stayed in contact. “I have been in touch with him since, we have exchanged a few messages.”

But football moves quickly. Iraola’s arrival changes the rhythm of the team and, potentially, the trajectory of Kerkez’s Liverpool career. In pre-season, he and Dominik Szoboszlai have emerged as vocal presences in a relatively young group. Two Hungary internationals, one in midfield, one at left-back, both driving standards in sessions that end with bodies scattered on the grass.

On Wednesday in New York, against Wrexham, Kerkez will continue that work on the pitch, trying to turn the hard yards of July into something more tangible by August.

New generation, same demands

Kerkez talks about Liverpool with the awareness of someone who knows exactly where he is and what it represents. He mentions Mohamed Salah almost in disbelief.

“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,” he says. “I just walked out! ‘What is this?’ I was thinking. Time flies.”

He smiles at the absurdity of those numbers. He also knows what they mean. Standards. Legacy. Expectation.

Kerkez became close to Salah last season, another thread tying him into a dressing room that has already lost one giant in Robertson and will, sooner or later, have to confront life after its Egyptian talisman too.

“A new generation comes,” he says, almost to himself, “and hopefully everything will be good.”

For Kerkez, that new generation is no longer an abstract idea. It’s him. It’s Szoboszlai. It’s the players Iraola is flogging through “consequences” drills in the Chicago heat.

The wedding jokes can wait. This season, Liverpool’s left flank is his to own or to lose.