Liverpool Football Club (LFC) strolled to victory in last season’s English Premier League (EPL). It was a win that was as assured as it was unexpected, having changed coaches the summer prior, a change that births a testing transitional period. They started this season flying—picking up five wins out of five—before sinking to an almost unthinkable deterioration with eight losses from their last 11 games. Expectedly, analysts and pundits have suggested a galaxy of explanations as to why this has ensued. Just as expectedly, hindsight bias endures. When the BBC asked 33 of its pundits about who they expected would win the EPL that season, all but six stated LFC. Even the “Opta Supercomputer” predicted an LFC win. Of the plethora of explanations put forward to explain LFC’s decline, one carries great psychological relevance: grief.
On July 3, 2025, during the summer off-season, a Portuguese family experienced a tragic loss. Diogo Jota, one of LFC’s title-winning players, tragically lost his life alongside his brother André in a car crash. Jota was 28 years old, and left behind his recently-wed wife, and three young children.
Emotional Cracks
While there was some mention of the potential impact this might have on LFC’s title defense, analyses largely ignored the potential impact of this psychological force, instead paying attention to which players LFC had bought and the other usual sporting factors. LFC won their opening game against Bournemouth on the 15th of August, yet the psychologically minded would have been paying attention to what happened at the final whistle. Mohamed Salah, LFC’s star striker, burst into tears as the fan base began singing in memory of Jota. A few months on and another player, Andy Robertson, spoke of his grief: “I’ve hid it well, but today I’ve been in bits… I couldn’t get my mate Diogo Jota out of my head today. We spoke so much about going to the World Cup because he missed the last one with Portugal and I did with Scotland.”
Grief and Performance
Anyone who has experienced grief could tell you that it can be comprehensive in its impacts, and relentless in its expressions. It can be all-enveloping and consuming, before seeming to recede, only to return like a blinding fog. C. S. Lewis famously wrote in his seminal text on grief, “her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.” Given the breadth of its impacts, it is little surprise that high performing athletes, competing on a stage where the margins are incredibly fine, have been hit so hard. Hall et al (2014) reported that complex grief can lead to declined cognitive functioning.
Commentators have often noted that LFC players seem to collapse once they fall behind in a game, losing confidence and disintegrating. C. S. Lewis noted, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
The 1v1 Project suggests that performance under grief is not always reduced, suggesting the existence of “performance swings”; this could explain the opening five victories LFC earned at the beginning of the season, or their notable victory over Real Madrid in the UEFA Champions League.
Glamourising Grief
Former golfer and researcher Katrina Douglas notes the way sports media tends to approach grief in an almost triumphalist manner through variations of the trope that “they won for the deceased.” Douglas mentions her own experience of being nudged toward saying one of her own wins would have made her father proud: “I said ‘No! No, he wasn’t proud that I could hit a ball around a golf course, or pick up a trophy.’ But they didn’t report that. And, for the record, I didn’t feel he was watching me.”
This skew toward positivity might also explain while few in the media seemed to have accounted for how impactful Jota’s passing might be.
Grief, Teams, and the Transference of Emotions
Something to be said about the pundits and “Opta Supercomputer’s” predictions coming after Diogo has lost his life. Either we undermine psychological factors, or we recognize that they are currently simply too complex for us to try to compute.
This was a team losing a teammate. They were an intimately connected group who spent long hours together, endured painful defeats, and enjoyed breathtaking triumphs. The bonds between these players run deep. Fogaca, Cupit, and Gonzalez (2021) investigated the impact of the death of a teammate on a sports team and reported on the onset of acute grief amongst members of that team. Notably, despite the relatively lower profile of the college team they investigated, the study reported on the negative impact of the news media on the grieving team members.
Further to these dynamics, one of the functions of emotions must also be kept in mind: transference (not of the psychoanalytical kind). Parkinson’s (2011) work on Interpersonal Emotional Transfer elaborates on the propensity of emotions to be contagious. This is an adaptive function, but can mean challenging emotions, many of which can be conjured amid grief, can be contagious, especially amongst closely knit groups.
Grief can be a destructive beast. Retrospective analyses of LFC’s season are increasingly giving significance to the possible impact of grief. Forecasts for this season could have been more accurate had they afforded more allowance for the extent to which grief can wreak havoc as a psychological leveler, especially when assessing performance within a field where the margins are razor thin. As any griever or once-grieving human will tell you, never underestimate grief, and never try to force it into a timeline.
