Full Liverpool Pre-Season Fixture List with Changes Likely | OneFootball

Liverpool’s Pre-Season Fixtures Begin Amid Mourning and Memory

There are moments in football that defy rhythm and rupture the script. A pre-season that ought to be marked by sweat, tactical diagrams and ill-fitting training gear is, for Liverpool, overshadowed by a grief that has no timetable.

The return to the AXA Training Centre this week comes cloaked not in anticipation but in a kind of shared, unspoken sorrow. Diogo Jota’s absence will be felt more profoundly than any tactical reorganisation or player sale. “Jota and his brother Andre Silva have been the subject of tributes from all around the world,” and Liverpool, suddenly a city of memorials and murmured condolences, prepares for what can only be described as a strange, heavy-limbed return.

Photo by IMAGO

Adjusting to Life Without Jota

What was meant to be a gentle reintroduction to the grind of elite football has been transformed by tragedy. “Liverpool pushed back an initial start date of Friday,” the piece notes, and with good reason. The fog of loss is not something you run off with a few beep tests.

The Reds are now scheduled to return on Tuesday. Quiet conversations behind closed doors will carry more weight than pre-match briefings. “The despair of losing Jota will also be unbearable, and yet they know that they must somehow continue on.”

Photo IMAGO

It is not resilience. It is simply necessity.

Fixtures That Cannot Be Postponed

The first of Liverpool’s pre-season fixtures is tentatively inked in for Sunday 13 July against Preston North End at Deepdale. Whether the 3pm kick-off proceeds remains undecided, but symbolism may override scheduling.

From there, Liverpool are expected to journey to Asia, where promotional obligations collide awkwardly with private grief. On Saturday 26 July, they face AC Milan in Hong Kong at 12.30pm, followed by Yokohama F. Marinos in Japan on Wednesday 30 July at 11.30am. Time zones are trivial when your team is still finding emotional footing.

The final pre-season preparations will return them to Anfield on Monday 4 August for a double-header against Athletic Bilbao. One game in front of fans at 5pm, the other behind closed doors at 8pm. One public, one private. That much, at least, seems fitting.

Curtain-Raiser Framed by Tribute

Liverpool’s fixture list cuts off early this summer, not by choice but by necessity. As Premier League champions, they will meet FA Cup holders Crystal Palace in the Community Shield on Sunday 10 August in London. It will serve, in part, as the first competitive tribute to Jota. The outlines of ceremony are already forming.

A week later, on Friday 15 August, Bournemouth arrive at Anfield for the Premier League opener. What happens then, what formation Arne Slot employs or who makes the bench, hardly seems to register in the larger scheme of things. “What happens on the pitch hardly seems to matter in light of Jota’s tragic death.” And yet, they will play.

Slot’s Task Begins in Earnest

Liverpool’s head coach finds himself not in the usual early-August maelstrom of media hot takes and transfer rumblings, but at the heart of something more difficult to define. Arne Slot must manage not just minutes and match sharpness, but mood and memory.

Photo: IMAGO

This pre-season will be unlike any other. And in a sport where the fixture list offers its own kind of certainty, Liverpool enter July without anything that can be called normal.