Loris Karius had come to terms with his footballing career being over when, following his Liverpool release in 2021, he was left without any desirable club prospects at the prime goalkeeping age of 28. “I was retired,” Karius tells The Independent, “because I didn’t do anything for seven months. It sounds dramatic. In my mind, I was pretty much retired.”
You wouldn’t blame him for falling out of love with the game. Three years prior, Karius had endured one of the cruellest nights a sportsman could possibly conceive, sparking a downward spiral that looked terminal. The infamy of his 2018 Champions League final capitulation in Kiev, later discovered to have been catalysed by a concussion, came to unfairly but understandably define his time on Merseyside. There, they struggle to remember him beyond his worst moment.
