Interview'We love coming here' - Billy Hogan on Liverpool's plans for pre-season tour of Asia

The Reds touched down for the first leg of their trip on Monday afternoon local time. Leg two will see the Premier League champions visit Japan.

Arne Slot’s squad will play two matches – against AC Milan in Hong Kong and Yokohama F. Marinos in Japan – as their preparations for 2025-26 ramp up, while several club legends, including Sir Kenny Dalglish, also joined the travelling party.

LFC Foundation coaches will deliver dedicated sessions, too, and Liverpool’s chief executive officer Hogan detailed the importance of the tour during an interview at the club hotel.

Watch it in the video above, or read on for a full transcript.

Billy, we landed in Hong Kong a couple of hours ago. It has been an extremely difficult couple of weeks for everybody connected with the club after the passing of Diogo Jota and Andre Silva.

It was devastating for the football club and certainly even more so for his wife and family. We’re out here in Asia but we continue to stay in touch with them in terms of how we will remember them during the matches this week. As well as what we’ll look at in terms of longer, permanent tributes to them as well. A very, very difficult last few weeks. I want to say thank you to everybody across the world of sport, not just football but the world of sport, for their outreach and their support – not just at the club but certainly again most importantly, the family. As I have said previously, Diogo was a fantastic footballer but just a really terrific guy and he is deeply missed.

It’s going to be a tour like no other but a really important time as the team try to get ready for a brand-new season?

Yeah, obviously this will be a bit of a different pre-season but it is certainly pre-season and we need to get the team into a place from a fitness perspective where they can start to get some match minutes under their belt. Obviously we played Stoke in a behind-closed-doors friendly just before we took off – a couple of hours before departure – so continuing to get the match minutes and build up that fitness obviously is the most important part of why we do this.

Football is the most important part of what we’re doing. It’s an opportunity for us to see some of the new signings. We’re incredibly excited to be playing AC Milan at the Kai Tak Stadium; we’ll be the first European friendly that has been hosted at the Kai Tak Stadium here in Hong Kong, in front of a sell-out crowd, which will be fantastic. Then we go on to Yokohama and play against Yokohama Marinos in front of more than 70,000 supporters, another sell-out. So, two great games and a really exciting week ahead.

We’re back in Asia for the first time since 2023. Why is this part of the world so integral to how the team will prepare for a new season?

Pre-season is always most important, as we said, to focus on the football. But when we can find opportunities to bring all the different aspects of the club together along with the football, that’s a really important part of why we come on tour. Asia is a really important and huge fan base for the club so we’re incredibly excited to be here. Standard Chartered, this is one of their Asian headquarters, this market is incredibly important for them from their perspective. You mentioned we’ve just landed; we were on a Japan Airlines plane, so I’d like to thank them – it was a very comfortable way to get out here so a huge thank you to them, obviously they are headquartered in Japan. Kodansha is another partner of ours that is headquartered in Japan.

We’ll be doing a ton of activation across our partners, including Carlsberg, AXA etc. So, a lot that we’ll be doing here in the market and looking forward to an opportunity to try to bring the club closer to our fans. We’ve talked about this in the past, we’ve got so many fans around the world and certainly here in Asia; we’ve got almost a quarter of our social media following, more than 50 million fans who are following the club across social media. It’s an opportunity for our fans to come closer to the club and to see the club in action. Many of them will never get the chance to come to Anfield so this is our chance to bring the club to them.

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There is lots of activity planned on the ground here, including with LFC Foundation…

We want to make sure that when we come out to any tour match that, not only do we come to play the match, we do more than that. We mentioned some of the commercial activity we’ll be doing but in particular we want to make sure that we are doing things on the ground, in the community. So, as you said, we’ve brought coaches from LFC Foundation – as I say, they are the hardest-working people on tour. They are running football clinics literally from morning until night and I’m going to be at an event tomorrow with the Special Olympics here in Hong Kong.

We’re working with the Make-A-Wish Foundation in Japan, some local children will get the opportunity to meet the first team. So, yeah, it’s terrifically important that we are involved in the community. We have a number of our legends who are out here as well – Sir Kenny Dalglish is here, on his first trip to Hong Kong, he told me on the flight. Rushy [Ian Rush] is here, Sami Hyypia, Lucas Leiva, Niamh Fahey, Jerzy Dudek – so we have a great group of legends and former players that are here as well. They’ll be involved in the Foundation clinics and they will be involved in some of the commercial events, as will the first team.

So, it’s a terrific opportunity for us and last but not least, we are opening our 20th standalone retail store here in Hong Kong. We opened our 19th just a couple of weeks ago and the 20th will mean we have more standalone retail stores than any team in sport, which just shows the power and strength of this football club.

The new players who have joined this summer also get the opportunity to experience the size and scale of the club so soon after signing…

Yeah, I think it’s always interesting for the new signings especially to be able to come out on tour and whether we go to Asia or we go to North America, to instantly get a sense for how big the club is. So, playing [in front of] two sell-out crowds, for the Standard Chartered Trophy here in Hong Kong and playing against AC Milan a little over 20 years on from the Miracle of Istanbul, which will be a great evening and occasion. And then going to Japan, it will be our first pre-season match in Japan. I was talking to Kenny and Rushy about their trip to Japan [for the 1984 Intercontinental Cup match] which didn’t go so well! But we’re looking forward to what will be a great two matches, a terrific week or so that we will be out here, and we’re just looking for an enjoyable time out here on tour and we hope that everybody really enjoys it. We love coming here.