Far too much is being asked of players now

for f a l long ti time and d the th Liverpool side he has built will be affected when Mo Salah and Sadio Mane go to the Africa Cup of Nations in the New Year.

Suffer

The bigger clubs suffer the most because they are involved in the Champions League or the Europa League and your body can only take so much, do so much, before it protests.

The danger would be that they will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

It’ It’s great tf for us who h want tt to watch football and for television and for advertisers who make money out of it.

But it’s not good for the people who matter the most, the actual players.

It’s applied all the time, that players get so much money and so on. But footballers can get mental health issues too.

It doesn’t matter how much money you make, being away from your partner and your family for a long stretch of time takes a toll on you and on them. That has to be factored into the equation.

Whatever about what you earn every week, you have to have a life.

The whole money thing is an argument people try to make to justify what is madness.

Our own Ireland players have, this week alone, had a long trip to Baku and then back to Dublin, two really testing, high pressure matches, all the emotion has been drained out of them and they will have gotten back to their clubs inside the last 24 hours.

Then they will be out again tomorrow!

All the journeying to

Azerbaijan and back and that is for players predominantly not operating in European football.

Things are at breaking point and they are only going to get worse.

Game

There is no sign that the people driving this, the federations, the Premier League and the TV companies, are even concerned about the problem.

They are the people running the game — they’re running it into the ground.