Jurgen Klopp believes it is a “disaster” for the players who will miss the World Cup because they get injured in club games in the weeks immediately before a winter tournament is crowbarred into the schedule.
A host of leading footballers have been ruled out of the competition in Qatar or are doubts for it after being hurt in recent fixtures, including Ben Chilwell, Timo Werner, Heung-Min Son and Takehiro Tomiyasu.
Normally players would have had a longer time to recover between their final club matches and the World Cup, and Klopp believes the current spate of injuries were predictable because of the “crazy” way the calendar has been organised.
The Liverpool manager said: “These problems were so clear and nobody mentioned it for one time until three or four weeks before the World Cup. Now all of a sudden players get injured and they say: ‘He cannot play the World Cup.’
“This specific reason that players injured in the season cannot play the World Cup is not new; after a long season it happens everywhere in the world. But now starting the World Cup a week after the last game, that is a bigger risk – crazy.
“Nobody cares about us, about how we deal with it. Should I ask the players before [Liverpool play] Southampton or Derby, ‘Do you want to play?’
“We are all guilty for letting it happen in the first place, and now it happens and now we have the situation, that is it. And we have to go along with it, and [for] the players who get injured and cannot play it is a disaster, but how can we change that?”
Liverpool forward Diogo Jota has been forced to miss the World Cup after he was injured in their October victory over Manchester City, while Klopp’s side visit Tottenham on Sunday without James Milner, because of concussion protocols after a clash of heads in Tuesday’s win over Napoli, but with captain Jordan Henderson available again.
