The football press is full of stories about player power and the terrible way that the players hold their clubs to ransom. Sometimes, however, there are the occasional stories where you feel that a club has treated one of its players pretty badly.

Take the case of Liverpool’s former captain Sami Hyypia. He has been left out of the twenty-five man squad named by Rafa Benitez for this season’s Champions League adventure which starts in Marseille next week. New Uefa regulations say that all squads must have at least eight home-grown players in them and Hyypia is one of the overseas players at Anfield to miss out.

Hyypia told the Liverpool Echo that he was disappointed by the decision and by the timing of the announcement;

"The manager's decision to leave me out of the squad is a big disappointment for me. I understand it's partly because of the UEFA regulations, but despite that, the news came as a surprise to me and a shock too. But the club had a 'perfect' timing for this: they didn't want me to move elsewhere, so that's why I was told the news of having been left out, just after the transfer window had closed. The club went public to say there had been offers for me, but turned them down. So perhaps that means I am still part of the plans for this season. I don't know if I would have wanted to move on, had I heard the news about the squad when the window was still open."

Should Liverpool make it through to the knockout stages of the competition a new list will be named so Hyypia could still play a big part in the competition. Despite this, it does seem a little coincidental that the announcement has been made after the transfer window has closed. It is pretty clear that Hyypia may have wanted to move on if he had known and it seems a little ‘sneaky’ that it was kept from him.

Hyypia has been a wonderful servant for Liverpool since he moved there from Holland in 1999. A veteran of over four hundred appearances he has been a member of the side that has won six domestic and four European trophies.

It would be a real shame if the relationship between the club and such a loyal and effective player for them was damaged by this. Hyypia is a Liverpool man through and through but at the age of thirty-four he could have looked to resurrect the end of his career elsewhere, rather than ending up on the bench or staying in England whilst his colleagues head around Europe.

Apart from being on the bench in the first qualifying game against Standard Liege and playing in the first league game at Sunderland, Hyypia has not featured for the reds this season. With Skrtel, Agger and Carragher likely to be ahead of him in the pecking order, he is unlikely to feature for them much throughout the season.

It would have been a nice gesture of Liverpool to let Hyypia have all the information prior to the end of the transfer window so that he could have made an informed decision about the latter part of his illustrious career.