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.