Jurgen Klopp has urged football authorities to put players’ welfare first and ‘not their wallet’.
Liverpool continue to hold talks with the EFL over a new date for their Carabao Cup quarter-final with Aston Villa, which clashes with their FIFA Club World Cup commitments.
The prospect of the European champions fielding two separate teams in order to break the current deadlock surrounding their last-eight tie at Villa Park.
But while Klopp insists that no final decision has been made, he outlined the problems which spreading the Reds’ squad across two competitions would pose.
He said: “If we would play while we are in Qatar, it would be two different teams.
“We cannot leave any players at home for the Carabao Cup, we have two games there in a very busy period.
“It’s not that we can go there with 11 players and says these 11 guys play the two games in Qatar and the other guys play at home in England against Aston Villa.
“We have to make a decision and we will make a decision but not yet.”
The Liverpool manager also challenged the game’s various regulatory bodies to consider the impact of their scheduling plans on the teams affected by them.
“Let’s have a look how they deal with it. If you see the schedule that’s coming up, it’s all okay,” added Klopp.
“Premier League, what a competition, sensationally cool; then, Carabao Cup, nice competition, what a game we had on Wednesday night [against Arsenal].
“But then, end of January after a very busy schedule in December, there are two semi-finals.
“It’s an easy decision for me to say if you keep that competition then why don’t you make [just] two semi-finals? We still have, in February, March and April, FA Cup games at the weekend.
“You can discuss that always, I’m four years in and before I knew about it people discussed it already. That’s the difference to other countries, Italy has 20 teams as well.
“[England] is the only country where nobody wants to touch it, or maybe wants to touch it – the FA wants to touch the League Cup, the Football League wants to touch the FA Cup, but nobody really wants to discuss it.
“Then, on top of that, UEFA decides to make the Nations League to give the boys who are already pretty busy – some very successful players, good players – another couple of intense games.
“I said it before and it always sounds like it’s my problem, I’m not involved in Nations League games, I don’t play international games at all.
“I have a couple of days off, it’s not my problem. I only discuss from the same perspective that you should discuss it but you don’t.
“You only report what I say and, as long as it’s like this, there’s no pressure on anybody.
“We have exactly the same situation and we [wonder] why the best players in the world cannot perform on the highest level as long as we wish for or they get bad injuries and stuff like this.
“So people say you should have a bigger squad but the game is not made for bigger squads.
“You cannot make 40-player squads and 20 of them you send away until January and say, ‘Now you come in’, but we pay for all of them. That’s not possible. It’s just not how it works.
“At the moment it’s an imbalance between the number of players you have in a squad, the number of games you have to play, and a big gap between the breaks the boys would usually need and [what] they get.
“If you are an international player and play all the big competitions in the world, then you have two weeks per year off. That’s a fact.
“Two weeks [for] the Manes, the Salahs, the Hendersons, all these guys have two weeks off a year.
“In a physically demanding job with pressure as well – we cannot say this game is not important, or this game we don’t have to play really – that’s the situation.
“The situation is clear, there would be a few solutions possible, but there was not one day where FIFA, UEFA, the Premier League, the Football League that they have to sit at a table and think about the players and not about their wallet.
“We cannot change that, obviously. It’s probably not even 50/50 what people think about what I say, it’s probably 40/60, 30/70, because we discuss it always on the back of the money we earn.
“That makes you not stronger, more resilient, it’s not like this. These are the games we have to play and we will play them with all we have.
“But somebody has to think about how many games it will be.”