The death of Diogo Jota, the empty peg in the Liverpool dressing room and the raw, immeasurable impact grief and trauma will be having on Arne Slot and his squad. 'You have to find ways to manage. Next game, next game...'

There aren’t many managers who can relate to the cruellest complexities of Arne Slot’s work since that terrible July morning when Diogo Jota died. Winfried Schafer can get far closer than most.

He knows that initial sense of disbelief. The senses of confusion and pain that tear through a squad. The little reminders that can stab at a brain during quiet hours.

And he also remembers how these things must go in football, which is that grief and trauma will eventually blur into the need to play another game.

It’s been 21 years since the German left his role as the head coach of the Cameroonian national side and 22 since he stood on the touchline at the Stade de Gerland, June 26, 2003, when Marc-Vivien Foe, a loanee at Manchester City the previous season, suddenly dropped to the floor after 72 minutes of their Confederations Cup semi-final against Colombia.

‘The tragedy was by far the worst experience in my career,’ Schafer tells Daily Mail Sport.

He is 75 now and Ghana’s technical director. It’s his 10th job since Foe was pronounced dead from a heart attack, aged 28, in the stadium medical centre. Staff had spent 45 minutes trying to revive him and every detail of that day in Lyon is preserved in Schafer’s memory.

‘It is still very present with me,’ says Schafer. ‘Before the match, Marc mentioned to us that he did not feel 100 per cent and I asked him if he wanted to play and, well, of course he said yes. That was his character. That is a moment, the decision to let him play, I’ll never forget.

‘After he collapsed, the doctor ran on and when they brought Marc off on a stretcher, I touched his cheek and said “You’ll be fine”. Next moment I turned back to the field and the match started again. That’s our life in football.’

Liverpool have played 19 competitive matches across 148 days since Jota, 28, and his brother, Andre Silva, 25, crashed in the Spanish province of Zamora on July 3.

Of those fixtures, seven straight wins were followed by nine defeats in 12, meaning Liverpool, the champions, are on their worst run since 1953, hammered in successive matches at home by Nottingham Forest and PSV Eindhoven. On Sunday, at West Ham, they go again. That’s their life in football.

It would be grotesque to attempt an estimate on where the line falls between tragedy and sporting reasons for what has been a season of multi-faceted difficulties. But it is there, a factor that is difficult to talk about and a weight impossible to measure.

Liverpool have used 32 players this season and 25 of them lived and breathed with Jota in the daily hothouse of sport. They won the title with him. Liked him. They will have known where he sat in the dressing room, will see his empty peg every day, his last phone messages, and who truly knows how hard each of those triggers will land?

‘It all changes in some way or another after a tragedy,’ Mark McGhee tells Daily Mail Sport. He was the manager of Motherwell on December 29, 2007, when his captain Phil O’Donnell, a one-time Scotland international, died of heart failure aged 35, shortly after collapsing on the pitch against Dundee United.

‘There are so many small details that would catch the lads’ eyes after it happened,’ he says. ‘It is the tiny things, at a given moment, when suddenly you realise Phil isn’t there any more and you go back to that place.

‘He was huge for us at the club – his voice was always heard at training. He talked to people, advised them, and looked out for them. He would police the dressing room, keep lads in line. Leaders like that are so valuable and we all missed him tremendously in different ways.

'Don’t forget, his nephew (David Clarkson), was in our squad. The lads rallied around him brilliantly. We all felt it and still do to this day. It will be the same at Liverpool.

‘I still have conversations all the time with the lads and staff that were with us and we talk about Phil often. It doesn’t leave and shouldn’t. It’s coming up to that time of year so that will happen more now, but back then, as a football club, you have to find ways to manage. Next game, next game.’

For Motherwell, who were third in the Scottish Premier League when O’Donnell died, the next game came a fortnight later. It was a cup tie against Hearts and they drew; thereafter they dipped with six wins in 17, but stabilised well enough to finish in third in the 2007-08 season, Motherwell’s highest placing for 13 years. Grief hurt, but it didn’t stop them, because it operates differently every time.

‘The first 24 hours were huge for us,’ McGhee adds. ‘I remember getting home to my place in Glasgow after the Dundee United game. My mum and dad were with me and I couldn’t stop thinking, “How I do get them going again after something like this?”

‘Next morning I called everyone into the ground, staff and players, and when we arrived there were already scarves and flowers everywhere in the car park. I had the club chaplain with me and I had a bit of trepidation, but he was fantastic. Sensational.

‘My message to the boys was to go away that day and think, “Right, OK, I can come back in tomorrow. I can do my job, whether I'm getting into the office as a player or a coach, without any fear of disrespecting Phil”.

‘One of the things I tried to get over was that once we did come to play a game, we should be prepared to celebrate a goal and not walk back with our heads down. Quite the opposite - if we score a goal, we celebrate for Phil and for his family. So it was that initial period, I think that was the most important.

‘It’s hard to say what the situation is at Liverpool. I’m not there and maybe our situations do not equate – whatever happened in our results, we knew we were playing well that season. But what happened to Phil, it was with us every day. It still is.’

It is still with Slot, on levels both human and sporting. Last week, he showed the utmost sensitivity in flagging the point of how often Jota was the key to so many acts of retrieval from 1-0 down last season. It’s a touch they have lost on the pitch, as well as a friend and colleague.

For Andy Robertson, Jota’s closest mate in the squad, the reverberations are frequent and unpredictable, as he disclosed earlier this month in reflection of how he couldn’t get Jota ‘out of my head’ on the day Scotland qualified for the World Cup. 

The tournament was one of their go-to conversations on long trips and Robertson had been ‘in bits’ just thinking about those chats.

To many of the squad, discussing what happened publicly has been hard. In today’s climate, it would likely be pounced upon as a confected excuse, unfortunately.

The reality is that the topic remains too raw to be aired, leaving the trauma to occupy an undefined place among the other reasons why results have gone wrong.

It is a profoundly sad piece in a bigger puzzle, spanning the slow adaptations of Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz to the form of Mo Salah and Ibrahima Konate to the sale of Trent Alexander-Arnold to Slot’s tactical vulnerability against long balls.

Schafer recognises all of it, of course, and indeed how it collides with football’s non-negotiable demand for results. In 2002, he won the Africa Cup of Nations with Foe in his side for the final. In 2004, 17 months after his midfielder had died, Schafer was sacked.

‘Marc was in many ways an outstanding player and human being,’ he says. ‘When I came to Cameroon they were in a crisis, things hadn’t gone well for a while and I hadn’t worked outside Germany. The older players were cautious and distant (towards me).

‘Marc asked me how I want to be the coach without speaking French and I said “Marc, believe me, if the team needs a linguist, I have to quit today, but if you need a coach, we’ll find a way to communicate. Tell me what the team needs… but slowly". He laughed and everyone relaxed. From that moment on, we were close.

‘He had natural authority, charisma, a great sense of humour and a big heart. His death was the saddest moment in my career.

‘After the match when we heard that he passed away, we met his family in the locker room. You just hurt. You know you’ll never hurt as much as the family in front of you. But it was a very long feeling of complete defeat and powerlessness.’

Only three days separated that semi-final and the final against France, which Cameroon lost 1-0.

‘We were devastated and we didn’t want to play,’ Schafer says. ‘It was Marc’s widow who told us that we have to.

‘Before the match in the locker room we all said, “This is for Marc”. But if you watch the match, you can tell how deep the grief was.’

Where Schafer’s experience contrasted to that of Slot and McGhee is the softer scheduling of international football.

‘If such tragedy happens in a club, that’s very different,’ he says. ‘After the final, everybody went back to their clubs. It’s not easy to explain, but football is such a day-to-day business, you get used to this pendulum of excitement and exhaustion.

'I checked in with the players on the phone, visited them, but until we met again as a team, we gave each other space and time. I suppose this was also a very different time and maybe harsher, with an expectation of being tough and dealing with your feelings alone. You force yourself to focus on the job. But there were always moments when we were reminded of Marc, his presence and aura.’

For Liverpool, buried somewhere among their sporting difficulties, that absence will be felt daily. Same goes for the need to focus on the job in hand.

A life in football? It can be a brilliant thing and it can also be ruthlessly tough, as Slot and his players know all too well.