Is the problem too many games or is the problem a culture that wont allow you to miss games and take a break.
Both.
Increasing demands are being placed on players by the people who run football. And, in the context of the pandemic, by people outside football, including members of the UK government. Demands that weren't there when they agreed their current wages, wages which some seem to think means they aren't entitled to object to any of these ever-increasing demands being placed on them.
Meanwhile, the idea expressed by some in this thread that players can happily say "actually I'm not feeling at my best, I think I'll sit the next few games out" whenever they like without professional consequence is at odds with the reality of how football works. Players are expected to play when needed, often while already injured.
All of this seems to be underlined by some ingrained idea that footballers don't really deserve to earn the money they earn despite the mega-rich industry they're part of being built entirely off the back of their talent.
It must be so easy for the billionaire organisations who run football to ignore player welfare when the immediate response to someone raising the issue is for fans, without prompting, to leap to criticising them, comparing them to healthcare workers (who the majority of football fans
also likely had an easier job than during pandemic, incidentally) for no apparent reason and using the money these mega-institutions deign to hand back to the talent driving their industry as a reason to ignore problems
that directly impact the quality of the product fans pay to watch. And people wonder why those same institutions don't seem to respect the fans.
This is a dispute between the mega-rich capitalist institutions running football and the largely working-class people whose talents their ability to generate huge swathes of income is based on. It's not a dispute between players and people working normal jobs. Yet some fans seem determined to frame it as the latter, as if Henderson is calling for footballers to get the same level of sympathy as NHS nurses.