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You don’t really know how.

All Liverpool’s players can do is try to work through it, that sudden wave of grief from the loss of a joyful friend, who was far more than just a teammate.

The great difference is that might come in front of crowds of thousands, in view of audiences of millions, amid the sporting expectation to perform as champions.

It is the affecting discordance of discussing a real-life tragedy, where people are grieving, within the context of sport’s relative trivialities.

The sport is also why millions more people were touched by Jota’s passing than just those who matter most – his young family and friends.

So while it almost feels misplaced to be talking about the potential effects of this on mere football, the reality of that context is that players are grieving.

That feeling will be all the more pronounced since there’s no comparable example in modern English football, nothing to reach to.

The game has had players pass at the prime of their career, and some of the most prominent are worth commemorating now: Jimmy Davis, Marc-Vivien Foe, Antonio Puerta, Dani Jarque, Besian Idrizaj, Davide Astori, George Baldock.

All grief is as pure as any other grief, but there’s an extra dimension in a football context when it involves reigning champions – particularly after all the emotion of the long wait that Liverpool had.

“Hopefully that’s good for the players, that they’ll feel part of an organisation that gets them, and supports them.”

That touches on how one of the few remotely comparable examples is the emotional toll of Hillsborough or perhaps even a tragedy of a completely different scale, like the Munich air disaster that killed many of the Busby Babes.

Such moments actually remind you that the sport is uniquely adept at immediately coping with grief.

“If you look at football over the years, what it’s really good at, under the most intense grief and pressure, is that it does get things right naturally,” says Michael Caulfield, who works with Brentford but is speaking in his capacity as a trained psychologist.

Football is not clanky.”

The sport’s social and community values make its emotion natural in such moments.

Football is really good at coming together in moments of grief (PA Wire)

There is nevertheless a difference between immediately coping with a tragedy and registering its deeper effects.

What will be said if Liverpool endure a bad run later in the season?

If coping with grief is about just going step by step, the fixture list makes you play that first game, then the next game, then the next game…

“I think it does help a lot as it’s immediate exposure therapy,” Walters says.