As anybody who has attended a shared leaving party at their workplace will surely attest, they can often prove a particularly difficult balancing act. After all, some people will always be more popular than others.
Such will perhaps be the case at this afternoon as Anfield prepares to wave farewell to four players who each played their specific part in helping Jurgen Klopp's first great Liverpool team achieve unprecedented success.
Evidence from the King Power Stadium on Monday night suggests Roberto Firmino will be afforded the greatest amount of affection from supporters, at least in terms of his vocal support. But there will also be boundless respect for the ever-reliable and often underrated vice-captain James Milner, and an acknowledgement the efforts of Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Naby Keita would have been greater but for untimely and serious injury setbacks.
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Their departure further cuts the umbilical cord from the Liverpool team that won the Champions League in 2019 and then followed it up by claiming a first championship in 30 years while also ensuring the Reds became World champions for the first time.
Indeed, of the 24 players who made at least one league appearance that season, at least half will no longer be at the club come the start of the new campaign. And of the 23 in the matchday squad for the FIFA Club World Cup win over Flamengo in December 2019, 12 will have gone.
The exits of Milner and Firmino have also further distanced Liverpool from the Brendan Rodgers era, with Joe Gomez now the only one of the 33 players signed during the tenure of the Northern Irishman still at the club.
Time, though, waits for nobody. And if constructing a winning team is one of the biggest challenges in management, an even greater task is knowing when to start dismantling the squad and building another successful side.
Klopp, though, has long accepted the realities. “We will not stay together for ever," he has previously said. "That is how it is. If someone wants to go somewhere else we have to find a solution for it. If we want to find somebody from another club we have to find a solution for it – all these kind of things. All the players are important because they can really contribute in the moment when they start or when they come on and that is why they are Liverpool players.”
Very few Liverpool managers have been able to build more than one winning team, largely due to the fact it requires first a successful side and then the time in the hotseat to build another.
And even the two Anfield managerial greats, Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley, didn't find it easy. Shankly went seven years without a trophy between 1966 and 1973, while Paisley had 18 months of wayward form when finishing fifth in 1981 - after six years of being in the top two, not too dissimilar to Liverpool's current plight - and then slumping to 12th by Boxing Day the following season before it clicked and Liverpool won the title. Mind you, it helped they won the League Cup and a third European Cup in the meantime. Both managers, though, aborted their initial attempts to rebuild. It took time.
Of course, the fact is Liverpool have already moved on from the four players who will bid farewell today. Oxlade-Chamberlain has made only two brief outings since early February, Keita hasn't been seen since being substituted at half-time at Crystal Palace at the end of that month, Firmino has started just one game since the World Cup in December and Milner, although regularly involved, has played for more than 25 minutes in a single game just three times since January,
Cody Gakpo, the January arrival from PSV Eindhoven, has assumed Firmino's mantle as the attacking spearhead, while the emergence of teenager Stefan Bajcetic and progress of youngsters Harvey Elliott and Curtis Jones have edged Oxlade-Chamberlain and Keita to the sidelines.
And all that is before the expected summer recruitment drive. Two high-profile midfielders are expected to arrive, possibly a third. There could be further tweaking in other areas of the squad, with a new goalkeeper and centre-back a possibility. What's certain, though, is change is coming.
Nothing lasts forever. And if this afternoon's emotional Anfield farewell acts as a reminder of a glory period in Liverpool's history, it's also a sign of what Klopp hopes is about to come.
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