BREAKING (and I use that word loosely): a man played a football match that meant absolutely nothing and ended up in hospital. In MINNESOTA. I don't even know where to start with this one, but I'm going to try, because that is what LolFootball dot com pays me the medium bucks to do.

So here's what happened. James Rodríguez, Colombia international, golden boot winner, the man who scored THAT volley against Uruguay in 2014, played a friendly against France on Sunday. A friendly. Not a World Cup final. Not a Copa América knockout round. A friendly. The kind of match where managers sub off their entire starting eleven at half time and nobody in the stadium can remember why they bought a ticket. And James ended up hospitalised with severe dehydration.

Now look. First and foremost, I genuinely hope the lad is okay. Dehydration is no joke. It's properly dangerous and I'm glad he got medical attention quickly. But can we just sit with the absurdity of this situation for a moment? Because I feel like international friendly fixtures are slowly revealing themselves to be the most dangerous events in world football, and nobody is doing anything about it.

Sources close to sources tell me... actually, no, I don't need sources for this one. I just need eyes. Every single international break, somebody gets injured, somebody gets crocked, somebody's hamstring goes twang like a banjo string, and a club manager somewhere puts their fist through a tactics board. Joan Laporta is literally at war with FIFA over Raphinha right now. And that was a competitive match! James went down in a FRIENDLY.

Think about it. You are James Rodríguez. You have had one of the most aesthetically pleasing careers in modern football history. You have played for Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Everton (we don't talk about that), and various other clubs. You are 34 years old. Your knees have been through more than most people's entire bodies. And someone has asked you to play a meaningless match in Minnesota in early April and you've nearly been taken out by insufficient water intake.

I'm not a doctor. I want to make that abundantly clear. I am a man who once confused a hamstring with a quad muscle live on our podcast and had to be corrected by our intern. But even I know that making a 34 year old run around for 90 minutes in what I can only assume was a heated indoor stadium or a weirdly warm Minnesota evening, in a match that has the competitive significance of a kickabout in a Tesco car park, is maybe not the wisest use of a human being.

And this is the thing that kills me about international friendlies. They exist in this bizarre purgatory where they're simultaneously too important to cancel and too meaningless to care about. Managers use them to "test formations" and "build squad depth," which is code for "I've been contractually obligated to pick a squad and I'm going to play the B team and hope nobody breaks."

Meanwhile, James is in a hospital bed in Minnesota, which is not a sentence I ever expected to type when I woke up this morning. Minnesota! The man could have been sat at home, feet up, hydrating at his own pace, watching Netflix, living his best life. Instead he's hooked up to an IV because international football demanded his presence for a match that approximately eleven people will remember by next Thursday.

Get well soon, James. Genuinely. You deserve better than this. You scored one of the greatest World Cup goals ever filmed and your reward, twelve years later, is a drip in your arm in the American Midwest because somebody thought Colombia vs France in April was a thing that needed to happen.

Football, honestly. It's a health hazard wrapped in a fixture calendar wrapped in a FIFA revenue report. Stay hydrated out there, everyone. Literally.