Professional football isn't fun any more. Sport is now work. Sonny Bill Williams, who walked out on the Bulldogs, has been sending messages to Canterbury for months that he was unhappy in his job.

NRL players win a match, exchange a few careful words with the media, plunge into an ice bath, are breathalysed, weighed and measured for body fat, push weights, sit through a video highlights session exposing every error and are then ushered onto the field to practise the same routine of running from dummy-half, executing a block play, then a double block before kicking to the corners.

"Don't let us take all the fun out of it," says Titans' chairman Paul Broughton, the NRL's longest-serving official.

If you're Williams, you have the additional burden of people with mobile phone cameras taking photos of trysts in pub toilets or Customs officials contacting radio stations to report you leaving the country.

So much for privacy.

Similarly, Penrith's Craig Gower loathed the media spotlight and fled to France, while St George Illawarra's Mark Gasnier's recent decision to play for Stade Francais followed 18 months of desperate pleading by his chief executive, Peter Doust, to stay.

When the pair met for the last time, along with Gasnier's agent, George Mimis, Doust looked Gasnier in the eyes and said, "I'm wasting my time, aren't I?" The immediate response was "Yes."

Multiple premiership coach Wayne Bennett, who will coach the Dragons next year, has long argued that if a player wants to go, nothing will stop him.

It's not known if Bennett spoke to Gasnier but it's likely he read the earlier reports about Gasnier's flirtation with the Wallabies and knew his departure was inevitable.

Gasnier blames the NRL, arguing it guaranteed his third-party deal and it was only when he was told the $300,000 he was owed would be assessable in the Dragons' salary cap that he decided he wanted out. This is contradicted by the get-out clause Mimis inserted in Gasnier's contract.

If Gasnier always believed the NRL would honour his third-party deal, why an annual escape clause?

"At the end of the day, the French have thrown up offers and arrangements which we can't compete with," Doust says of the €80,000 ($130,000) tax-free image rights deals and a 25 per cent tax rate.

Significantly, Gasnier did not use Mimis to negotiate his French contract, but the very bottom line is that rugby league had become a chore. His game wasn't improving.

He still rushes up in defence. Video sessions are a bore.

Dragons' coach Nathan Brown has enlisted the always optimistic Wendell Sailor to enthuse Gasnier for the match against the Bulldogs tonight.

Similarly, the Bulldogs have tried all types of therapy to massage Sonny Bill's ego, including a dinner date with his new management team where an entourage was fed but the star second-rower stayed home.

Unlike Gasnier, whose game had stagnated, Sonny Bill was still capable of winning games on his own.

When I last spoke face to face with him at the Fairfax awards at the SCG in December, he asked a series of questions about Melbourne Storm coach Craig Bellamy and assistant Stephen Kearney.

His first choice would have been Bellamy and the anonymity of Melbourne, while his second was to play under Kearney at Canterbury.

Maybe he saw in Kevin Moore, the replacement next year for current coach Steve Folkes, more of the same.

Some will conclude that Sonny Bill's lunch on Thursday with Moore and captain Andrew Ryan was a final attempt to decide whether anything will be different at Canterbury in 2009.

More likely, it was a facade. Unlike Gasnier, who admitted to Doust it was futile to attempt to talk him into staying, Williams took the cowardly course.

Williams's management is the same team under which Anthony Mundine fled the Dragons for the USA before "The Man" took up boxing. Ditto Solomon Haumono fleeing the Bulldogs to London in search of the "Pleasure Machine."

Mimis was Gorden Tallis's manager when he wanted out of the Dragons to play for the Broncos in 1995. The Broncos offered $100,000 restitution, but Dragons' boss Danny Robinson refused and Tallis was forced to sit out a year.

But Sonny Bill's management knows the Bulldogs are trapped. Should he return from France, they can't take him back and if they accept a settlement, it's an invitation to disgruntled stars to break contracts.

Until players experience more joie de vivre with their football, it's the clubs who will learn the meaning of hard labour.