What makes it hurt so much to watch Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning suffer? Everything. Everything hurts, from Manning’s busted left foot to his dinged right shoulder and his damaged pride.

All those ailments can be fixed. What’s really strained, and might be beyond repair, is the uneasy relationship between the Hall of Fame quarterback and a team that’s been trying to nudge Manning out the door in Denver since the beginning of 2015.

Manning refused to take the hint and walk away rather than return to suffer through his worst NFL season. Broncos general manager John Elway does not escape blame; the Denver front office set up Manning for failure. But now it’s a mess. Trust between team management and Manning has taken more hard shots than the 39-year-old quarterback’s aching body.

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Nobody, not even Manning, knows for certain whether he will ever be the starting quarterback for the Broncos again. It’s out of his hands. Health, coach Gary Kubiak and the effectiveness of new starter Brock Osweiler will determine Manning’s fate.

This is a strange, uncomfortable place to be for Manning, who has controlled the chaos at the line of scrimmage more masterfully than anybody else during the past 18 NFL seasons. After getting embarrassed, then getting benched in a 29-13 loss to Kansas City on Sunday, Manning stood with his back to the wall in the Denver locker room. Never have I heard a man who always seemed to have all the answers on the football field look so lost or sound so defeated.

“By going out there trying to help the team, I ended up hurting the team,” Manning said. “I’m disappointed about that.”

Whether the call by Manning to play against the Chiefs was courageous or foolhardy, he was called into Kubiak’s office Monday and told to take a seat … until further notice. More disappointment for Manning: The coach benched him for the next game in Chicago. As Kubiak admitted, it wasn’t the news Manning wanted to hear.

So what else is new? The truth is the Broncos have done almost nothing in 2015 that has catered to Manning’s wishes. The team cut his salary by $4 million. In Kubiak, Denver hired a coach whose offensive philosophy did not fit Manning’s skill set. Elway took an inexperienced offensive line to training camp and refused to make a trade to acquire Pro Bowl tackle Joe Thomas at the trade deadline, which put an immobile quarterback in a very tough position.

Almost everything the team has done, right down to the insistence that a perfectionist give up his repetitions at Wednesday practices, screams the Broncos were ambivalent, at best, about Manning as the leader of a championship push.

It stinks to hear Manning sound so disconsolate after the way he has been treated so shoddily, as just another disposable part in the NFL machine. So now we feel sorry for Manning, diminished as an athlete but no less beloved, because he’s an altruistic benefactor to the children battling cancer in an Indiana hospital and also the quiet hero who kept alive the memory of “Chattanooga Five” by writing the shooting victims’ names on his shoes before games.

But here’s the deal, and it’s a messy reality that’s hard to accept for an NFL nation that loves Manning. There’s very little room for sentimentality in pro football, especially when Denver is chasing a championship and a broken-down Manning is too slow to keep up.

Blame his shaky offensive line or a torn plantar fascia in his left foot, but all that matters now is Manning cannot help Denver win the Super Bowl if he’s throwing interceptions at a higher rate than any other quarterback in the league.

Watching Manning evokes the same, sad vibe there was to the final season of Champ Bailey, whose Hall of Fame spirit was willing but his body was unable during the final months of 2013. Manning’s ugly 67.6 quarterback rating is worth mentioning, if only because it’s lower than the 72.9 that Tim Tebow posted in 2011, when Elway decided to dump a hugely popular quarterback whose performance was deemed too weak to lead the Broncos to their ultimate goal.

Although he considered retirement, Manning loved the game too much to quit after last season. Although the Broncos slashed their veteran quarterback’s pay, Elway did not have to the heart to tell Manning to get lost before this season. The result is an organization with one foot trying to gain traction for the future and the other foot stuck in concrete of the past, which is a good way for everybody to go nowhere fast.

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Love of the game and decisions made by the heart rather than the head got Elway and Manning in this mess. There’s no easy way out. The Broncos warned Manning repeatedly not to try to do too much this season. This offensive scheme is tailored to Osweiler’s skill set. If Osweiler performs smartly and reliably against the Bears, will Kubiak really give the job back to the league’s 31st-rated passer against New England the next week?

It would be crazy for the Broncos to bring back Manning before he’s healthy enough to play without excuses. The uneasy relationship between Manning and the team could not survive another benching.

Way back in 1998, Elway missed four regular-season starts with a barking hamstring and bruised ribs, then rode off into an orange sunset wearing a Super Bowl ring.

Hey, we all want a fairy-tale ending for Manning.

But that’s not the way to bet.

Mark Kiszla: mkiszla@denverpost.com