Liverpool soar past £500m mark and it all started 22 years ago

Liverpool are without Champions League football this season for the first time since 2015/16, with last season’s fifth-placed finish meaning that a place in the much less lucrative Europa League awaits the Reds this time around.

Prior to this season, Liverpool had made six consecutive appearances in European club football’s top tier knockout competition, winning the tournament in 2019 in Madrid with a 2-0 victory over Tottenham Hotspur having been beaten finalists 12 months prior.

In 22 years they have featured in Europe’s elite competition 15 times, also winning it so famously back in 2005 in Istanbul against AC Milan, and Liverpool’s storied European history, which includes four European Cup wins before it was rebranded and revamped as the Champions League in 1992, has been added to.

But throughout the 1990s the Reds were missing from European club football’s biggest stage as they struggled to recapture their dominance of the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, it would be 16 years until Liverpool would regain their place among the elite, with Gerard Houllier leading the Reds into their first campaign in the new-look Champions League in 2001.

It started with a rather routine two-legged success over Finnish minnows FC Haka, which ended 9-1 on aggregate, enough to punch Liverpool’s ticket to the group stage where they would line up against Boavista, Borussia Dortmund and Dynamo Kyiv.

It’s 22 years to the day since Liverpool finally returned to the biggest stage in earnest, although a mood that should have been one of great jubilation was a sombre affair on September 11, 2001, as terrorist atrocities in New York brought the world to a standstill.

The clash with Portuguese outfit Boavista ended 1-1, Michael Owen ‘s 29th-minute goal cancelling out a third-minute opener from Brazilian striker Silva, but progression would be achieved with three wins and three draws, the Reds progressing from the second group stage, as was in place then, before being beaten in the quarter finals over two legs by Bayer Leverkusen.

Since their return more than two decades ago, the Champions League has become increasingly important to Liverpool’s financial success.

When the Champions League began the prize pot shared among clubs was a little over £20m in the 1992/93 season. It now stands at over £2bn as broadcast revenues and commercial partners have bumped up the money to astronomical levels that has played a part in a ballooning wage and transfer market.