Liverpool missed out on £20m and created a footballing monster that has plagued them for years

It was a game described by Chelsea manager Claudio Raneiri as David vs Goliath.

Indeed, when Liverpool traveled to Stamford Bridge for what was essentially a final-day shootout for a place in the Champions League and the £20m prize that came with it, the Reds s -boasted 18 league titles to Chelsea’s solitary crown won fifty years earlier.

Ranieri’s description may have been dramatic, but Gerard Houllier’s men were football heavyweights trying to climb back onto the perch. Chelsea, by contrast, were a chaotic mess of a club with a Frankenstein’s monster, a team that had drifted towards success and away from it again in the late nineties and early nineties.

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But when Liverpool met their London counterparts three months later in the 2003/04 Premier League opener at Anfield, those David and Goliath roles were reversed.

Because while Stamford Bridge celebrated in celebration when Jesper Gronkjaer slotted past Jerzy Dudek to secure Chelsea’s top-four finish, little did they know the real effect the Dane’s goal would have on the club.

Chelsea’s financial problems were well known at the time, and with debts reaching around £80m, failure to qualify for the European Premier League could have had dire consequences for the West London side.

Instead, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich took a helicopter flight over Craven Cottage and when he saw Stamford Bridge he decided, within months he had bought Ken Bates, paid off the club’s debts and invested around £105 million in players to immediately turn Chelsea into players. contenders for the title.

Liverpool, reeling from a season without Champions League football and desperately trying to reshape a team that had finished second and challenged for the title just over 12 months earlier, were desperate to sign the brilliant Irish winger from their Blackburn’s Damien Duff only to be eyed by a £17m bid from Abramovich’s new toys.

And that was the first real sign that the Reds’ place in English football’s pecking order had really changed.

By the time the two sides met again in August, Duff was fielding a side that featured seven changes from that final day clash.

Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink grabbed the winner three minutes from time after earlier goals from Juan Sebastian Veron and Michael Owen, and while the Reds would finish fourth to return to the Champions League, the rest, as they say, is history .

Abramovich may be gone from Chelsea, but the club is now firmly established as one of Europe’s heavyweights and one of Liverpool’s most hated rivals.

And without that 2003 win, it’s unlikely that Todd Boehly and his boys would be themselves at Stamford Bridge 20 years later.

The rivalry between Liverpool and Chelsea has been written about extensively, but that £20 million clash in May 2003 would be the starting point for the heated animosity between the two sides to intensify – and for the footballing landscape to change dramatically in the years that followed. they followed.

By losing that game, Liverpool actually helped create a monster. Chelsea’s summer spending spree has sparked an arms race between football clubs across Europe that has seen investors, tycoons and yes, oligarchs all eager to get involved in the English game.

The fiscal genie has truly been let out of the bottle and football will never be the same.