Liverpool lost out on £20 million and produced a nightmare of a football team that plagued them for years.
Claudio Ranieri, the manager of Chelsea, compared the match to David vs. Goliath. In fact, Liverpool had eighteen league crowns to Chelsea’s single championship, won fifty years earlier, when the two teams traveled to Stamford Bridge for what was effectively a final-day shootout for a spot in the Champions League and the £20 million prize that came with it. Although Ranieri’s portrayal was exaggerated, Gerard Houllier’s team was the football heavyweights attempting to get back up to their position. In comparison, Chelsea was a disorganized and disorderly club with a team like a Frankenstein’s monster that had fluctuated between success and failure in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
However, those David and Goliath positions had been switched when Liverpool played their London rivals in the Premier League opener at Anfield three months later. Because while everyone at Stamford Bridge let out a raucous cheer when Jesper Gronkjaer curled past Jerzy Dudek to guarantee Chelsea’s spot in the top four, they were unaware of the true impact the Dane’s strike would have on the team. Chelsea’s debt, which was said to have reached £80 million at the time, was publicly known, therefore the West London team may have suffered greatly had they not been able to advance to Europe’s Premier competition.
Rather, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich flew in a helicopter over Craven Cottage and, upon seeing Stamford Bridge, he decided to buy Chelsea. In a matter of months, he had paid off the club’s debts, acquired Ken Bates, and invested almost £105 million on players, transforming Chelsea into title contenders right away. In an attempt to rebuild a team that had finished second and challenged for the championship just over a year ago, Liverpool, smarting from a season without Champions League football, was frantically trying to sign Blackburn’s outstanding Irish winger Damien Duff. However, they were outbid by a £17 million offer from Abramovich’s new toys. And that was the first concrete indication that the Reds’ standing in English football had really changed.
The rivalry between Liverpool and Chelsea has been extensively discussed, but that £20 million match in May 2003 would be the catalyst for the long-simmering hostility between the two teams to heat up, and for the football landscape to drastically shift in the years that followed. Liverpool had effectively contributed to the creation of a monster by losing that game. Due to Chelsea’s summer spending binge, European football teams were in a weapons race with each other, and investors, businessmen, and yes, even oligarchs, were eager to participate in the English game. Football was never going to be the same because the financial genie had been let out.