The Champions League final result wasn’t important for Liverpool’s future

It wasn’t a great game, or even a good one, but that doesn’t matter. What’s far more important for Liverpool, though, is that even the result itself didn’t particularly matter in terms of the club’s future.

Make no mistake – losing this match would have hurt for weeks at the very least, and probably for months on end. Juergen Klopp doesn’t call it “the biggest club game in world football” out of politeness. His breathless, almost disbelieving post-match interviews demonstrated that.

But what sets this Liverpool season apart from any other in the past decade or so is that its success appears to be based on solid – and therefore repeatable – foundations. And that hasn’t been the case in the recent past.

Bottom dollar

During a TV interview just prior to Liverpool’s 2007 Champions League final against Milan, for example, then-owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett waved around wads of dollar bills in front of the cameras. It seemed excruciatingly crass at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight it appears almost viciously ironic.

That’s because Hicks and Gillett didn’t bring mountains of cash to the club – instead, they brought debt. And as the global financial crisis of the late Noughties bit hard, that became a huge problem for leveraged buy-out specialists such as Hicks.

Liverpool still managed a second-place league finish in 2009, but the likes of Xabi Alonso, Javier Mascherano, Rafa Benitez and Fernando Torres all departed in quick succession shortly afterwards.

As Mascherano would put it years later in an unsentimental but clear-sighted assessment, “The club was in a process of disintegration…  I felt the project was falling apart. Rafa had gone, there was no direction.”

One-man band

This talent drain was to prove hugely damaging for the club, and half a decade would pass before Liverpool qualified for the Champions League again.

That, of course, was after the delirious 2013-14 season, which saw Liverpool again finish second in the Premier League, a title bid derailed by Steven Gerrard’s infamous slip with just three games left to play.

The problem that time around wasn’t the owners – Hicks and Gillett were long gone by this juncture – but rather an over-reliance on the brilliance of Luis Suarez. He left in the summer of 2014, and Liverpool’s title aspirations departed with him.

New light

Now, though, things are very different. Despite initial misgivings from some portions of the club’s fanbase, Fenway Sports Group’s ownership has turned out to be stable and supportive.

And it’s a remarkable thing to say given that no player has scored more Premier League goals than Mo Salah in either of the past two seasons, but Liverpool are nowhere near as dependent on their Egyptian king as they had been on Suarez five years earlier.

Indeed, it isn’t even so clear-cut these days that Salah is the one player whom Liverpool can least afford to lose. At the very least, Virgil van Dijk and Alisson Becker deserve to part of that conversation.

Moreover, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andy Robertson both managed more league assists than Salah this season, while Sadio Mane found the net just as often.

Instead, the most important figure at the club is the manager – who clearly isn’t going anywhere. And as Klopp said in the run-up to this game, “If I am trying to make signings I don’t have to convince players anymore and tell them what Liverpool is. That is obvious.”

Better days

There’s nonetheless a need for some reinforcements over the summer, most obviously a reserve left-back and someone who can compete with that formidable front three, which nobody in the squad currently seems able to do.

Xherdan Shaqiri has had some very big moments this season, but Klopp still doesn’t seem to put a great deal of trust in him.

Similarly, while Divock Origi has done enough in recent months to earn himself a place in Liverpool folklore – not least tonight – it remains far from clear whether he has the consistency to be a first-reserve for a club with such high ambitions.

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, meanwhile, appears to be viewed primarily as midfield ball-progressor rather than a forward.

There’s no reason not to expect Liverpool to fill these gaps adeptly, though. Both Fabinho and Naby Keita – two of last summer’s headline purchases – have begun to look fully integrated during the final third of the season. And you have to go all the way back to the transfer of Loris Karius in 2016 to find a signing who didn’t work out, which is an extraordinary strike rate.

Tonight’s victory will rightly be celebrated for a long time to come. But Liverpool’s greatest triumph might turn out to be that regardless of the result today, the club’s future looks very bright indeed.