Manchester City Champions League win could end up costing Liverpool as much as £150m

While missing out on the Champions League next season already means that Liverpool have missed out on the potential to earn more than £100m from the competition, the Reds look set for another financial blow.

Despite a late rally which saw the Reds win seven of their final nine matches, Jurgen Klopp’s side were made to rue their patchy earlier season form as Liverpool had to settle for fifth place and a spot in next year’s Europa League, a competition that can still generate healthy financial returns but at only a fraction of what is available in European football’s elite knockout competition.

Liverpool, winners of the 2019 Champions League final and finalists in the same competition in both 2018 and 2022, have been a mainstay of the tournament over the past six years and such has been the importance of Champions League football to their financial growth over that period that their hiatus from it must only be a short-term thing.

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But the lack of Champions League football next season is also financially impactful when it comes to the reformed FIFA Club World Cup that will launch its new format from the summer of 2025, with the potential prize money for winning the competition standing at £150m.

Manchester City’s Champions League victory earlier this month against Internazionale means that the treble winners have booked their spot in the inaugural 32-team revamp of the competition, which FIFA hope will head off any further attempts to launch a breakaway competition by major European clubs. That’s because, according to the Mirror, that FIFA have drawn up plans to award qualifying places to the three Champions League winners from 2021-2024, which means the likes of Chelsea, Real Madrid and City have already booked their spot, with a glimmer of hope still for Arsenal, Manchester United and Newcastle United.

Eight more slots will be handed to European clubs by virtue of their UEFA coefficient. But places in the tournament will be limited to just two per country – unless a nation is able to boast three different Champions League winners in the previous four years.

It means major clubs such as Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Juventus, Paris Saint-Germain, Atletico Madrid and Borussia Dortmund can still qualify through the back door by either winning the Champions League next season or boosting their coefficient by reaching the latter stages.

Liverpool have a strong UEFA co-efficient, sitting fourth in the rankings thanks to their fine Champions League performances in recent years, but despite their strong history it won’t be enough to get them into the inaugural event. Eight more slots will be handed to European clubs by virtue of their UEFA coefficient but, per FIFA’s guidelines for the competition, ‘a cap of two clubs per country will be applied to the access list with an exception in cases where more than two clubs from the same country win the confederation’s premier club competition over the four-year period’. That means that the Reds would miss out on the chance to compete.

The current format, which Liverpool won in 2019, sees seven teams from six confederations around the world compete in an annual knock-out tournament. City will travel to Saudi Arabia in December in search of further silverware.

The revamped tournament would be staged every four years. But there has been opposition to FIFA’s proposal. Some members of UEFA and the European Clubs Association view it as an attack on the status of the Champions League as the world’s most prestigious club competition, while there have also been concerns raised about player welfare and adding more games to what is already a congested world football schedule, particularly for major European clubs.