Liverpool missed out on £20m and created a football monster that tormented them for years

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

Indeed, when Liverpool travelled to Stamford Bridge for what was essentially a final day shootout for a place in the Champions League and the £20m bounty that came with it, the Reds 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 the football heavyweights trying to clamber back on their perch. Chelsea, in contrast, were a chaotic mess of a club with a Frankenstein's monster of a team that had lurched towards success and away from it again in the late nineties and early noughties.

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

Because while Stamford Bridge celebrated wildly when Jesper Gronkjaer's curled past Jerzy Dudek to secure Chelsea's top four place, little did they know the real effect the Dane's goal would have on the club.

Chelsea's financial issues were well known at the time and with debt reaching a reported figure of around £80m, failure to qualify for Europe's Premier competition could have had dire consequences for the West London outfit.

Instead, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich took a helicopter flight over Craven Cottage and when he spotted Stamford Bridge his mind was made up, within months he had bought out Ken Bates, repaid the club's debts and invested around £105m in players to immediately turn Chelsea into title contenders.

Liverpool, smarting from a season without Champions League football and desperately trying to reshape a squad that had finished second and challenged for the title just over 12 months earlier, had been desperate to sign Blackburn's brilliant Irish winger Damien Duff, only to be gazumped by a £17m bid from a Abramovich's new playthings.

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

By the time the two sides met again in August, Duff was lining up for a side that included seven changes from that final day clash.

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

Abramovich may now be gone from Chelsea but the club are now well established as one of Europe's heavyweights and one of Liverpool's most hated rivals.

And without that 2003 victory, it's unlikely Todd Boehly and his boys would have pitched up at Stamford Bridge themselves 20 years later.

Liverpool and Chelsea's rivalry has been written about at length, but that £20m showdown in May 2003 would be the starting gun for the simmering animosity between the two sides to intensify - and for the landscape of football to change dramatically in the years that followed.

By losing that game Liverpool had, in effect, helped create a monster. Chelsea's summer spending spree ignited an arms race between football clubs across Europe that saw investors, tycoons and yes, oligarchs, all keen to get involved in the English game.

The fiscal genie was well and truly out of the bottle, and football would never be the same again.