Searching for Liverpool's Champions League winning Starting XI

Why didn't they start together more often?

Five years ago today, Liverpool became champions of Europe for the sixth time. They did it with a starting XI which has gone down in history.

People find it hard to believe that the above pictured group of men started a solitary game together, and that it just so happened to be in the 2019 Champions League final. It’s the well established front three, a rock solid midfield, an excellent back four and the best goalkeeper in the world. Why wouldn’t Jürgen Klopp have selected them together more than once?

He presumably would’ve loved nothing more, but life got in the way. It got me thinking, though. How close did this legendary team get to starting more matches?

Our window of opportunity lasted three seasons. The Brazilian pair of Alisson Becker and Fabinho joined in the summer of 2018, ahead of the Champions League winning campaign, while Gini Wijnaldum was the first of the gang to leave when his contract expired in 2021.

With the Reds competing on multiple fronts every season, this group’s three shared campaigns featured a grand total of 163 matches. You will want to open the tables in a new tab to see them a little better, but let’s start whittling the games down.

No player achieved a full house of appearances on their 2018-2021 bingo card. Mohamed Salah came closest, with 151 out of a possible 163 games played, ahead of Roberto Firmino (148) and Andy Robertson (147). We don’t need the 11 players to have started every game to find them starting together more than once, of course, but Joël Matip only appearing in 56 of the matches severely hampered the chances.

When looking for an explanation for why this group began a single match together, fitness problems are the obvious starting point. Liverpool’s record in the Premier League has tracked closely with their injury total for years. The most recent difference between points and absence suggests that the Reds should be applauded for taking their 2023/24 title challenge as deep as they did, not chastised for seeing it fall away.

Klopp’s intensely physical football combined with a relatively small squad of high quality players took a toll. Never was this more evident than in the final of the three seasons at which we’re looking for our XI, in which anyone who could play centre-back suffered an injury and usually a bad one. This is very apparent on the below table, which sees matches for which at least one of 11 players was unavailable due to injury highlighted.

There were just eight matches after the 2019 Champions League final in which the starting XI from Madrid could have taken to the field together. Some of the highlighted games in the table saw 10 of the men start but we’re not interested in near misses. Let’s take out the matches for which one or more of our heroes was excluded from the squad.

The games in blue were ineligible due to players being rested or suspended. The latter reason took a couple of big games out of the equation, including the derby with Divock Origi’s ridiculous 96th minute winner and a home match against Bayern Munich, with Jordan Henderson and Virgil van Dijk unavailable respectively. We’re down to 27 potentially qualifying fixtures, in which the 11 starters from the 2019 Champions League final were in the match day 18.

The 1-0 loss to Atletico Madrid in 2020 was once the subject of a BBC article along these lines, as it was the first game in which Liverpool started with the XI for which we’re looking except with Joe Gomez in for Matip. The latter was on the bench and remained there that night, so let’s exclude the games where there was an unused substitute lurking in our midst.

We’re almost there, with just 12 matches seeing all the players on our hitlist featuring. As we know only one of them saw the hallowed undecet start, there’s 11 where somebody was a sub, and of those, there was just one in which the whole group was on the pitch together.

Naby Keïta started a game against Chelsea at Anfield in 2019, alongside Fabinho and Jordan Henderson in midfield. While the Guinean was on the pitch, Salah did this:

Thirteen minutes after that rocket, Keïta was replaced by Gini Wijnaldum and the team which would start a Champions League final less than two months later was born. It lived that day for 11 minutes, with James Milner coming on to replace Jordan Henderson after the captain suffered an injury.

This means that including stoppage time, Liverpool supporters saw 71 minutes of Alisson, Alexander-Arnold, Matip, van Dijk, Robertson, Henderson, Fabinho, Wijnaldum, Salah, Firmino and Mané. In that time, the only goal was Salah’s penalty in Madrid.

Still, if you’re not going to complete 90 minutes together as a group, you’d better make what time you have count. Half a decade ago today, Liverpool’s illustrious but rare starting XI very much did that.