The financial picture painted across Europe by UEFA was a bleak one.
Combined losses were expected across the continent of around £5bn due to the impact of the pandemic on the finances of football clubs as media rights, closed stadiums and affected commercial deals all shook the sport's eco-system to its very core.
Not a club was immune from the effects of the pandemic, but how serious those effects have been for individual clubs has largely been down to just how they managed their own affairs in years prior to COVID-19 and just how reckless they had been in pursuit of success and the reliance on the ever expanding 'bubble' of the game never bursting.
For some clubs the impact has been far greater than others.
Barcelona, for so long the club who were able to strongarm the best players in the world to join their galaxy of stars at the Nou Camp with the flash of a chequebook and promise of the best pay packet in the business, has become the sick man of Europe.
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Debts of more than £1bn and combined losses of £490m over the 2019/20 and 2020/21 accounting periods have required a shedding of their best assets, including their greatest ever player in Lionel Messi, while they no longer hold the lustre, or power, that they did in the transfer market. The £142m swoop for Philippe Coutinho from Liverpool seems a long time ago.
Inter Milan, Juventus, Real Madrid and many other of Europe's heavy hitters have all struggled badly.
In the Premier League, the richest football league in the world, the losses have been stark too.
Liverpool posted their accounts for the 2020/21 period on Friday, financials that showed a pre-tax loss of £4.8m and revenues dipping by £3m to £487m, with matchday revenues slumping 95 per cent from £70m to £3m due to the ban on fans attending games for nearly all of last season.
That £4.8m loss comes on the back of a £46m pre-tax loss that was posted for 2019/20, taking the overall loss during the pandemic to £50.8m. When compared with how their rivals have fared it has been a minor miracle.
Manchester City trumpeted their ability to be one of the few clubs to turn a profit as they registered a positive £2.4m pre-tax profit. Champions League success aided their efforts, as did the healthy commercial partnerships that arrive from the United Arab Emirates, but the profit did little to wipe away the overall impact on the business over the past two years, with losses of £123.6m overall.
Manchester United are another to have struggled.
United's 2019/20 loss stood at £23.2m, around half of Liverpool's, but their 2020/21 pre-tax losses came in at £92.2m, taking their combined losses to £115.4m.
Tottenham Hotspur were hit particularly hard due to the shuttering of stadiums having only opened their state of the art new home a year before the pandemic. The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was due to be a game changer for Spurs, but with the ability to monetise it in the way they had planned, allied with poor performance on the pitch, it has become one of the main reasons for their financial struggles during the pandemic.
Spurs posted losses of £68m in 2019/20, a figure that jumped to £80.2m in their most recent set of financial results. That takes their combined pandemic losses to £148.2m.
Chelsea are another to have posted poor results. The poorest in the Premier League so far, in fact. Their most recent accounts for 2020/21 showed a £145.6m loss to take them to a combined £156m over the two years.
Of the rest of the Premier League only West Ham United and Leicester City have published their results, with West Ham making a combined loss of £91.9m, while the Foxes' combined losses for the two pandemic affected years stand at £100.3m, double the loss that Liverpool, who remain one of only two Premier League teams over the past five years to be in economic profit, have posted during Covid.
In fact, of the teams who have yet to post their 2020/21 results, five of them posted bigger losses in 2019/20 than Liverpool have accrued over two, with Arsenal (£54m), Crystal Palace (£58m), Brighton & Hove Albion (£67m), Southampton (£76m), Aston Villa (£99m) and Everton (£139.9m) all having posted heavy pre-tax losses for 2019/20. Given the trend for clubs' results so far the combined losses are likely to worsen.
The robust nature of the Reds' business under Fenway Sports Group has meant that they have been able to weather the storm better than most, something that hands them an advantage when it comes to making progress and coming out of the pandemic in a stronger position.
Manchester City made a loss of £72.8m more than Liverpool; Manchester United £64.6m; Spurs £97.4m and Chelsea £105.2m more than the Reds.
The combined losses, so far, of the Premier League's 'big six', the clubs who were agitating to form a new European Super League last year, stands at £648m over the two pandemic-affected seasons. That means that Liverpool equate for just eight per cent of the losses from the Premier League's big boys over the last two years.
It is a demonstration of the health of the business and also how success and sustainability are managing to find a way to go hand in hand at Anfield, although it must be noted that the financial year end Liverpool in May is a month earlier than some of their rivals, meaning that other factors during the intervening four week period are accounted for.
