8 players we can’t believe never made it to a Champions League semi-final
Arsenal, Roma, Chelsea and PSG legends feature among eight legendary players we can’t believe never played in a Champions League semi-final.
There have been countless unforgettable battles at that stage of the Champions League, with Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Andres Iniesta and Fernando Torres just a few of the names that blessed us with iconic moments. But some exceptional players never even made it that far.
Here are eight superb footballers who never played in a Champions League semi-final.
Gabriel Batistuta
If you’re old enough to remember James Richardson sipping a cappuccino on Channel Four’s brilliant Football Italia, you’ll no doubt fondly recall Batigol as a force of nature in his pomp.
One of the greatest goalscorers in history.
But while the Argentinian forward regularly made mincemeat of classic Serie A defences, opportunities on the biggest European stage were actually fairly limited – in large part thanks to spending his prime years at Fiorentina.
Batistuta memorably led the line for La Viola in Champions League matches against the likes of Arsenal, Barcelona and Manchester United, but he never made it beyond the convoluted multi-group-stage format the tournament favoured around the turn of the century.
It was a similar story during his time with Roma, where he came up against Real Madrid and Liverpool.
In his twilight years, he replaced Hernan Crespo at Inter in the 2002-03 campaign – but he wasn’t part of the Nerazzurri’s Champions League squad when they made it to the final four that year.
Edinson Cavani
In fairness, a cruel twist of fate denied Cavani a place in the semis when PSG made it to the semi-finals for the first time in the post-takeover era in 2019-20.
Unlike club captain Thiago Silva, he refused to sign a short-term two-month contract extension past June that year.
The Uruguayan had started to be frozen out of the picture and was no longer a PSG player when the season resumed for the strange, post-lockdown, behind-closed-doors final stages of the Champions League campaign.
He’d featured intermittently in the group stage and completed 90 minutes in the Round of 16 comeback victory over Borussia Dortmund en route to the final, but he was out of the squad for the one-legged knockout victories over Atalanta and RB Leipzig, as well as the defeat to Bayern Munich in Lisbon.
Francesco Totti
Roma weren’t exactly Champions League mainstays over the course of Totti’s legendary 24 years of service.
The World Cup winner flitted between the Champions League and the UEFA Cup/Europa League during his time as a Giallorossi deity. He only ever made it as far as the quarters, with Manchester United eliminating Roma in both 2007 and 2008.
Roma knocking out Barcelona en route to the semis in the 2017-18, their first season after his departure, must’ve been bittersweet.
You imagine he’d have gone on to do more in Europe had he succumbed to Florentino Perez’s ongoing flirtations, but he was too loyal to his club and his city.
“I wouldn’t go to Real Madrid, because it wasn’t my story,” Totti reasoned in The Guardian.
“My story was Rome, Roma, and a series of reference points that allowed me to express the best of me as a man and therefore as a footballer. Forever my family.”
Patrick Vieira
Between 1995 and 2011, Vieira represented AC Milan, Arsenal, Juventus, Inter and a nascent Manchester City, but he never made it to the final four of the Champions League.
That can’t be right, but somehow it is.
Arsene Wenger’s Gunners made it to the final in their first season since his departure.
And, whisper it, but a young Cesc Fabregas actually ran rings around him when he came up against them with Juventus in the quarters that year.
Jose Mourinho’s Inter won the treble in 2009-10 but he left in January of that campaign after struggling for gametime.
Tony Adams
Like Ian Wright, Adams is another Highbury hero who was a victim of the particularly intense competition for Champions League places in the 1990s.
The centre-half famously captained the Gunners to three league titles in three different decades, but he only ever played in four European Cup or Champions League campaigns and never made it past the quarters.
Alan Shearer
Not only did Shearer never make it as far as the semi-finals, but the Premier League’s all-time top goalscorer never once played in a Champions League knockout game.
That’s a bit mad when you think about it.
Batistuta has competition as the greatest 1990s icon to never play in a major knockout clash. Shearer was never really given the platform to go deep into Europe’s premier cup competition while representing Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle United.
The striker boasts a respectable record of seven goals and four assists from just 16 Champions League appearances in total – all of which were in the group stages in 1995-96 and 2002-03.
A knee injury kept him sidelined for all six of the Champions League matches under Kenny Dalglish in 1997-98, including that famous 3-2 victory over Barcelona.
READ: 9 superb players who never played in the Champions League: Wright, Di Canio…
Gianfranco Zola
The diminutive Italian notched three goals and three assists in 14 appearances for Chelsea as they made it to the Champions League quarters in 1999-00, but otherwise his European experience was limited to the UEFA Cup and Cup Winners’ Cup.
And he left Stamford Bridge the season before they knocked out Arsenal’s Invincibles en route to the 2003-04 semis under his similarly affable compatriot Claudio Ranieri.
Rafael van der Vaart
While admittedly not quite at the level of some of the other names on this list, Van der Vaart was a brilliant footballer on his day and played an important role in Tottenham’s rise to become a Champions League club (for a while).
His CV – Ajax, Hamburg, Spurs, Betis and Midtjylland – doesn’t exactly scream ‘Champions League semi-finalist’ but there was also that two-year stint at Real Madrid.
You’d kind of assume making the Champions League’s last four was a given with Los Blancos, but that was a different era for the club.
They were thrashed by Liverpool in the 2008-09 Round of 16 and exited the competition at the same stage the following year (after the signing of Cristiano Ronaldo no less) by old foes Lyon, so often a thorn in their side during the noughties.
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