Chris Howie 

If there’s one thing the Champions League has consistently delivered over the years, it’s talent.

One needn’t look too far back in the competition to see how Kylian Mbappe burst onto Europe’s grandest stage for a respectively ‘smaller’ club and help Monaco knock out grander sides such as Manchester City and Borussia Dortmund on their way to the 2017 Champions League semi-final. 

Ukrainian striker, Andriy Shevchenko was the 1997 version of Kylian Mbappe. In an era before social media and YouTube, there wasn’t much known about the young Dynamo Kyiv forward outside of his homeland.

There were no compilations, no forums and no stat websites for people to glean what sort of adversary they would be up against, they had to do things the old fashioned way, generally speaking by seeing them up close. In the 1997/1998 season, Barcelona was the side who got to see Shevchenko up really close. 

Louis Van Gaals’ Blaugrana side welcomed Dynamo Kyiv to the Camp Nou for a Champions League group game hoping to exact some revenge following the 3-0 reverse they’d suffered back in Ukraine.

Instead, what they witnessed was a demolition handed to them by the ruthless Andriy Shevchenko, who in 45 first-half minutes completed a hat-trick to mortally wound a team so used to inflicting defeat. Dynamo would go on to reach the Quarter Finals of that season’s competition, with Shevchenko netting 6 goals in 10 appearances.

The following season, Shevchenko, under the tutelage of legendary Ukrainian coach, Valeriy Lobanovskyi, helped inspire his side to reach the Champions League semi-finals.

It was in this season he proved himself to the elite, upping his European goal tally to 10 in 14 appearances, however, there was little he could do as his swashbuckling side were knocked out to eventual runners up Bayern Munich. With 93 goals in 163 appearances in all competitions for Dynamo Kyiv, the time had come for the 23-year-old Shevchenko to ply his trade at the very top.

The ‘top’ in question ended up being AC Milan, who in 1999 bought Andriy Shevchenko for £25 Million, which at the time was a Serie A record. Whilst he hit the ground running domestically, scoring 24 goals and earning the distinction of being the second-highest scoring foreign debutant after Michel Platini – it was in Europe that he would have to bide his time. 

For his first three seasons at the club, the Rossoneri were unable to get past the group stages of the Champions League. It wasn’t until Carlo Ancelotti came in 2001 that his side did eventually go all the way in 2003, however, Shevchenko would have to play a reduced role as injuries hampered his season.

He would nevertheless go on to score decisive goals in the quarter-final against Ajax and in the semi-final against city rivals, Inter Milan. The most important contribution of all would be in the 2003 Champions League final against Juventus, as he rolled the 5th and most vital spot-kick past Gianluigi Buffon to seal AC Milan’s first Champions League title since 1994 and their sixth of their seven titles to date. 

Two years later, the newly crowned Balon D’or winner of 2004 would ironically get another Champions League title defining spot-kick in a penalty shootout, this time against Liverpool. However, on that occasion, Shevchenko could only strike a meek penalty straight at the wobbling Jerzy Dudek’s legs, denying Milan and gifting Liverpool one of the greatest Champions League final wins of all time. 

His performance in the 2005 final is perhaps the only blot in an illustrious career. By the time AC Milan had won their seventh Champions League title in 2007, Shevchenko had departed for Chelsea, where form and fitness would start to catch him up.

As it stands, he still remains the ninth highest goal scorer in the competition with 48 goals in 100 appearances, joint with Zlatan Ibrahimovic but having played 20 games fewer. Very much like the Swede, there are few players to have burst onto the scene with as much excitement as the Ukrainian dynamo.