Of all the people who conspired against Rafael Benítez during his final, internecine season of attrition at Liverpool it is somewhat surprising to include the name Aly Cissokho. The French left-back, then of Lyon and last season of Anfield, conceded the penalty that gave Fiorentina the victory that confirmed Liverpool’s Champions League exit in 2009. The Cissokho connection aside, only by severing their links with the past have Liverpool completed the long journey back.

They dressed Anfield in Champions League livery for the first time in five years . The small details register. “The Champions League footballs came out in training the other day and that brought it home how long the club has been away,” Brendan Rodgers said. “Too long,” the manager added, without being prompted. “This club needs to be at this level for itself and for football in general.”

The five-time winners are relishing Tuesday’s return to the European elite against the Bulgarian champions Ludogorets Razgrad, although supporters may have little appetite to revisit their last experience of the competition. A time of turmoil, politics, protest marches, debt and suspicion off the field and the end of Liverpool’s reign as Uefa’s No1-ranked club on it. And it was about to get much worse. A recap offers a gauge of the transformation wrought by Rodgers and the owner, Fenway Sports Group, and explains why everyone at Anfield is acutely aware of how precarious a place at the top table can be.

An abiding memory of Liverpool’s extended departure from the group stage in 2009-10 is of Steven Gerrard and co gathered around a TV screen at the Puskas Stadion in Budapest to see if Lyon could claim a point at Fiorentina. David Ngog had just given Liverpool hope of taking qualification to the final game against the Italians at Anfield by scoring in a 1-0 defeat of the whipping boys, Debrecen. Cissokho’s foul, Juan Vargas’ resulting penalty for Cesare Prandelli’s team and Sébastien Frey’s late save from the Lyon striker Lisandro López extinguished it. Fiorentina joined Lyon in the knockout phase. Liverpool’s residency in the Champions League, having qualified in eight of the previous nine seasons, was over. Not that many countenanced the long-term ramifications that November night.

Cracks were already starting to appear in Benítez’s team and Liverpool’s Champions League campaign was effectively ruined by conceding 90th-minute goals in both encounters with Lyon. There would be another last-minute goal against in that final 2-1 defeat at home to La Viola, who had also beaten Liverpool 2-0 in Tuscany with a double from Stevan Jovetic, a player Benítez wanted to sign but did not receive backing for from the powers-that-were. That power belonged to the indebted owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett, and their managing director on the ground on Merseyside, Christian Purslow. Their control was waning along with the team’s prominence in Europe.

Liverpool were not so much focused on repairing the cracks in Benítez’s team in the winter of 2009 as allowing accusations and recrimination to pour through them. The Liverpool manager had signed a new five-year contract only a few months earlier, one that strengthened his authority throughout the club (Raheem Sterling was an early signing by his restructured youth academy) yet was already aware of internal talk to replace him. Not so, according to Purslow, who was quick to speak following the team’s elimination in Hungary.

“This will have no bearing on Rafa whatsoever,” said the managing director, who implemented the still unfathomable decision to replace Benítez with Roy Hodgson seven months later, after Liverpool finished seventh in the Premier League. “Rafa signed a new five-year deal four months ago and in those terms he is four months into a five-year journey. You don’t deviate from long-term plans for people and the way to take the club to the next level because of two late goals against Lyon, and that’s what it boils down to.”

Purslow claimed Liverpool’s finances could take the hit of an early Champions League exit. Others had their doubts. As David Conn wrote prophetically in the Guardian the next day: “There is a feeling that the club’s hold on its place among English football’s elite is weakening, with failures on the pitch married damagingly to the mess off it.” He added: “A failure to qualify for the Champions League at all will cause a truly serious financial loss next season. Then, they could begin to fall terminally away from United, Chelsea and Arsenal and the other big-city pretenders finally closing in on that fourth place, the gateway to euro-riches.”

At the time Purslow was searching for new investors willing to meet Hicks’s and Gillett’s £100m asking price for a 25% stake in the club. Ultimately, the high court put new ownership in place with Liverpool on the brink of administration less than a year later.

It has taken them five years to recover from the fallout to their last Champions League campaign plus the instability and mistrust that pervaded Anfield when the hierarchy decided Benítez was an obstacle to investment. To Rodgers and Fenway the process is continuing, with the European windfall helping Liverpool close the financial gap on their top-four rivals rather than elevate them clear, but the visit of the champions of Bulgaria is a significant step. Anfield will embrace it.