Ronak Kotecha, May 20, 2026, 10.19 AM ISTCritic's Rating: 3.5Story: At half-time in the 2005 UEFA Champions League final, Liverpool were 3-0 down against AC Milan. What followed became one of football’s most iconic comebacks, retold here through the voices of the players, coaches and those who lived through that unforgettable night in Istanbul.
Review: Some football matches transcend sport. Liverpool’s Miracle of Istanbul is one of them. Even if you know exactly what happened on that famous night in 2005, and chances are, if you’re a football fan, you do — Untold UK: Liverpool’s Miracle of Istanbul somehow makes it feel fresh, tense and strangely emotional all over again.
That is perhaps the documentary’s biggest achievement. It doesn’t rely on nostalgia alone, nor does it treat the event like a standard football highlights package. Instead, it slows things down. It takes you back into dressing rooms, into minds, into moments of doubt and disbelief. It lets the people who were there sit with what happened and what nearly happened.
The first half of the film is deliberately uncomfortable. Liverpool are being dismantled. AC Milan are in complete control. Rafael Benítez’s tactical decisions are questioned, the players look shell-shocked, and you’re reminded just how hopeless the scoreline really was at 3-0. That context matters because without fully sitting in that despair, the comeback cannot hit as hard as it eventually does. And when it does, it still works. Twenty years later, it still works.
Steven Gerrard’s header. Vladimir Smicer’s strike. Xabi Alonso is following up on his own saved penalty. We’ve seen these clips a hundred times, but here, they are framed less as sporting highlights and more as emotional turning points – moments where belief slowly returns, first to the players, then to the fans, and finally to everyone watching.
What elevates the documentary further is its willingness to hear both sides. The Liverpool voices are understandably emotional, but the AC Milan players add something equally powerful. Their recollections remind you that miracles only feel miraculous because someone else had to watch them happen in real time.
The documentary also wisely spends time on the aftermath. What does a night like that do to the people involved? How do you carry that memory – whether as triumph or trauma, for the next twenty years? Those quieter moments are where the film finds its emotional weight.
It’s not flawless. At times, it leans a little too heavily into sentimentality, with swelling music and dramatic pauses that occasionally tell you what to feel instead of trusting the story to do it on its own. And for hardcore football fans, there may not be much here that is entirely “untold.”
But that’s not really the point. This isn’t about revealing new facts. It’s about revisiting one of football’s greatest nights through older, wiser eyes and realising that some stories never lose their power.
You finish Untold UK: Liverpool’s Miracle of Istanbul, understanding why Liverpool fans don’t just remember Istanbul, they revere it. Not because it was improbable. But for 45 unforgettable minutes, football became something bigger than football itself.