Brendan Rodgers feels Carlo Ancelotti’s side are on the verge of becoming one of the greatest ever after Liverpool lost 1-0 to Real Madrid.
The Reds manager was impressed with the level of performance Los Merengues showed against Liverpool as they qualified for the Last 16.
“Real Madrid are on course to be as good if not better than the great Barcelona team we’ve seen over the last four or five years,” Brendan Rodgers said immediately after the game.
“You look at the quality of the possession, the calibre of players like Luka Modric or Toni Kroos, who is a player I love – 24 years of age, and his quality, his composure.
“Then there’s Gareth Bale, Cristiano Ronaldo who is 29 and hungry, [Karim] Benzema. And they have beaten Barcelona 3-1 here just the other day, so they’ll obviously want to win the title here but over the next three or four years they could go on to eclipse that team, they are that good.”
Rodgers also boldly defended his team selection as he made seven changes to the side that lost in Newcastle at the weekend.
“You’ve had asked me before the game if the selected team was strong enough and you could see tonight how good they were.
“I knew what I was doing, I knew what the team would be tonight in order to hopefully get the result, we’ve seen that we nearly got that, we certainly got the performance.
“Probably we are disappointed with the result because the bottom line is that we lost, but to come to a stadium like this where they win games in their threes and fours and beat teams like Barcelona, and still keep the game as close as it was until the very end, just shows the quality of our performance.
“We knew we had to defend well, but we also has the courage to play and I was very proud of the team tonight. Supporters also were incredible, they gave us a great backing. Overall, we showed wonderful composure to play in such a great arena.
"Performance-wise there are many positives. Some of the young players did very well, they’re adapting to life at Liverpool, and we’ll take the positives from the game.”
