Liverpool, £21.9m (€31.6m) in debt and with speculation growing that skipper Steven Gerrard will leave if his boyhood club fail to compete with the big boys in Europe, needed this result desperately.

Benitez’s clever substitutions and half-time rallying call did the trick and saw Liverpool hit back from a goal down at the break to secure the three goals they needed to progress, a job made more difficult by Monaco’s comprehensive victory against Deportivo in the other Group A match.

Benitez said: “It is one of the proudest nights of my career. The players ran hard all the time and you see how much it means to the supporters, it is a great night.

“We knew before the game that it was very important for the club to gain these extra finances. Now we have a gap between the next stage and we can fight for other things, but for the club this result is very, very important.”

Liverpool will pick up another £5m (€7.2m) for reaching the second phase, after goals from Florent Sinama-Pongolle, Neil Mellor and Gerrard negated Rivaldo’s free-kick opener, and that money has already been earmarked for Benitez to spend in the transfer window next month.

Gerrard had spoken before the game of the need for Liverpool to compete with the best to keep him at the club, and for some new faces to be brought in during January. He will now get his wish on the second of those demands, at least.

Benitez added: “As a manager I have had a lot of luck, and I have been in very good clubs with good supporters.

“At Valencia it was fantastic but it is the same here, and I hope that it continues for the five years of my contract.

“I have never experienced a result like this in the Champions League, and this result is very special to me and the whole club.

“We talked about what to do at half-time and the decisions on who to change, we needed something different and I had decided to put on Pongolle as the first-half finished.

“We knew that Monaco had scored three and they were going to win so we needed three goals, but I told the players we had done that at Fulham so we could do it again.”

Gerrard will now certainly be safe at Anfield until the summer, and if Liverpool keep improving at this rate, they could well do enough to convince him to stick around to be part of the Benitez revolution.

The Spanish coach said of his influential skipper: “Steven was excellent, he can play from one side of the pitch to the other.

“I told him he has freedom and he has talent, when you see performances like that you see how important he is to us. He can work from end to end and it was a wonderful display.

“But I felt that the difference between the sides was really our supporters, I cannot thank them enough.

“I want to say thank you to the supporters, they were magnificent to help us achieve this result.”

Olympiacos boss Dusan Bajevic conceded that Liverpool deserved their comeback win, saying: “When you are watching a game like that you do not believe you can lose in that way.

“But we brought the problems on ourselves, we did not create a chance from open play during the match.

“Liverpool were faster, stronger and better than us and when we conceded so early in the second half there was always the fear that they could come back at us.

“If we had held the lead a little longer maybe we could have done something.”