Player Profile

Voronin wasn't exactly the biggest name in the world when he arrived at Liverpool on Bosman in July 2007. The Ukranian plied his trade in Germany after leaving his childhood club, Chornomorets Odesa, in his home country, at only 16. Voronin made his Bundesliga debut against Bayern München in December 1997 but it wasn't until he moved to Mainz when he got his big break. He topped the second division scoring charts in the 2002/03 season with 21 goals in 30 matches. Voronin was playing for Bayer Leverkusen when the club faced Liverpool in the Champions League in 2005. Rafa thought he was Leverkusen's best player against the Reds and didn't waste any time to snap him up on a free once his contract expired in the summer. Partly because of injury but also because of competition for places, Voronin's first season at Anfield could neither be called a success nor a failure. His first 'start', in the Champions League qualifier in Toulouse, saw a thrilling goal which won the match and set the team up nicely for a subsequent aggregate victory and a place in the lucrative group stage of the competition. League goals soon followed at Sunderland and at home to Derby. He was outstanding in the 8-0 annihilation of Besiktas even though he didn't end up on the scoresheet himself. Early in the New Year, he injured his ankle during a training session and was sidelined for several weeks. He returned to the first-team picture again towards the end of the season, was a scoring substitute against Blackburn and repeated that feat at Tottenham on the final day of the League season. Six goals in 28 matches seems might like a meagre contribution for a striker but circumstances dictated that he was always going to be behind the other forwards when it came to team-selection. However, he worked hard and proved to be fairly effective in the limited playing-time he had during 2007/08.

Rafa clearly wanted him to move him on after only one year and on transfer deadline day he was loaned to Hertha Berlin for the 2008/09 season. Voronin was a great success at Hertha which finished fourth in the Bundesliga. He scored 11 goals in 20 league matches and Hertha wanted to sign him permanently, but couldn't afford him so he returned to Liverpool. Voronin was a peripheral figure at Liverpool in the 2009/10 season and finally left for Moscow in the 2010 January transfer window. Voronin had two decent seasons for Dynamo Moscow and then ten days after his thirty-third birthday, on 31 July 2012, moved on loan for a year to German Bundesliga club Fortuna Dusseldorf where he appeared ten times in the Bundesliga and once in the German Cup during his loan-spell in the 2012/13 season. He failed to score in any of these matches.

The Ukrainian forward was back with Moscow Dynamo in 2013/14 after his year in Germany with Fortuna Düsseldorf. He played in seventeen Russian league matches (ten from the start and seven as a substitute) scoring seven times, which included a hat-trick against Ural Sverdlovsk Oblast. Dynamo finished the season in 4th place, which meant qualification for the Play-off round of the Europa League in the 2014/15 season.The 35-year-old announced his retirement from football during the second week of February 2015. 

In 2017 Voronin took on a scouting role with the Ukrainian FA, tasked with watching their players who were appearing in foreign leagues. He returned to his old club Moscow Dynamo as assistant manager in October 2020. However, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he fled Moscow with his family on a flight to Amsterdam and his contract was terminated by mutual consent on 1st March.