There are a lot of things that have to be right. If you execute an SQL query from a database front-end program, that program has to be set to UTF-8 as well.

Say you want to enter "© 2025" into the table. The best thing to do that is inserting the value CONCAT(_UTF8 x'C2A9', ' 2025'). Then you really know what is in the database.

Off course you also have to set the HTML output character encoding right, but you already seem to do that correctly.