The upcoming Champions League promises intense competition during football’s pivotal moment.

When Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin attends the first games of the new Champions League this week, it will be with a considerable security detail. This has led to grumbles from federation staff, especially since very few people outside football know what he even looks like. There have probably only been two moments when the Slovenian official was properly in the public eye.

One was when the Super League was launched in April 2021 and Ceferin admirably defended the spirit of European football in a defiant media appearance, all while lambasting executives as “snakes” and “liars”. Less publicised from that day was the fact Uefa were also in the process of approving the changes to the Champions League we are going to see enacted this week.

This directly led to the second time, as Ceferin was inexplicably put front and centre of Uefa’s launch video at the group-stage draw. There was no doubting who the star was supposed to be, given there were even jokes at Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s expense. The many actual football stars in the video weren’t given anything like the same status.

If it seems ironic to complain about that and also start a discussion about the same star-filled competition with talk of a football administrator, it is only because there is a lot more at stake here than who will win the trophy in May.

The modern Champions League has shown that question doesn’t really warrant proper analysis until the last 16, and that it will still be won by a club with a revenue of over €500m anyway. Probably Real Madrid, or Manchester City. Such predictability has fostered some of the reasons we’re here.

The world’s most lucrative international club competition finds itself at a curious juncture in its history, which this season hits 70 years, a crux that is remarkable given its immense global popularity. All of the evidence shows that interest in the opening stages was waning, however, and the round was becoming too predictable. Although this was actually because Uefa and the Champions League itself had facilitated – and even driven – huge financial gaps between the super clubs and the rest, the governing body’s response was to further bend to those clubs.

This 36-team opening-stage idea directly came from their executives leveraging the threat of the Super League, and then trying to advance with that project anyway.

That breakaway may have been averted, but the forces that created it were not. The Super League clubs are still agitating for more money, and more influence. That is why there are more games between big clubs, and the opening stage now stretches into January. It creates more events, and a bigger pot.

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That is where so many strands of modern football come together, and partly why Ceferin is standing there at the centre. A mere two weeks after this season’s Champions League final in Munich, Fifa plan to launch their expanded Club World Cup. It’s almost ridiculous to consider that the new European champions could have international matches and then head off to this new tournament in the US. The Club World Cup is almost a personal project for Fifa president Gianni Infantino, which maybe explains why Ceferin is front and centre of the Champions League given their petty personal rivalry.

Some of his clubs are eyeing it in a different way. If the Club World Cup grows, especially if backed by the expected Saudi financing that will make prize money lucrative, some clubs may view it as a potential international Super League by proxy; one they have even more influence in. Real Madrid lean towards Fifa.

The politics there are all the more interesting given we could be talking about a world where City are expelled from the Premier League. Weighing over all of this, then, is December’s European Court of Justice judgement that so questioned the governance of Uefa and Fifa. That is there to be tested in court, for all kinds of new competitions.

Uefa would point to how the Champions League is legally ring-fenced to take place in the regular season and also as the competition that crowns the champions of Europe.

As can be seen from how this season will start, though, there is more going on here than just who lifts the trophy in Munich.