And so it begins again. The familial midweek gatherings of football’s galácticos. The hairs-up-on-nape anthem, with violins jinking up and down the scale and a choir of Uefa-approved angels exhorting Ce sont les meilleures équipes! Sie sind die allerbesten Mannschaften! The main event! – even when it is Maribor v Sporting. The gripes that the Champions League is a misnomer, given this year’s edition contains 17 domestic title winners out of 32 teams. And – inevitably – those hazy, apparently lazy, wasn’t as good in my day laments: that the group stages are more predictable than ever.

Such comments are not new. Little in football is. We have heard them since the 1999-2000 season, when the Champions League swelled to 32 teams and Uefa stretched the definition of “champions” to allow up to four clubs from one country. But the gripes have strengthening justification.

There are several ways to show this. One is to examine how teams from Europe’s biggest five leagues – Spain, England, Germany, Italy and France – have performed against other leagues in the group and knockout stages. Here the evidence is clear. The top teams are winning more often. Between 1999-2000 and 2004-05, teams from the Big Five leagues won 117 of 215 games, a win rate of 54%. The next five seasons, between 2005-06 and 2009-10, that figure climbed to 60%. And for the last five years it has been higher again – 64%.

Shocks still occur. Chelsea lost to Basel home and away before reaching the semi-finals last season, while Copenhagen held Juventus and Anderlecht clung on against Paris Saint-Germain but there is less resistance and fewer surprises. What is supposed to be a competition too often resembles a procession.

Bookies odds show a similar pattern historically. According to data from Oddsportal.com, there were 25 matches in the 2004-05 Champions League during which the favourite started at odds of 1-2 or shorter, implying they had at least a 67% chance of victory. By 2009-10 that figure had climbed to 36. Last season it was 41. Incidentally, there are five matches with short-priced favourites this week: Juventus v Malmo, Liverpool v Ludogorets Razgrad, Real Madrid v Basel, Porto v Bate Borisov, and Barcelona v Apoel Nicosia. A £100 bet on Barcelona would win just £7.

Unsurprisingly, the richest leagues dominate the knockout stages more than before, too. Last season was the first in European Cup history in which no team from outside the Big Five leagues reached the quarter-finals. We have journeyed a long way from the first Champions League group stages in 1992-93 – when the last eight featured Marseille, Rangers, CSKA Moscow and Bruges in one pot and Milan, Gothenburg, Porto and PSVEindhoven in the other.

Along with predictability of the group stages comes another problem: over-familiarity. Arsenal’s trip to Borussia Dortmund on Tuesday is their third in four seasons. So is Manchester City’s visit to Bayern Munich on Wednesday. The Westfalenstadion is one of the finest in Europe; but part of European football’s attraction is wanderlust, not just wandering down familiar paths and into familiar pubs. What should be done depends on how worrisome you perceive the problem to be.

But however much Uefa attempted to level the playing field by increasing the rewards for the likes of, say, Ajax or Apoel for making the Champions League, they would still find it impossible to compete with Europe’s biggest sides without a sugar daddy. Even if Uefa wanted to redistribute wealth from rich to poor, it would never renew the risk of a breakaway European League.

And what is good for the Champions League isn’t necessarily good for domestic competition. All clubs in the last 32 get a participation payment of £7m and an added £396,000 for every group match. That is chicken feed for Premier League clubs but it can ruin the ecosystem of smaller leagues because one club is so much richer than everyone else.

I have sympathy for those romantics who hark back to the old European Cup, but it is never going to happen. BT Sport will pay £897m to show live coverage of the Champions League. It, like all Uefa’s broadcast partners, wants the big clubs to survive as long as possible. A wider knockout tournament is just too risky.

At least Uefa’s plan to reserve the first pot of seeds for champions, which would have ensured Manchester City and Juventus – seeded second – had better prospects this season is welcome. But it is a half-turn of the spanner, not a radical tinkering. It is unlikely to help smaller clubs progress deeper.

There is a counter-argument: that the current set-up, for all its faults, is made worth it by the unfiltered thrills of the knockout stages. Remember that in the past 10 years there have been eight different winners of the Champions League – while in that time in England, Spain and Italy, there have been three title winners, and the Bundesliga four. Meanwhile Dortmund and Atlético Madrid show it is possible to go from domestic mediocrity to a European Cup final within three years.

In some respects, then, the Champions League resembles a Hollywood blockbuster that makes you forget its formulaic early stages with a few unforgettable set pieces in its final stages. But is it wrong to wish that we did not have to wait until February for the highest quality drama?