With the group stage over and spring beginning to uncoil itself, the business end of the European Champions League monolith powers into view this week. And next week. And the week after – and the week after that.

As if the Champions League had not expanded into enough prominence since its transformation from the knockout European Cup in 1992, this season the last-16 round will be played over four weeks rather than two.

That change ensures that for the continent's major football countries, England, Italy, Spain, Germany and France, the competing clubs' matches have been arranged not to clash. Television viewers in their tens of millions will be able – and encouraged – to stretch their legs, crack open a Heineken (one of the tournament's six main sponsors) and watch all the ties involving their home clubs over four ­successive weeks.

This change is not without its detractors, as domestic leagues, including the Premier League, grumble about Uefa hogging the fixture calendar, but the organisation is unrepentant. The Champions League is strengthening its hold over European football's landscape, imagination and TV schedules. Uefa insists that some live matches are shown on terrestrial television, massively increasing the audience beyond the exclusivity of pay-TV. The Champions League offers the nation here the only chance to watch Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool live on free-to-air TV against top class opposition, give or take the odd ­Carling or FA Cup tie.

Changes to this season's qualifying format have also meant the champions from more smaller countries were given the chance to compete, and Uefa's other prime innovation, advocated personally by the president, Michel Platini, is to schedule the final for 22 May, a Saturday, not a Wednesday, evening. Platini has said this is to encourage more children to be at the game, although given the prices the final is still unlikely to be teeming with teenagers.

These latest changes have brought the money in, too, with Uefa's TV and sponsorship earnings from the Champions League up to an estimated €1.09bn (£947m) this season. Of that, 75%, €750.9m, is distributed to the participating clubs.

That is the hallmark of Platini's Uefa: celebrating the grand football theatre of ties like Ancelotti's Chelsea versus Mourinho's Internazionale, including more small countries, arguing for the collective soul of football and "financial fair play", while keeping the rich clubs well-fed and happy. The brooding, separatist threat of G14 has gone, the European Club Association is incorporated within Uefa, and talk of a breakaway, present for years, is silent, for now.

Platini, who lifted the European Cup with Juventus at the infamous Heysel final in 1985, says of the tournament: "There is nothing like the setting, the stage, the experience of a Uefa Champions League night. The football being played in the Uefa Champions League is of an exceptionally high standard and has improved the quality across Europe and beyond. We are happy to see more national champions, more countries and more decisive matches."

It is a truism that the tournament's scale now represents extraordinary ­development from the knockout European Cup's beginnings in 1955, yet it is remarkable, too, how much has remained constant. Real Madrid won the cup in its first five seasons, and the present day wearers of the all-white strip play Lyon in the last 16 on Tuesday. Milan, Inter, Fiorentina, all in this season's last 16, competed in finals in the 1950s and 1960s. Almost all the winners are still great names now, although Benfica, Celtic and the Dutch clubs have fallen from prominence as the richer clubs have pulled away. Nottingham Forest, winners in 1979 and 1980, stand out for their provinciality, a monument to Brian Clough and Peter Taylor's astonishing achievement.

For those who feel that today's Champions League is too drenched in money, a vehicle for the multinational corporate sponsors and a slave to the TV euro, it is clear that business and media reach were key motivations for establishing the European Cup in the first place. The French sports newspaper L'Equipe generated and promoted the idea, its motivation as much to increase its midweek circulation as to expand the glory of football. It is a nice piece of history that L'Equipe was provoked into trying by the little England mentality of our Daily Mail, which proclaimed English champions Wolves "world champions" after they beat Honved and Spartak Moscow in two friendlies in 1954.

The Football League, of course, forbade the 1955 champions, Chelsea, from playing in Europe because they might miss home fixtures. While Matt Busby defied that parochialism to take Manchester United in the following year, history judges the league's intolerance as a factor in United tearing around Europe in a rush, ultimately to tragic consequences at Munich in 1958.

A league standing in the way of a club's participation is unthinkable now, but tensions remain between domestic and continental turf. Platini rattled the Premier League with his criticism of its "ultra-­liberale" (extreme free-market) approach, arguing it solidifies success, including the four qualifying places, in the hands of Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool.

The Premier League responds by arguing that the money the Champions League pays out to those four entrenches their financial dominance. A Premier League spokesman, referring to that and the four-week last-16 round, said: "The Champions League is a fantastic competition, its impact is largely positive and has clearly benefited the Premier League and our clubs who compete in it. However, there are some concerns, right across Europe, about the distorting impact the revenues have on domestic leagues and the difficulty caused by the increased number of dates taken up by European club competitions."

In response Uefa has studied the economics and points out that Champions League money forms only a small part of our top four's incomes, 8-13% according to 2007-08 figures. The bulk of the money earned by the big four is made here. Premier League TV income is relatively evenly shared compared to other European countries but, crucially, the match‑day and commercial earnings of, in particular, Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea vastly exceed those of the aspiring clubs. That is why the idea for a play-off system to decide fourth place has been so enthusiastically embraced by the Premier League clubs, except for the big four.

Ivan Gazidis, Arsenal's chief executive, says of the Champions League: "It is hugely prestigious, one of the competitions you have to win if you want to be thought of as a great club. Financially it is important over time, but it is not life or death."

At Uefa, aside from the money and the politics, they like to focus on the sporting glory, the club football peak it represents, and the Champions League's symbolism. At their headquarters on the banks of Lake Geneva, they point out that 10 years before the European Cup was established, the countries of Europe were still ­slaughtering each other at war.

Uefa likes the Champions League to be seen as much more than a vehicle for Master­card; instead as a celebration of post-war unity, in which the battles are of skill, fought on manicured turf, by players from all over the world, in the great ­European cities, under floodlights.