When Arsene Wenger was appointed Arsenal manager in September 1996, one newspaper headline read: “Arsene Who?”

Almost 20 years to the day, a similar headline could have been written to mark Aleksander Ceferin’s election as president of Uefa.

Catapulted from relative obscurity to become the second-most powerful man in football, the 50-year-old lawyer has more than a little in common with the Premier League’s longest-serving manager.

Indeed, Ceferin’s plans to restore the “competitive balance” of the European game could almost have been formulated by Wenger, who has railed against the spending power of the likes of Chelsea, Manchester City and Paris St-Germain.

It was the Slovenian’s pledge to defend the interests of the have-nots that helped him sweep to power in a landslide victory over establishment candidate Michael van Praag, whose backers had included the Football Association.

A third-dan black belt in karate who has crossed the Sahara Desert four times by car and once on a motorbike, Ceferin was born in Ljubljana when Slovenia was still part of Yugoslavia and he grew up a supporter of Croatia’s Hajduk Split.

“All we had is sports,” he recalls of his younger years under what he calls a “socialist regime”.