Michel Platini, the legendary French playmaker turned Uefa president, is treating a series of headaches, from the fallout from his support for the Qatar World Cup to issues over racism and club finances, with typical insouciance.

But the news that BT was prepared to pay a whopping £900m for exclusive rights to Champions League and Europa League football from 2015, more than double the existing deal with ITV and Sky, and around £400m more than its pay-TV rival was prepared to shell out, must have been enough to raise a smile.

The bidding war shows that the carefully cultivated Champions League, introduced as a replacement for the European Cup in 1992 and opening up the competition to several qualifiers from the big European leagues rather than just the winners, has become a golden goose both for Uefa and the clubs that typically qualify and share the proceeds.

With its big-name sponsors, carefully managed branding, alluring ties and instantly recognisable "anthem", the Champions League has become the most glamorous and coveted club trophy in football.

Just as Sky famously used top flight domestic football as the "battering ram" to build a hugely profitable media business in 1991 – following advice from the then Spurs chairman Alan Sugar to blow its rivals "out of the water" – so BT hopes that the glamour of Europe's blue riband club competition can do a similar (if subtly different) – job for its rapidly changing business two decades later.

Away from the celebrations in the BT boardroom and the recriminations at Sky Sports' new studios in Osterley, west London, most fans are likely to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. Some are already angry that one of their few opportunities to watch the biggest clubs on free-to-air television has been diluted. ITV broadcasts 18 live games per season featuring the biggest clubs, while BT has committed only to showing each British side on a free-to-air basis at least once.

BT has said it will use the free-to-air games to drive subscribers to its sports channels and has already revealed it will have to alter its strategy of giving away BT Sport to its broadband customers to pay for the new rights.

So fans, who have already seen the likes of ITV Digital, Setanta and ESPN come and go as challengers to Sky, will have to potentially fork out for both offerings if they want to follow their side in the Premier League and in Europe.

BT, however, will also argue it will allow those unable to pay £40 a month for Sky Sports access to all European live ties at a reasonable price, rather than just the handful currently shown on ITV.

The deal also accelerates the inflationary cost of showing top live football way beyond the means of free-to-air broadcasters, a process that affected domestic football 21 years ago. Now the day has come for the Champions League, with Sky and BT – for different reasons – prepared to pay well beyond what ITV or BBC could afford.

For clubs the deal is likely to widen the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots. Whereas the income from the Premier League's latest £5.5bn television deal is at least handed out with some regard for redistribution among all 20 clubs – the overseas TV money is shared equally, for example – the Champions League income goes directly to the competing clubs.

It is split partly according to the size of the TV deal in each country so that England's four competing clubs raked in more than £100m between them last season despite failing to make the last eight, and will be hugely boosted by the new deal, with a knock-on effect on transfer fees and wages. Champions League holders Bayern Munich collected £47.3m in prize money and TV income last season.

Ironically, the growing gap between rich and poor is widened by Uefa's new Financial Fair Play rules ,designed to calm football's overheating finances by forcing clubs to break even.

But because the biggest clubs bring in the most revenue, boosted further by their Champions League earnings, some fear that the upper echelons of the game could become even more of a closed shop than at present.

Beneath the calm exterior at Uefa's Swiss headquarters in Nyon, on the banks of Lake Geneva, European football's governing body is facing major challenges.

The ever-present structural threat of a breakaway by the big European clubs to launch their own closed version of the Champions League and keep all the money for themselves was recently refloated by Juventus. The huge increase in TV income should help keep them in the fold.

However, that will present its own issues of competitive balance if it becomes ever harder for newcomers to challenge the elite.

Despite the rich financial rewards for Uefa, also keen to maximise revenues to compensate for a botched experiment in centralising rights sales for international matches, there are also risks.

There is a danger that by turning its back on millions of casual fans watching ITV's prime-time free-to-air slot, and which has made the Champions League music and brand so ubiquitous, over time the competition will lose some of its allure. A similar experiment is already going on in Platini's native France, where the Champions League is entirely confined to pay-TV.

The world of football has changed beyond recognition since Platini lifted the European Cup in 1985, and the BT deal is merely the latest dramatic manifestation.

It is undoubtedly good news for the big clubs and their already well-remunerated stars, and their agents. Whether it is good news for the game at large in the long term, and for the fans that sustain it, is a more difficult question to answer.