Paris Saint-Germain's path towards defending their Champions League crown will be laid out on Thursday when the draw for the 36-team league phase of Europe's elite club competition takes place in Monaco.
PSG's thrilling triumph in last season's final in Munich, when they inflicted a 5-0 hammering on Inter Milan to win the trophy for the first time, came at the end of the first edition of the Champions League under the competition's new format.
The group stage in place for over two decades was consigned to history and replaced by a 36-team competition in which every club was pooled together into one giant league and played eight games against eight different opponents.
PSG, as it turns out, finished an unremarkable 15th in the league phase but then won on penalties in the last 16 against Liverpool, who had come first.
Luis Enrique's side did not look back after that as they became just the second French winners ever of the trophy, following Marseille in 1993.
Now their aim is to retain it -- something only Real Madrid have managed in the last 35 years.
"Last season we fulfilled the objective which everybody connected to the club had been dreaming about," PSG's coach said recently.
"But we want to keep on making history and now that would mean winning two Champions Leagues in a row. That is our objective.
"Last season nobody thought we were capable of winning it and we showed that we were.
"The dream is to win it again. We know it will be very difficult, but we are delighted to have that as a dream."
PSG's victory ended a run of 20 years in which the winners had always come from either England, Spain, Germany or Italy.
Those four nations still dominate the competition -- nineteen of the 36 teams in the league phase hail from the Premier League, La Liga, German Bundesliga or Serie A, with England contributing six clubs thanks notably to Tottenham Hotspur winning last season's Europa League.
With three teams coming from France, there is increasingly less room for sides from smaller European leagues to be represented at this level.
In total, only 16 countries will have clubs involved in the Champions League proper, when European football's governing body UEFA has 55 member associations.
But there is still variety, with only half of the teams involved in Thursday's draw also having featured in last season's league phase.
Kairat Almaty's surprise victory over Celtic in the play-offs means they are just the second team from Kazakhstan ever to reach the Champions League proper after Astana, who failed to win a game in the group stage in 2015/16.
Almaty, near Kazakhstan's border with China, is 5,800km by land east of Budapest, where this season's Champions League final will be played.
Europa League semi-finalists last season, Bodo/Glimt have reached the Champions League proper for the first time and are the first Norwegian side to do so since Rosenborg in 2007/08.
Union Saint-Gilloise also feature for the first time after the Brussels club claimed a first Belgian title in 90 years.
Meanwhile Pafos, whose squad includes 38-year-old Brazilian former Chelsea, PSG and Arsenal defender David Luiz, have qualified off the back of a first Cypriot title.
"We are the black sheep of the Champions League and the expectation is that we will suffer and lose games, but we will fight, compete and just enjoy the journey," their Spanish coach Juan Carlos Carcedo, a long-time former assistant to Unai Emery, told Marca.
If finishing as winners of the league phase ultimately did Liverpool little good, the three teams who came immediately behind them -- Barcelona, Arsenal and Inter -- all went on to reach the semi-finals.
The financial rewards for involvement in the Champions League are more eye-watering than ever, with UEFA anticipating total prize money of just under 2.5 billion euros ($2.9 billion).
The Champions League winners can pocket over 100 million euros in prize money, before adding millions more from television and coefficient ranking -- it is understood PSG earned close to 150 million euros in total from winning last season's trophy.
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