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The rhetoric is already being ramped up. Sergio Ramos has described the first leg of Real Madrid's Champions League semifinal with Juventus as one of "three finals" for Carlo Ancelotti's team this season. Lionel Messi is busy insisting that the prospect of meeting Pep Guardiola is not motivating Barcelona's players; Thomas Muller is confident his coach's intimate knowledge of his former club gives Bayern Munich the most slender of advantages.

This week is one of those rare occasions when the hype matches the reality. Two clashes that are genuinely appetising. The perfect antipasto of Juventus against Real Madrid, and then the main course: Barcelona and Bayern.

Four of Europe's unquestioned superpowers; the three teams who are, to most eyes, not just the best in the world but among the very best of all time, eye to eye and toe to toe. It is the sort of week that is almost a reward for being a football fan, for all the pain and disappointment you have to endure, all the games that never quite live up to expectations. Even more encouraging: presuming there are no whitewashes in the next 48 hours, next week should be even better.

Nobody, then, wants to play the killjoy. Nobody wants to suggest the lineup for the Champions League semifinals is anything less than mouth-watering. Nobody wants to sound ungrateful for the feast -- maybe not of beauty, maybe not of goals, but certainly of drama, of technical wizardry, of brilliance -- that is about to be presented to us.

Yet it is hard to escape the feeling that all this is not quite as special as it should be. That although all four games -- not to mention the final -- will be of the very highest calibre, there is nonetheless some warning, some cause for concern buzzing at the back of the mind.

But it is there, hard to grasp, not far off impossible to define, a dark shadow where there should be nothing but light. And it is this: that it is all just a little bit familiar.

Bayern and Barcelona have only been drawn together in European competition four times before. Indeed, they had never faced each other competitively until 1996. They did not meet in a European Cup knockout game until 2009; their previous encounters were in either the group stage, the year they were also pooled with Manchester United, or in the UEFA Cup. For two sides who have been in Europe pretty much every year since the early 1970s, that was quite a wait.

That rarity, though, was crucial. Games between two of the biggest clubs in the world are occasions in and of themselves, but the fact they had happened so rarely heightened the drama and raised the stakes. It made them extraordinary in the very truest sense of the word.

That is not the case anymore. For all the hullabaloo when they were drawn together this time -- Guardiola back at the Camp Nou, Luis Enrique against his great friend -- it was hard to marvel at how unusual it was, how much of a precious treat, because they played each other two years ago. It is still Bayern against Barcelona, of course, and it is still something to get excited about. But it does not feel rare; not as rare as it should, or as rare as it once was.

This is the greatest single problem facing UEFA, and the Champions League, in the modern era. Familiarity, or rather over-familiarity; it may not be enough to breed contempt, but it is certainly capable of engendering something approaching apathy.

Let us get one thing straight: we are currently in a golden age for the Champions League. Set aside nostalgia for the mystery of the European Cup, and it is clear that now is a wonderful time to be a football fan. There are a clutch of sides of incomparable quality among Europe's elite; it would be enough to have one at one time, but to have three makes the competition genuinely compelling. Consider the quality of the teams just beneath them on the ladder -- Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain, Juventus -- and you see just how good they are.

Yet it is also undeniable that we are in the least competitive era the European Cup has ever known, in the sense of the breadth of that competition. The pool of semifinalists, over the last five, 10 years, has shrunk rapidly; we are now at the stage where the only thing that will prevent the lineup for the semifinals next season featuring at least three of the teams there now is two of them being drawn together in the quarterfinals.

This creates an intriguing tension. On the one hand, fans are drawn to excellence. The standards set by Barcelona, Bayern and Real make the Champions League what it is: the greatest club competition in the world.

On the other, there is the risk that this might all get a little stale. That brings with it two problems. The first is that the magic of seeing two of the giants meet will wear off, something that happened, to some extent, with meetings between Real and Barcelona, which are now so common they are not quite so hotly anticipated, and occurred a few years ago with Chelsea and Liverpool, too. The second is that viewers, particularly in countries not represented in the latter stages of a closed-shop competition, will start to turn off.

There is a balance to be struck. It is why UEFA have changed the seeding system for next season's tournament, so that the champions of the big seven leagues are seeded, and it is why there are discussions about how to adapt the market pool -- a considerable source of television revenue -- so that less money is concentrated in the same pockets.

That is a start, but more needs to be done. The quickest step would be to remove country protection in the draw for the last 16 -- so that Real could meet Barcelona -- but that is little more than a sticking plaster. The issue is deep-rooted, in an imbalance in wealth and power, and needs solutions to match: an increased prevalence of home-grown, or association-trained, players; a form of financial fair play that does not simply preserve the status quo.

Perhaps all that will sound a little sour. Perhaps you feel these sorts of weeks prove why the Champions League works so well. Perhaps you believe this is how it should be: might making right, only the strongest surviving.

But consider this: Bayern against Barcelona is special now. Will it be quite so special if they meet in the semifinals next year, in the final two years after that, and then come up against each other in 2019 and 2020 too? Will you still be waiting for that game with bated breath? Or will you be suffering just the mildest form of fatigue? Will you start to think that maybe you won't watch this time because you've seen it all before?

There is no sense in UEFA robbing its showpiece competition of what makes it special -- excellence. But it must take steps to spread that excellence around if it wants the magic to remain.