Toulouse and Bordeaux-Bègles are 13-5 favourites, and South Africa's Stormers may be the best African shot at breaking a six-year French stranglehold.
If anyone is going to crash the French party in Europe's top club rugby competition, African fans will be hoping the Stormers have a say. The Cape Town side is one of the few names outside the usual suspects that deserves a mention in the chasing pack, and with the Champions Cup looking more one-sided than ever, they carry a lot of southern hemisphere hope.
The picture at the top is stark. Toulouse and Bordeaux-Bègles are both priced at 13-5 for the title, and French clubs have won the trophy six years running. A seventh straight triumph for the Top 14 looks very much on the cards, and the odds say the winner will almost certainly wear one of those two sets of colours.
Behind the favourites, the bookmakers see a thin line of challengers: Leinster, Bath, Northampton and Montpellier. Glasgow and the Stormers might sneak into that group, but not many others. For a 24-team tournament, that is a remarkably short list of genuine contenders before a ball has even been kicked.
The bigger worry is structural. With the current format and regulations favouring deep, well-funded French squads, it is hard to see how the gap closes soon. That matters for African rugby too, because the continent's talent and its few representatives in the competition are left chasing a model that keeps getting harder to beat. Unless something shifts, the Champions Cup risks becoming a French procession instead of a true contest.
