Hello! We're making way for week one of the Champions League. But the two main Ballon d'Or contenders might be sitting it out.

Unless a long shot appears from the pack, this year's Ballon d'Or is going home with Ousmane Dembele or Lamine Yamal. The odds say the men's trophy is Dembele's to lose, with or without any effort to fluff up the best season of his life.

But as the Champions League returns this week -- Dembele's Paris Saint-Germain start the defence of their trophy tomorrow against Atalanta, Yamal's Barcelona tee off at Newcastle United on Thursday -- the pair of them will likely be missing. They're victims of competing club-versus-country interests, which are clashing more and more regularly.

This month, Dembele (top photo) strained a hamstring on international duty with France. His recovery period was set at roughly six weeks, so he will sit out a fair chunk of the Champions League's opening rounds. PSG were furious to see him and Desire Doue pick up injuries and publicly dressed down France for "disregarding the health of the players" (an accusation France denied).

Subsequently, the same friction developed with Yamal. He came back from time away with Spain carrying a groin problem, forcing him to miss Barcelona's 6-0 win against Valencia in La Liga on Sunday. His coach, Hansi Flick, struggled to bite his lip, claiming Spain had given the 18-year-old painkillers to get him on the pitch. It leaves Yamal doubtful for the trip to Newcastle, though the Spanish Football Federation doesn't think it has done much wrong.

Beef involving clubs and national teams is as old as the hills. The torn anterior cruciate ligament Alphonso Davies suffered in March set Canada and Bayern Munich against each other, and we're going to see an increasing number of arguments like it because football's calendar is asking so much of players and clubs.

Everybody has their own priorities. Dembele and Yamal are nominally the world's best players, as the Ballon d'Or will show. This wasn't the time for them to be resting up.

The line-up for the 2025-26 Champions League is a shakedown of the usual suspects and a few novel contenders: Kairat, Bodo/Glimt, Union Saint-Gilloise. Our data projections (see above) are strongly tipping an English winner, with Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester City the most fancied. I'd be a little surprised if City have it in them, to be honest.

Then again, what do we or the machines know? Last year, when we crunched the numbers before matchday one, PSG came out with a four per cent chance of winning their first European Cup. For the bulk of the league phase, that faint percentage looked about right. It was only as the knockouts came around that they found their stroke, with Luis Enrique's team transitioning from one who seemed unsure of themselves to indisputably the best of the best.

Quick predictions: clubs rarely retain the trophy, so PSG will fall short. Inter's compelling run to last season's final won't be repeated. They're diminished since May. Belgium's Union will edge into the play-offs and Barca will win the whole shebang, setting up Yamal for next year's Ballon d'Or (after Dembele hobbles up to collect the 2025 prize).

Oh, and one of the highlights will be matchday eight, the point in the league phase when everything is on the line. Whether you liked the new Champions League format or not, there's no denying the last round before the knockouts (18 matches, 64 goals, all on one night) was a blast. Bring it on.

I don't get the sense that Wrexham set themselves any upper limits. They'll have a natural ceiling because most clubs do, but exponential growth -- from the National League to the Championship in three short years -- will only encourage their showbiz owners to let aspiration run wild.

It's why they burned £33million ($44.6m) on their squad over the summer, with a view to advancing again. But instead (and for the first time in yonks), Wrexham have stalled slightly. They're fourth from bottom in the Championship table and the early weeks of the season have taken them to school.

You know it is a bit of a shock to the system because Richard Sutcliffe, our resident Wrexham correspondent, is writing today about the virtue of granting manager Phil Parkinson some patience. It's a wholly new narrative for a coach whose reign to this point has been dreamy. Promotion is his staple diet.

Common sense said that an immediate leap into the Premier League was asking too much, and Wrexham's decision-makers are bright enough to know that, but if there's any suggestion of them starting to go backwards, Parkinson's immense record won't protect him indefinitely. It sounds incredibly harsh (and truly, it is), but as the saying goes, that's football.

To break away from the largesse of the Champions League (and, to a certain extent, Wrexham), let Michael Cox guide you into the world of non-League that Wrexham used to inhabit.

His outing to an FA Cup 'derby' pitting Enfield Town against Enfield FC -- Enfield is a suburb in north London -- was an education into how the sport operates and meanders at that level.

FC aren't actually from Enfield anymore. They moved out years ago and don't have a stadium to call their own. Town were created by a group of fans who refused to go with them out of principle. Money (or a chronic lack of it) is central to the plot, and there's a lingering touch of bad blood between the teams. God love the English pyramid.

We've been chuckling away at George Shelvey, the first-choice goalkeeper for National League side Gateshead. He pulled off a worldie of a save against Wealdstone on Saturday, tipping a long-range shot onto the crossbar -- but was so quick to give it 'the big I am' to the crowd that he forgot to notice the ball was still in play.

Wealdstone pounced, and the 2-1 win that Gateshead were close to collecting, with two minutes to go, slipped through Shelvey's fingers. Once bitten, etc.

Why Ousmane Dembele and other Ballon d'Or stars may miss Champions League return