This season’s Champions League is proving unexpectedly profound and asking serious philosophical questions about the nature and purpose of top-level sport.

It has been, by surface-level measures, tremendously good fun. It’s had goals, goals, goals. After just three matches, are already seven teams into double figures for goals scored, and it’s not even just because a bunch of weaker teams are getting their arses handed to them every week. Unless you count two – Lille and Slovan Bratislava, who have zero points and 10+ goals conceded – as a bunch. And that would be plain nutty.

Just over the last two nights, we’ve had two 4-3s, a couple of 4-2s, a sprinkling of 4-1 and 5-1 paddlings, a 3-2 and a couple of 2-2s. The week before we got another couple of 4-3s, another 4-2 involving the defending champions, a shock 3-3 draw and some more 3-2s.

After 54 games of the tournament, there have been as many games end 4-2 or 4-3 as 0-0 or 1-0. We’re rollocking along at a heady rate of a tick over four goals per game.

There have been shocks. There have been incredible comebacks and near-misses, there have been big clubs going toe to toe, there have been some enormous thrashings.

It has been, in many ways, the perfect football tournament. The best players in the world serving up spectacularly entertaining games with astonishingly consistent reliability and regularity.

But… nobody really cares. Nobody outside those directly involved raises an eyebrow. Because in far more important ways the new-look Champions League remains the worst football tournament.

Too big, too bloated, but above all else too lacking in meaning and peril.

Jeopardy is the key. That’s the secret sauce that makes the entertainment on offer worth it all. Sure, Liverpool’s comeback against Villarreal was amazing. But imagine if it had actually meant something real to either side’s prospects? Same with Bayern drawing 3-3 at Viking, or Villa just putting their Premier League struggles to one side to go around the continent just giving team after team a fearful splattering.

Almost none of it will actually matter. A tiny handful of the league phase’s 144(!) games will have meaningful consequence to a tiny handful of the league phase’s 36 clubs on matchday eight, when the whole months-long collective effort will once again be declared worthwhile when one piece of late drama lifts someone to 24th and a continued place in the competition and leaves some poor sod 25th when the music stops.

Until then, and with absolutely no real way of knowing at this point which teams we’ll be talking about then, almost everything is just some games of football that happened. The Champions League league phase has so much bloated irrelevance that you don’t even need to spot the Man City-shaped elephant in the cavernous room to struggle to put anything that’s happening into any kind of meaningful context.

The entire Champions League league phase (and while we’re busy saying a lot of stuff we’ve already said before, but now in even more exasperated fashion: we still desperately need a better name for it than that) can now be broken down into a fairly significant pile of total mismatches, a small pile of intriguing results that don’t really matter, a smaller pile of even more intriguing results that do turn out to matter a bit, and then the largest pile of matches that are effectively just endless Community Shields as far as the eye can see for months on end. A fun chance to watch two big clubs go at it, sure, but however hard people might try and pretend the result has some meaning, it just doesn’t.

It really doesn’t help UEFA that PSG have already managed to show the insignificance of the league phase so thoroughly, twice. Phoning it in to finish outside the top eight but knowing that a safety net extending all the way down to 24th was always going to catch them and bounce them into the knockouts where they could start properly paying attention.

The good news for UEFA this year at least, is that PSG appear now able to accidentally win all their league games anyway, with fixtures against City and Barcelona accidentally triggering their competitive instincts early. But even that carries dangers; what if PSG end up ‘winning’ the league phase but then, as has to be considered a possibility, don’t in fact win the actual title at the end of it all? That’ll just reiterate the league phase’s irrelevance further.

There is another advantage held by the likes of PSG and Bayern Munich as well. They know they need not particularly worry about the punishment play-off round for those who finish between ninth and 24th, because they know that by the time that’s taking place, the vast bulk of their domestic work will more often than not already be complete. They can be confident in their ability to focus fully on the Champions League when the knockouts arrive in a way Spanish, English and Italian clubs cannot.

With the English clubs, there’s already an established pattern: their sheer heft, their spending power, the depth of their squads, the significant advantage of never having to play each other, will almost always carry them through the league phase in lofty positions, before necessity of actually having to put a full year-long effort into their domestic league leaves them vulnerable when the real stuff kicks off in the final third of the season.

It’s already happening again. Aston Villa, Liverpool and Arsenal all sit inside the top eight having dropped just two points between them, and those away at Bayern Munich.

Man City are outside the top eight only on goal difference having lost to the two-time defending champions in one of the most Community Shield-coded barnstormers we’ve seen yet.

The exception, of course, are poor old Manchester United. But even they only cement the wider issues when you think about it.

The 4-1 defeat at Como was so bad that it might well end Michael Carrick’s time at the helm. But that says a lot more about just how many straws are already on the back of that particular camel, and about Manchester United more generally. If it takes the worst-run major club in top-level European football to make your league phase interesting, then we would contend that it says far more about that particular basket case than it does anyone or anything else.

And the final kicker here? Even stupid, ridiculous, crisis-addled Manchester United, currently on a European humiliation tour that threatens to end multiple careers on and off the pitch, currently sit in a qualifying position.

The reality is that, two years into the new format, no serious European heavyweight has yet managed to get knocked out in the league phase. The best you’ll find is a Napoli here, a minor, non-big-three Spanish side there.

Approaching the halfway stage of this year’s tournament, and the most eye-catching name currently below the cutline may genuinely be, after their European adventures of the last two seasons, Bodo/Glimt.

There’s a further puzzle here in wondering whether one has beget the other. Is it in fact the near meaninglessness of the games that has given them such extraordinary surface-level entertainment value? Does the knowledge that it doesn’t matter make for games that, treated as one-off exhibition matches, have so often been such great fun?

It strikes us that it probably isn’t a coincidence that, say, Arsenal played with greater freedom in a 2-2 draw against Bayern Munich than they did days earlier in a tense and nervous 1-0 win at Nottingham Forest.

But with due respect to those ever Tricky Trees, it also strikes us as absurd that the result of an October Premier League game at Nottingham Forest almost certainly carries far more significance for Arsenal than any result in an October Champions League game at Bayern Munich now ever could.

Shorn of tangible consequence, Champions League games have for the most part simply become a bunch of stuff that happens. It’s fast-food football. You enjoy it at the time, but there are no nutrients here and it soon leaves you feeling empty.

The Champions League is now just ultra-processed empty calories.