The return this evening of the Heineken Cup for its fourteenth season marks a distinct raising of the bar, on the field and off. When Munster, the holders, trot out into a splendidly refurbished Thomond Park for their opening pool game against Montauban, a frisson of excitement will run through the European game.

This is the tournament in which players will judge themselves, or are judged by national coaches whose first tranche of international games is only a month away. But this is also the first season in which the participating clubs and regions can make a signal contribution to the commercial success of the competition, thanks to the new seven-year agreement reached this year.

“The clubs have never been better represented round our table and that’s got to be good,” Derek McGrath, chief executive of European Rugby Cup Ltd (ERC), said. “We can look at where we will be in five or ten years’ time more sensibly, we can talk about tournament structures, we get extra energy to help us build the tournament.”

This is a good time for the new agreement to kick in, given that this is the final year of the sponsorship agreement with Heineken, the brewing company, and talks are also going on with broadcasters. “The value of the tournament is growing year on year and that’s measurable,” McGrath said. “But the value isn’t just cash, it’s the value coaches get from their players being exposed to a higher level of competition.”

Hence the beady eyes that Martin Johnson, Warren Gatland, Frank Hadden and Declan Kidney, the home unions’ managers and coaches, will fix on the next fortnight. Kidney, the Ireland head coach, will watch how Munster fare under his successor, Tony McGahan, with an all too familiar team. They include this evening only three players who did not start last season’s final against Toulouse — Keith Earls at full back, Peter Stringer at scrum half and Justin Melck, the South African back-row forward who is working hard to turn a three-month contract as cover for the injured Denis Leamy into something more substantial.

Given England’s need to discover consistency, Johnson, the team manager, will take the deepest of interest in how his elite players fare. His coaching cohorts have been out and about in the week — Graham Rowntree and Simon Hardy were helping London Wasps with their set-piece work — but reputations can be confirmed or broken in the first two pool rounds of Europe.

The Guinness Premiership clubs, too, will use this season to assess where they stand relative to France. Their umbrella body, Premier Rugby Ltd (PRL), will make recommendations to the ERC board in November having conducted its own strategic review but it is acutely aware of the need to hold its own in a tournament won six times by English clubs, four times by France and three times by Ireland.

The European rankings list introduced this year, for example, shows Munster at the top followed by Toulouse and Biarritz before Leicester appear as the first of the English clubs. “If European competitiveness becomes a problem, we have to look at the salary cap,” Mark McCafferty, the PRL chief executive, said, knowing that no review of the cap is scheduled before next year (it stands at £4 million this season) and could not be implemented until the 2010-11 season.

French clubs are not subject to the same fiscal limitation and their budgets range from the €22 million (about £17.5 million) of Toulouse to the €9.5 million of Montauban. “It’s important for the English clubs to be successful in Europe,” McCafferty said, relishing the chance to see how much greater a commercial dividend the Premiership competitors can create given freer range this season.

But today the players take centre stage: Munster with their swath of internationals, Perpignan, eagerly awaiting the arrival of Dan Carter, the New Zealand fly half, in December, against a Treviso side blessed with the organisational skills of Fraser Waters, twice a cup winner with Wasps, who have missed the subtlety that he brought to their back division, which they have yet to replace.