JUST how tough is it going to be for Glasgow Warriors in this season’s Champions Cup? Perhaps the best indication comes from looking down a list of the teams who have won the tournament since it began in 1996.

Not only are they some of the most distinguished clubs ever to have played rugby, they are also - especially when it comes to the winners in more recent years - among the richest. The leading French and English clubs, in particular, have budgets that are way beyond what anyone at Scotstoun could dream of. You need a lot more than mere money to bold a successful squad, but it certainly helps.

And look, as well, at the first few winners of what was for so long known as the Heineken Cup: Toulouse, Brive, Bath and Ulster. Those four came from three different countries, since when no new nationality has been added to the list of winners.

When Ulster won it back in 1999 there were some who said their victory had been devalued because English teams had boycotted the competition that year. Those detractors might have had a case if no Irish team had ever won it again, but since then, of course, both Munster with two wins and Leinster with three titles have been added to the list of champions.

Granted, Irish rugby has enjoyed a golden age over the past decade and more, so the success of the three provinces should come as no surprise. What is more perplexing, however, is the inability of Welsh teams to compete at the same level.

When it comes to the Six Nations, Wales have won four titles since the turn of the century, including three Grand Slams; Ireland have won three titles and one Grand Slam. Yet somehow the sporadic supremacy of the Welsh national team has never translated into success at club level, with Cardiff, back in the very first year of European competition, having been the only team from Wales even to reach a final.

That solitary runners-up spot is one more than Scotland has managed, of course, but we should not forget how close Edinburgh came to reaching the final just four years ago. Having come top of their pool then beaten Toulouse in a quarter-final that brought a crowd of 38,000 to Murrayfield, Michael Bradley’s team then lost to Ulster in the semi-final by just three points.

That 2012 campaign may have proved to be a flash in the pan rather than the start of something big, and Bradley, unable to build on its success, was soon gone. Nonetheless, it was a useful reminder that, in the right circumstances, Scottish teams can get the better of some of the best clubs in Europe.

Since then, despite playing second fiddle to Glasgow in terms of PRO12 position, Edinburgh have also reached the final of the Challenge Cup, losing last year to Gloucester. Some of the bigger clubs from France and England who find themselves in European rugby’s subsidiary tournament do not always see it as a priority, but even so, Edinburgh are rightly proud of having been the first Scottish team to get to a continental final.

By contrast, Glasgow’s one foray to date into the knockout stages of the Heineken is not a happy memory. That was in the short-lived quarter-final play-offs back in 1997, when, after coming second to Wasps in their pool, they lost 90-19 to Leicester, the team they meet at Scotstoun on Friday night in the first round of this season’s pool stages.

Just two years later, however, and by now one of two Scottish teams,

Glasgow Caledonians, as they had been renamed, actually managed to beat Leicester at McDiarmid Park in Perth. They still fell short of qualification from their pool, finishing third behind Stade Francais and Leinster, but it was a significant result all the same.

At the time, indeed, some within Scottish Rugby saw it as a vindication of their decision to crunch four teams into two. Alas, Glasgow failed to follow up on that success, and instead it was Leicester who regrouped and went on to win the Heineken Cup twice in the coming years. Yet even so, it was an encouraging sign, and an indication of what can be done, at least as a one-off.

So there’s always hope. And, while much of that hope was all but extinguished in last season’s Champions Cup by an early defeat from Northampton, a season earlier the campaign began with an excellent 37-10 win over Bath.

If Glasgow can beat Leicester on Friday, they will travel to Munster believing they can win there. But that is a substantial if, of course, and beyond that there is the small matter of going to Paris a couple of weeks before Christmas and trying to get a result against last year’s runners-up, Racing 92.

For the Warriors even to have a realistic chance of getting out of their pool this season, you suspect they will need to reach the level they were at when they won the PRO12 in 2015. That will be rather difficult, given the fact that some of their most important players back then are no longer in their ranks - above all talismanic lock forward Leone Nakarawa, who now plays for Racing.