It looks like the top European football clubs really do intend to leave the hoi polloi behind in their quest for greater riches.
The meeting of five big English clubs in London to discuss a breakaway closed shop Champions league, with possibly one-legged games played in the USA, could signal the death throes of Uefa and eventually threaten Fifa’s monopoly.
Both bodies are in weakened states and are ripe for challenge by the money men in football.
In a recent column I wrote that the idea ‘stinks to high heaven’, but if it comes to pass will Scottish football be any worse off without its bloated money-grasping ethos?
Only Celtic had a realistic chance of representing Scottish hopes, albeit the title challenge from Aberdeen this season may change that.
There is the matter of solidarity payments worth around £300,000 per Premiership club should Celtic reach the group stages.
For the rest of our clubs though, winning the Scottish Premiership, never mind reaching the Champions League, long since became an impossible dream, given the disparity in resources betwen them and the Parkhead club.
So, would it really matter for most football fans in Scotland if we are dismissed as irrelevant to the big boys and their plans for world domination?
Like many fans, I increasingly see a Champions League which is dour, dull, repetitive and rapacious. It is becoming a turn-off for many among the TV audience which provides the subscriptions to keep the cash cow delivering.
The prize of entry is in reality unobtainable for most of our clubs. So, why should we lose sleep over the defection of the disaffected to their own walled-off land of perpetual milk and honey?
A new footballing landscape is being painted here and for some it is the footballing equivalent of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
If the top clubs break the stranglehold of Uefa how long before they replace Fifa’s monopoly with their own?
In that bright new dawn, club not country will be king.
For the self-appointed elite it represents their dream, but I’m not so sure any more that it is a nightmare scenario for the rest of us.
Make football work a bit harder…
The failed attempt to launch a new weekly Scottish sports paper begs the question is there a market for ‘minority’ sports? In a country where football is king, even big sports like golf and rugby often get short shrift in broadcasting and column inches.
Football devours all before it and leaves the athletes, skaters and swimmers who rise at 4am just for training facilities feeling invisible.
Over the two weeks of the Commonwealth Games last year I covered track cycling, weightlifting and judo among others, where just competing usually costs the athletes money. Nothing was too much trouble for them in interviews with a hungry media pack.
Compared to lack of access and off-limits questions frequently cropping up when covering our national sport these days, it was pure oxygen for a reporter.
Maybe it’s time to spread the coverage and make football work a bit harder for its place in our hearts.