So the NFL road show has arrived in town. You will know by now, because it is a very well-oiled PR machine, that the Miami Dolphins — seven games and no wins in the league so far — take on the New York Giants, undefeated in five, in a league match at Wembley on Sunday that really does count.

If the Giants, who look the more likely of the two, happen to make it to the Super Bowl in Arizona in February, you’ll know that this game was part of the journey. There will be no more than 10,000 travelling fans at the match, which means that the 70,000 or so who make up the rest of the congregation on Sunday are home grown — or at least Europe grown. Sure, they won’t necessarily be Dolphins or Giants fanatics, but they will largely be a converted audience that doesn’t need American football selling to them.

What the NFL hopes, apart from providing a “fix” to UK-based fans, is that seeing a packed Wembley, reading about the fixture all week and then watching highlights, if not all of the match, might grow the fanbase some more, helping them to sell more merchandise and bump up the value of television rights.

This is an important fixture for the NFL, but in many ways it is much more important for the Barclays Premier League. Where American sport treads, we are inevitably destined to follow, at least when it comes to football. You could argue that we are halfway there already, with extensive pre-season tours to America and the Far East now common practice, not to mention a Sunday morning kick-off at 11.30am already this season.

Regular midday fixtures are not scheduled to test the British transport system or the patience of Sunderland fans as they hurtle down the M1 at 5am, they are in place to help our friends in the East get their Saturday and Sunday night fill of the beautiful game and our friends in the West (ie, West London and Gloucester Place, where the Premier League is based) make even more hay while that sun shines.

Of course the Premier League would also argue that mixing up kick-off times gives more choice to the consumer . . . sorry, I mean the fan, but I have yet to meet a fan or more importantly a footballer — for they should occasionally be consulted about these things — who loves a midday match. It feels almost Luddite to try to argue against the mixed-up, crazy world of Premier League kick-offs as they do seem to be here to stay, but it doesn’t mean that they are right and more choice is not always best. One weekend soon there will be no games at 3pm on a Saturday. As the mix of Premier League clubs’ ownership becomes more international, every season the incentive to appeal to countries eight time zones away is only going to increase and the biggest gift of all to them would be a real Premier League fixture.

Tom Coughlin, the New York Giants coach, is treating his team’s trip to London as nothing more than another league game and said that the flight time is almost as long as when the Giants travel to the West Coast of America, so there shouldn’t be too much of an issue. The same could not be said for any Premier League club wishing to hop over to Thailand to play a midweek fixture.

So what do you do? Lengthen the season to accommodate the travel and do away with the meaningless pre-season tours — which would be redundant anyway if real fixtures went ahead? All well and good, unless you ever want England to compete on the world stage again.

Players already turn up for international training exhausted; add a few trips to the Far East and the West Coast and see that absentee list grow. The FA must be sweating; it knows it is only a matter of time before Manchester United and Liverpool agree to play in Hong Kong one Saturday afternoon (which is about a 9am start if you take it on pay per view). And there really is nothing it can do about it. Such considerations do not enter the franchise owners’ meetings at the NFL. After all, the US American football team do not exist in the real world and there are no World Cups to qualify for or European Championships to play in.

If this is all sounding a bit far-fetched, you really haven’t been following English football for a few years, but to appease you, let us start on a smaller scale; every weekend thousands of Irish football fans make the trip across the water to take in Premier League and Clydesdale Bank Premier League football. So give them Sunderland v Manchester United in Dublin, or even better in Cork, as a reward? No issues about travel or jet lag to deal with — the only stumbling block would be which team forfeit the fixture as a home match. If you limit the travelling fans to get a real sense of the “home” crowd, ie, those who live in that country, you could have as little as 10,000 of the 70,000 who would normally be at Old Trafford for that fixture. And I am not sure they’d all be delighted. But I am sure in trying to placate them, something along the lines of “you can buy another Cristiano Ronaldo” might be uttered. And to Sunderland’s fans: “You can buy your first Ronaldo.”

I know I have to move with the times but where will it end? Perhaps next season every team will have the right to play Ronaldinho once: the fixture will be pulled out of the hat to make it fair as he becomes the Premier League’s first roving player — owned by the League itself.

Or what about Mourinho Monday? Every team have to play at least one match on a Monday and have José Mourinho pick their side for the game. Even better, he picks both teams, gives both team talks and acts as a pundit for the telly. Of course we could vote with our feet and not put up with any more nonsense, but, well, it’s just that the Premier League is so bloody exciting!