He has heard the criticism and read the outrage, but Richard Scudamore remains certain that one European league will be playing competitive matches outside its own country before long. “Somebody, somewhere will do it in the next five years,” he said. If it is to happen, you will not be surprised that he remains intrigued by the involvement of the Premier League.

That will be enough to have various columnists shouting the advice that when in a hole, stop digging, but what is Scudamore to do? Last he heard, the clubs want him to take the idea forward and he is not ready to walk away from something that has been a year in discussion.

He will begin a round of consultations with foreign cities and far-off confederations that were planned all along. Given his belief that some kind of overseas expedition is inevitable, whether it is by Manchester United, Real Madrid or AC Milan,

it may amount in his mind to dereliction of duty to advise the 20 Barclays Premier League clubs to give up, whatever the force of the opposition.

“Are we bruised? No, that sounds like you are snivelling in a corner, worried to go to work every day,” he said. “What we are aggrieved about is that we always said this was a year in the making. We always said there are the big issues that need reconciled. But that never got out. It came out as though the club execs were getting straight on a plane. We’d never even discussed which cities.”

So was it just badly handled rather than being a bad idea? Would the 39th game be a serious contemplation rather than what appears a dead duck if he had brought Fifa, the FA and other organisations on board earlier?

“It is very dangerous not to go to the clubs first,” the Premier League chief executive said. “They would quite rightly feel aggrieved. Maybe it would have been different if we would have consulted more widely without offending the clubs, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.”

Future discussions will involve different formats for the proposed “International Round”, although Scudamore suggests that if there is a better, fairer version than the proposal involving all 20 teams spread across five cities, he has yet to see it. “We’ve probably had 200 ideas about how it might happen,” he said. “Do you take two games out of the 38 [regular season], for example, although I don’t believe in that.

“The fundamental objection from a hardcore is that we don’t want to play games overseas full stop. It is a perfectly valid view. But what weight do you give to that hardcore? That is one of the things we are evaluating. Does one season ticket-holder equal a thousand Chinese, one million Chinese viewers? I don’t know the answer to that, but we are thinking about these things.”

Scudamore was not in Tokyo, Sydney or Los Angeles peddling his 39th game yesterday but standing in horizontal rain by the side of a new school facility in Cinderford, Gloucestershire. It is the town where he sent off two people in a ferocious Boxing Day derby match in 1982 in his days as a qualified Bristolian referee. He may have to remind people that he does have a background in the game at a time when he has been painted as a purely commercial animal driven by the need to make money, rather than protect the long-term interests of the sport.

“Nothing works for commercial purposes if it kills the essence of what we do,” he said. “What I absolutely believe is that where we have been successful, others have been successful around us. You can’t separate our success from the FA with their television rights and their commercial deals. Our success filters down everywhere.”

He cites the example of the artificial pitch he opened yesterday at a school in Cinderford, paid for by the Football Foundation — a joint partnership between the Premier League, the FA and the Government. “We will give away £124 million of a £960 million turnover to the Football League, the PFA [Professional Footballer's Association], other good causes,” he said. “And you won’t see that from any other commercial organisation.”

It has been a bumpy few weeks for Scudamore to say the least and follows the Carlos Tévez affair last year. Those two difficult periods have been all the more notable because of the success he enjoyed in the previous nine years, fighting off the challenge of the European Commission to collective bargaining and driving up the television deals to turn the Premier League into the strongest league in the world (economically at least).

“The future success of the league is not dependent on a 39th game and my career at the Premier League does not hinge on whether we do a 39th round,” he said. “We are not bankrupt of ideas without a 39th game. Our huge reach gives us all sorts of opportunities. We have strategic ideas all the time.”

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