The 39th Game: you probably thought it had ended up in the same waste bin as those television programme ideas that Alan Partridge once pitched to his BBC commissioning boss. Inner-City Sumo, Arm Wrestling with Chas and Dave, Monkey Tennis. Add Wigan Athletic playing Blackburn Rovers in Kuala Lumpur to the list.

Yet it is not a dead duck, merely a very sick one that could undergo a small revival of sorts this week. Unlike Partridge's shows, there remains a significant market for the International Round, which is why it will be back in front of the 20 Premier League chairmen at their annual meeting on Thursday and Friday.

The hawkish among them will seize on a couple of recent comments from influential football powerbrokers to try to breathe fresh life into the controversial idea of Richard Scudamore, the Premier League chief executive.

First there was Sunil Gulati, the president of the US Soccer Federation, saying: “I don't think the principle is a foolish one. We would consider it.” His organisation's initial opposition to Premier League games in New York or Los Angeles had simply been a reflection, he said, of the way it had been launched without warning.

Something similar came from Jack Warner, the influential Fifa vice-president, over the weekend. “Let me tell you something. That 39th game might not have been a bad idea. If ... what is the guy's name? Scudamore? If he had done his job properly and talked to Fifa and talked to Uefa, then announced it, fine. But he came like a thief in the night.”

Both men confirmed what had been suspected from the start: that Fifa were not against the proposal, more the League's assumption that it could railroad it through and plunder all the profits. Divide up the booty with host confederations and the world governing body and, well, nice to meet you, Mr Scudamore. Let's talk business.

So the overseas opposition may just be won over. But what about you? Are you any more ready to see your team fly off to Hong Kong or Tokyo? This week in Leicestershire, the clubs will debate whether to continue to explore the full International Round of matches. The alternative is to settle for building on the existing pre-season tournaments held in the Far and Middle East in non-competitive fixtures.

The huge problem for the hawks, such as Arsenal and Everton, is that there does not appear to have been a eureka moment; a flash of inspiration that reveals a flawless method of playing the fixtures abroad that will not cause significant upset to somebody.

It is not as though Scudamore had not thought long and hard about the downsides before proposing his 39th game, about the potential damage to the integrity of the competition in having an extra match. He knew that, in dispatching Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal to different venues for marketing reasons, the naked commercialism of the venture would be there for all to see.

He had considered the obvious alternative of exporting a round of matches from the regular Premier League season, but that idea would still distort by depriving ten clubs of a home fixture. Personally, it seems a better solution than a 39th game and it has already been tried by the NFL and Major League Baseball, which took its season opener between the Oakland A's and the Boston Red Sox to the Tokyo Dome.

But English supporters have dug a pretty deep trench over these issues and will not easily be persuaded of any plan, perhaps least of all one that would deprive them of a match from their home fixture list.

Faced with the same commercial imperatives that drove Scudamore to come up with his original plan - and which have grown in his eyes with the expansion of other leagues, including American sports - the chief executive will not want to let go. And he can tell the clubs that the overseas confederations have started to relax their opposition and so has Fifa. Of course they have. They think there is money in it.

So something is likely to come from this week's discussions even if, for the time being, it ends up being some sort of fudge, a pre or mid-season tournament involving all 20 clubs. For Scudamore, it would represent a small breakthrough, a flag placed on foreign ground, perhaps the start of something bigger.

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The idea that Mark Hughes may not want to become Manchester City manager in case it prevents him moving on to his beloved United might stack up if the two clubs were competing toe to toe for the same prizes, but last time I checked, one had just become champions of Europe while the other had qualified for the Uefa Cup by being nice. What the top four want, the top four get, so City may just be a finishing school for Hughes. Same city, different leagues.

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Telling the FA how to woo the Fifa bigwigs and win the 2018 World Cup, Jack Warner, the Fifa vice-president, advised: “If you have to bring them to Downing Street, that’s what you have to do. If you have to take them to Buckingham Palace, that’s what you do.” Although rather than “them” he meant “me”.