OKAY, so it wasn’t a secret meeting. In fact, it was barely a meeting at all.

“There is nothing secret about this informal brainstorming session,” a Uefa spokesman said, reluctantly breaking cover about this top-level pow wow between the heavy hitters of continental club football.

Merely a chance to discuss ideas and exchange views regarding Europe’s club competitions post 2024, in one camp, stood the Executive Board of the continent’s governing body, headed up by its Slovakian president Alexander Ceferin. In the other was the executive board of the European Club Association, the umbrella organisation which represents the will of 232 clubs across Europe.

The Herald:

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An occasionally uneasy alliance between clubs at varying stages of the food chain of modern football, among their number yesterday was Peter Lawwell, the chief executive of Celtic.

At least the Scottish representatives found common cause with Edwin van der Sar, the vice chairman of the ECA, whose bargaining position was presumably bolstered by the fact that his Ajax side had just dramatically dethroned Real Madrid as top club in Europe.

But as this was just a brainstorming session, not a meeting, there was nothing to see here. Other, perhaps, than the goalposts of continental football being stealthily shifted again, if not exactly in front of our very eyes, then in a darkened room within the plush Nyon headquarters of the continental governing body.

Top of the agenda, if the reports of the Wall Street Journal were to be believed, was a plan for continental matches at weekends rather than midweeks.

While this innovation is more convenient for those attempting to arrange foreign travel, it would rather undercut domestic league play. Which makes it somewhat divisive when you consider that the top English clubs have used the phenomenal riches of their broadcast deal to carve out a dominant position in Champions League play which only seems likely to become even more entrenched with each passing season.

It reads almost like a footnote in these times where Brexit negotiations hang in the balance, but the biggest clubs on continental Europe may no longer have common cause with their English cousins.

“When you go to the office or you’re at school you don’t have a friend who is a Bayern Munich fan, do you?” Alberto Colombo, the deputy general of the European Leagues grouping, was reported as saying. “Your colleagues support Arsenal, Manchester United and Liverpool and these are the rivalries we want to talk about on Monday morning.”

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Other ideas thought to be on the table yesterday was a mechanism to make qualification even simpler – if not automatic - for Europe’s establishment clubs, even the possibility of promotion and relegation between tiers.

With clubs of the scale of Celtic failing to qualify for the Champions League this season, the challenge for Scotland’s representatives is simply to stop our qualification equation getting any more difficult.

“The purpose of the meeting was to engage in an informal brainstorming session to allow for an initial sharing of ideas and exchange of views around UEFA Club Competitions post-2024. This is the first of a series of meetings amongst stakeholders in the months ahead, in order to allow for a detailed and proper consultation with the aim of drawing up concrete proposals that can be properly considered and analysed prior to any decisions being reached.”

So it was a meeting. A meeting about a meeting. More may become clear after the ECA general assembly in a fortnight’s time. But don’t bet on it.