The cheery freshers are taking their first steps into Bar One point five, where Sky Sports Supreme Super-duper Sunday surrounds them from every corner. It's a good 'un: an offering from the World Soccer League between LA Galaxy and Liverpool from Cape Town, South Africa.

As the beer flows, the crazy sporting accounts of the fresher's elderly relatives begin to emerge. Sheffield Thursday in the ye olde Premier League? A basketball team called the Sheffield Sharks? Pah, for real entertainment, watch the NBA's premier European side, the London Mavericks.

As for Rugby Union, the Six Nations has evolved into the annual 16 team European State Cup. Watch out for the plucky Romanians…

Clearly it is difficult to predict the fate of professional sport in the next half century, but with television deals consistently increasing both domestically and abroad, with the correct branding and intensive marketing in the economic centres of the future, sporting franchises have untapped and seemingly limitless potential to exploit.
In the case of the Premier League, however, there is very little scope to expand the domestic broadcasting market further and despite public derision, there is an economic sense to Chief Executive Richard Scudamore's proposal of a 39th game on the fixture list.

There is little doubt as to why his proposal has been met with the support of the Premier League's group of chairmen; the increased trend in foreign ownership is hardly a coincidental fashion statement made by global fat cats. Money and profit is paramount, and Scudamore's projected offer of £5million for one annual game would appear a fair exchange.

And it is hardly a unique proposal. As recently as last autumn, the NFL, the NBA and the NHL played a league fixture in Europe for the first time, with London their first base.

Where was the moral outcry when all three sports played to sell-out crowds? Unlike our friends across the pond, the British prefer to cling onto the delusion that it can control the speed at which business dictates its favourite sport.

Essentially, the birth of the Premier League in 1992 has already made this unattainable. As Scudamore admits: "You can't stand still and if we don't do this, then somebody else is going to do it, whether it be football or another sport." If the Premier League delays its global jaunt, the brand is at risk of decline.

FIFA may achieve a temporary embargo by posing a threat to the future of England's 2018 World Cup bid. Coupled with the widespread unpopularity of the proposal, there is a realistic hope that the issue will be removed from the Premier League agenda for another ten years.

But when football's global competitors include the NBA, whose commissioner David Stern has publicly stated that they "really are thinking about expansion teams in Europe in the decade", English football's missionary operative appears dangerously inevitable in the long term.

This story is from the University of Sheffield's student paper, the Steel Press. Visit their webpage for more stories.