The first thing to be said about this week’s European Court of Justice ruling – that promises, for a time, to open a path to cheaper live Premier League football for armchair fans in the UK – is that if this doesn’t make the European Union (EU) more popular in famously eurosceptic Britain, nothing will.
But the potential consequences for the future structure of the European game are just as fascinating.
For example, the ruling – which appears to clear Portsmouth landlady Karen Murphy (and anyone else) to use a decoder to view live broadcasts intended primarily for the Greek market – could de facto create a single EU market for Premier League football.
If the price difference was big enough (perhaps allowing for the odd Greek phrase-book) and the hassle factor not too great, Wayne Rooney and Fernando Torres fans anywhere in the EU could theoretically buy their subscriptions en masse from the cheapest national EU market.
If enough did so, you would think that the price differential would, in turn, erode.
Once a single European market for broadcasts of elite-level club football on the continent was created, albeit in this rather strange way, it would not require too much of an imaginative leap to conclude that the best kind of football product for extracting value from this market might well turn out to be an EU-wide Super League.
Indeed, the Premier League might hasten the initiation of the sort of grand experiment that such a league would represent if it sought to protect the value of its domestic UK rights by drawing in its horns: by ceasing to sell live Premiership rights elsewhere in the EU unless European broadcasters paid prices similar to their UK counterparts.
Even a pan-EU league would be vulnerable to the likes of Karen Murphy seeking to source their matches from the cheapest EU market.
So it might need to fix the price at which broadcasting rights to its matches would be sold, rather than auctioning them in each national market.
But if enough of the big clubs were involved, and if the new league fixed the price at a level it knew the big markets – Germany, Spain, England, Italy, Russia – could bear, it could probably afford to leave rights unsold in countries where no broadcaster was prepared to meet the asking price.
The potential consequences of this week’s ruling for fans and players are also interesting.
In the short term, you would have to think UK fans will win, while Premier League players may lose.
Armchair supporters, after all, may well be able to get access to cheaper live Premier League action, at least for a season or two.
By contrast, if the Premier League’s income is hit by this next time it markets its rights, you would expect any reduction to feed through quickly into players’ wages.
Try to look further ahead, though, and it is not hard to see how the occupants of the “Winners” and “Losers” columns in this equation might be reversed.
For example, the threat of falling wages might well prompt the best players to move to other leagues, leaving Premier League viewers with a reduced-quality product, even if they were paying less to watch it.
Alternatively, if the process set in motion by Ms Murphy and her allies did facilitate the formation of a European Super League, and if this league became a magnet for the world’s top players, you could see wages soaring even higher than they are today, albeit only for the crème de la crème.
As if what she has achieved in the football/broadcasting spheres weren’t impressive enough, I also wonder whether Ms Murphy hasn’t stumbled upon a way of easing the present Euro-zone crisis.
This, you will know, is focused on Greece, source of the decoder at the heart of this affair.
Now it seems unlikely that this week’s ruling will create such a stampede of demand for Greek decoders that the companies concerned will become profitable enough to wipe out the country’s bothersome deficit through the taxes they become liable to pay.
However, I do find myself wondering whether other low-cost Greek products and services have been unjustifiably kept out of various EU markets, to the detriment of the country and its finances.
At the very least, Ms Murphy’s victory suggests that dismantling internal EU trade barriers could form part of a strategy for helping Greece and other debt-burdened national economies to dig themselves out of trouble.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 World Cup. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed here.