Oceans of tears this weekend at the prospect of a European Football Super League, and there we were, being led to believe that Euro-integration was the future?

If it is invitation-only, risk-free showboating, this isn’t a competition as such – it’s marketing content. Think Federer and Nadal hotdogging and pinging up 20-shot lob rallies with the assistance of ball boys, and that is where footie is heading – entering its own era of performance art.

However, the damage to football is not being inflicted by the potential members of this exhibition league. It’s being generated by mainstream football, who in imposing sanctions on participants will be cutting off their own noses to spite their facetiousness.

It’s the reaction to Brexit all over again, where the aggravation comes not from the decision to break away but from the decisions made by the butthurt elite in the aftermath.

This proposed add-on is happening only because the incumbent governing bodies have been bumbling along behind the curve and have dropped the ball. In any big bunce setting, malingerers get Pac-manned.

But if this new league is a money-grabbing whorefest, just let them get on with it. If the weight of fans is truly in manifest opposition, it will all fizzle out anyway.

As it is, top teams are facing bans and the national leagues and major competitions face being deprived of their headline talent. Then watch attendances plummet lead-balloon style.

It should remind us of the Darts split in the 1990s and the laughable BDO tournament that was suddenly being contested by obese, old geezers who couldn’t handle a supermarket checkout, let alone one over 50.

Just let these clubs crack on with their additional 20 games per season – they’ll soon start diluting their team selections, which might arguably water down the overbearing impact of their mega-money on their own national competitions.

Pretty nauseating, though, to see the corrupt football authorities bleating on about the betrayal of fans. They’re just hacked off that a wheelbarrow of mega money – and the power that goes with it – is not within their own grasp.

You wouldn’t have ever caught them griping at the gazillionaire foreign owners who have domestically been creaming in monster profit from the beautiful game for years, because they were all wetting their own beaks. And it’s all rather naive of these professionally jobsworth administrators to expect the purveyors of hard, cold currency to not want hard, cold power too. In the end, if it’s worth taking, the money men take it all.

Of course, all our premier-league, space-wasting politicians have flung their limp, wet-fish personas onto this bandwagon, with Tory mouthpieces criticising the rich clubs seeking to get richer at the expense of ordinary people.

Yes – that’s Johnson’s job.