For major Premier League clubs such as Manchester United, the need to find new revenue sources is set to become increasingly important in the coming years.

While broadcast rights have been on an incline for more than a decade, the most recent £6.7bn deal for domestic rights may have seemed like a big £1.7bn rise on the last cycle, but the devil is always in the detail, and the detail gives some clues as to the trajectory of broadcast rights.

The £5bn deal was across three years and for 200 games each campaign, the new deal is across four years and for 270 per season, that has diminished the value per game of the product.

While international rights are seen as having a little way left to travel upwards, the fact is that broadcasters cannot keep paying more when subscriptions are dwindling and challenges faced by such things as the rise of piracy via IPTV impact them so significantly. The streamers have dipped their toe into the water, but paying more than the kinds of sums that traditional broadcasters have been is likely not the long-term play.

The other revenue pillars of matchday and commercial both have their limitations. United are aiming to build a new 100,000-seater stadium adjacent to Old Trafford that will significantly lift already high matchday revenues, but there will always be a ceiling as to what can be done with bricks and mortar. As for commercial, partners now want to see a real return on investment against strict KPIs, and the simple transaction of handing over cash for having the name on the front of a shirt and on advertising hoardings is a thing of the past. The partnerships have to be meaningful and impactful, and if they aren’t they don’t last and the value of the sponsorship inventory diminishes.

Pre-season has for a good two decades been where clubs can make some extra funds, with tours to different countries and continents bring the club closer to a global fanbase and aiding the growth of the brand, which can turn into greater merchandising power.

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The idea of a ‘39th game’ has been kicked around by the Premier League since 2009. The major US leagues of the NBA, NFL and MLB have long headed to the UK and other key markets for regular season games, not just exhibition games, and that has been a lucrative endeavor for them and allowed them to grow each brand. They have been extremely popular events.

The 39th game idea was to take a round of Premier League games to the US in a similar way, giving fans in a major market that has disposable income and sports fandom in its blood a chance to see meaningful action and not a mish-mash of fringe players and youngsters go through the motions.

The idea went away, then it came back, and with the World Cup in the US next year and America now well and truly having caught the ‘soccer’ bug, the possibility of it happening has appeared to be edging closer. There are a number of Premier League team owners who would dearly love for that to happen, unsurprising when you consider more than half of Premier League teams are owned by North American businesses or individuals.

But, revealed by Front Office Sports on Tuesday, Premier League chief football officer Tony Scholes poured cold water on any plans being talked about behind the scenes.

“We don’t feel the need to come play in the US during the season proper, and you’ll understand the challenges that would present in the UK as well,” Scholes told FOS in during a mid-season media briefing on Tuesday.

“[Playing internationally] is not on our agenda, and no discussions are taking place.”

How long that is the stance remains to be seen, with the strategy going against what other leagues and major sports are doing.

La Liga, the Premier League’s biggest competitor when it comes to European domestic leagues, has long courted the idea of having regular season games in the US, the goal to have ‘El Clasico’ on US soil in the coming years very much on the agenda. The league has been vocal in its desire to expand into the US and become the first football league to host regular season games there, something that will likely fire the starters pistol for others, and one that puts La Liga in the driving seat when it comes to making the most of revenue opportunities that exist.

For United, a US game during the season would deliver tens of millions in revenue and would be more appealing to US commercial partners were it to become a regular fixture, as well as boosting merchandise sales and adding to the broadcasting sums that come into the club, with the potential for that additional game to be sold as an individual package.

The Premier League stance in the here and now is clear, but football is evolving, and it won’t wait for the Premier League. It’s hard to imagine those discussions don’t return when La Liga gets up and running stateside.