Of the dozen clubs who were involved in the doomed European Super League plot last year, it's fair to say that Liverpool have made the greatest attempt to offer an olive branch to supporters.
Protests against the decision of the Reds to band together with 11 other teams to form a break away competition back in April of 2021 saw Fenway Sports Group chief and Liverpool principal owner John Henry renounce the intentions to make an ESL push, instead filming a video apology to fans taking blame for the decision.
While some may have questioned the true contrition, the move that was made back in November to formally create a new Supporters Board that FSG would have to seek consent from to make any such move to form a new competition in the future suggested that the apology was genuine.
It appeared the club were committed to learning from the mistakes made and rejecting the ESL.
But the ESL hasn't really gone away. Liverpool have gone the furthest but the likes of Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus - three clubs ravaged by the financial impact of the pandemic more than most owing to the heavy spend - remain wedded to the idea of the ESL and are continuing to fight the issue in the courts.
Their legal fight isn't one that they believe will see them give rise to the £3bn competition that they had planned, but to pave the way for the idea to manifest and become reality further on down the line in a different, more palatable guise.
But is it the players or is it the clubs that truly hold the power?
Mohamed Salah is Liverpool's crown jewel and has been for some time. His appeal both home and abroad, being the most prominent African footballer and most famous Muslim footballer means that he is of huge value both on and off the field.
Salah, of course, remains in focus due to his contract status. Despite both parties wanting to reach an agreement there is still no ink that has been committed to paper. Salah is in a strong bargaining position, something that comes with being one of the world's very best players.
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The 12 clubs who were invited to the ESL were done so due to their global reach, but the fact that the very best players in the world plied their trades among those dozen clubs was where there was considerable appeal.
The creation of a competition that wasn't about enriching the traditions of football clubs with long histories but about monetising the game through the clubs and their stars, who through the advent of new technologies are earning huge sums away from the game, whether it be through boot deals or selling their cartoonised digital images via non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Thankfully, and for the good of the game and its traditions that are particularly held dear in English football, the Reds have tried to lead from the from the front in distancing themselves from the ESL. Other clubs have been less committed to cutting the cord.
Professor Stefan Szymanski has for more than 20 years been a renowned voice in the world of the economics of football. He had predicted the rise of the ESL some time ago, pointing to the economic necessity for these clubs to find a way to make what has largely been an unprofitable business for the past century into a profitable one.
A Scunthorpe United fan, Szymanski, the Stephen J. Galetti Professor of Sport Management at the University of Michigan has authored many books on the subject, from the lauded 'Soccernomics', to 'Money and Football', to 'Playbooks and Checkbooks'.
Reds owner and FSG supremo Henry was a fan of Szymanski's work, particularly 'Soccernomics', a book he co-wrote with award-winning author Simon Kuper. In fact, Henry liked it so much he provided a written recommendation of 'Money and Football' that appears on the back of the book.
And Szymanski believes that the demand for the ESL that the clubs hoped for wouldn't have been centred on the clubs themselves, it would be on the best players in the world going toe to toe week in, week out. In much the same way that the excitement builds for the World Cup for that very reason, Szymanski believes the pull of these stars was where the true value lay.
Speaking to the ECHO, Szymanski said: "I teach finance and accounting in sport to my students and I try and give them an understanding of how financial markets work, and one thing I like to show them is the history of the stock exchange indices over the last 100 years.
"I use that to say that there is a crash coming at some point. I have no idea when, it could be tomorrow, it could be years from now, but history teaches us that markets go up and then they go down and it would be bizarre if that started happening.
"And it's the same with the Super League. It came and then it went away and I can't believe for a moment that it won't come back in some form or another.
"I stick to the same argument I had last year that there is a pent up demand to see the top stars play against each other.
"It's not actually about the clubs anymore. It's not about Manchester City and Barcelona or Bayern Munich and Liverpool, that's not really the issue, the issue is Neymar and Mo Salah or Lionel Messi and (Erling) Haaland.
"That is incredibly attractive and is one of the reasons why the World Cup this year will, despite all of the appalling things that go on behind it, we will still watch it as we want to see all of those players come up against each other. The people that say it's only because it is scarce that people want to see it, that is nuts to me. It's just not true. It's like saying that ice cream is nice because you only have it every once in a while. Leave us alone with a tub of ice cream and it will be gone."
The ESL has disappeared from view for the time being.
The three rebel clubs continue to pursue legal action in a bid to clear the way for the next proposal, one that will likely have to learn plenty from the epic failure of the last.
The action is being taken to ensure that these clubs can form new competitions if they so wish, and that the likes of UEFA and FIFA can't try to block the stars that would compete in these competitions from playing in other competitions or for their countries.
Szymanski cites the Kerry Packer case in cricket in the 1970s, where Packer's creation of World Series Cricket threatened the traditions of the game and was based upon the same premise as the ESL; the best players all in one place. The failure of that particular competition's launch did have an impact, with rulings made that could be pointed to today as direct comparisons.
"The question is what format the ESL will come back in and what the likely process will be to present this again," said Szymanski.
"What is going on with Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus isn't that they think they have a chance of launching this league now, it's because they have decided there is a bigger issue at stake and that they are putting down a marker for the future, and that marker is that clubs are free to organise their own championships if they want to and nobody else can tell them what to do. And that is going to be a really sensitive legal issue.
"If you say that these clubs are enterprises then we don't have a law that says that one association of enterprises can prohibit another from doing something that is not illegal, that is not regulated by government, or that a member of an association can be sanctioned if they decide to break away and form their own independent association.
"In general that would be contrary to European law, and probably to British law at the moment. What these clubs are trying to do with the ESL is establish in European law that in principle if they wanted to do this they can say 'well, you can't sanction us'.
"For example, a sanction that might say your player can't play for their international teams if they take part in a break away league, these clubs want a ruling that is illegal. In fact this was more or less ruled on in England back in 1975 with the Kerry Packer issue in cricket.
"What happened was that the ECB threatened Tony Greig and the other players that if they played for Packer then they would not be able to represent England at cricket. Tony Greig took them to court and it was ruled it was illegal and a restraint of trade. We already have a precedent for this and this is the sort of ruling that ESL clubs are looking for.
"Another point the ESL was trying to ride on the back of was the financial meltdown arising from Covid.
"UEFA has been clear about this and published some very good analysis around the financial hole in European football that this has created, which is somewhere between €6bn and €7bn. Bearing in mind the total revenues for European clubs is something like €25m according to Deloitte, a quarter of their revenues have gone in these last two years. When that happens it blows a hole in the balance sheet.
"One of the answers was the ESL, which would have created a private, closed league system like they have in the United States, and that would have offered them the chance of a profitable business venture.
"The issue for UEFA is finding people who want to put money into football if it isn't profitable. If the general economic climate deteriorates will there be people willing to put money into what is a loss making business?"
Liverpool won't be doing anything with a new ESL plot unless the fans gave it the green light. Whether the rest of the elite club follow suit remains to be seen.
