This is a prestigious week for Albion.

They are planning to play one of the Super League clubs.

Let’s hope they wipe their feet at the front door and feel suitably honoured.

European football has been reeling since midway through yesterday afternoon over plans for a Super League.

Not just here. Other nations are just as appalled.

If anything, the English game is better placed to cope with the loss of six of its biggest clubs – if that is what it comes to - given we have an oversubscribed top flight.

There are several potential top division outfits with sizeable and loyal fanbases, magnificent histories and impressive stadia who cannot get in.

But they can try.

Why? Because the door remains open for those who are well enough organised off the pitch and good enough on it.

Because of a structure which did not mean Nottingham Forest, Leeds, Ipswich and Derby would stay in the First Division forever because they were the top clubs in the 1970s.

Now it seems the biggest clubs are pulling up the drawer bridge.

Why? Money. Self-protection.

But, away from the financial and contractual intricacies, there is one thing which surely stands out to anyone who watches any sport.

And that is the clubs themselves surely diminishing the aspect of competition which sustains them.

They have grown because they are successful in competitive fields.

Now they are taking swathes of that competitive field from under their own feet.

The point is well made that not all the Super clubs are currently in super positions in their domestic leagues.

Some have lost matches to less Super clubs, such as Albion.

That’s okay. It can happen. Liverpool remain a much bigger club than Albion, despite not beating them this season.

I think we can live with that.

But they cannot all be among the elite of the elite.

Some of these Super clubs will end up being ESL also-rans year after year.

Teams who rank tenth to 15th in the ESL.

If they DO play in their domestic leagues, what does that mean for the competitive nature of those competitions?

They will still try to win the title, of course.

But there will be no need to race for the top four.

That battle for Champions League spots can be among the most interesting aspects of the end of the season.

Europa League places too in many countries, although we turn our noses up at the competition in England.

Not any more – and yet those non-ESL clubs going well don't have elite Euro dreams to chase either.

And what does that mean for, for example, a team fighting relegation playing one of those freewheeling sides late in the season?

Many nations won't even have the hope of one of their clubs playing at the top table.

If we are comparing the ESL to the NBA, for example, don’t expect all matches to be, well, Super.

Admittedly, in the NBA that is partly down to the sheer quantity – 82 regular season games for each team.

The play-offs can be fantastic but there are a lot of dull regular season games.

A lot of games involving teams who have given up on the season and, with no relegation threat, are rebuilding for the following year with seemingly no concern at all about current results.

Is that what we will see in the ESL? Possibly.

Will the Prem be diluted because its top clubs are not involved or, if they are here, see it as a secondary competition, with no need to push themselves if they are not chasing the title and with every reason to rest their best players?

You would think that is a probability.

That is, of course, if all this happens.

I still like to suspect the plans will change, be compromised, adapted, scrapped.

That it's just the first part of a negotiation.

But maybe that is wishful thinking.

Maybe that is harking back to an afternoon now hazy in the memory when Albion played Manchester City in a routine second division game, Neil McNab and Asa Hartford exchanged crisp finishes from the edge of the box and everyone felt roughly equal in size and very equal in status, importance and opportunity.

Long-gone times.

Albion can still upset a Super founder in Chelsea if they play well enough tomorrow.

But it does not feel like a super start to the week.