Rio giants Flamengo are one of Brazil's biggest clubs discussing abandoning the country's state championships.

Might Brazilian football finally be approaching its 1992 moment? That was the year when England's major clubs broke away to form the Premier League.

Up until then, in a structure in which 92 league clubs all have one vote, the elite clubs were hostage to the whims of the smaller ones. The top clubs grumbled for years, breakaway "super leagues" were threatened, until 23 years ago, when the Premier League was launched. The rest, with all its excesses, is a global success story.

The tyranny suffered by Brazil's big clubs goes deeper. In England, the crux of the matter was the distribution of TV money, whereby proceeds from the same deal were divided among the 92. In Brazil, the dispute centres on something even more fundamental: the game's calendar.

Brazil, of course, is huge, a country the size of a continent. There has only been a genuine national league since 1971. The tradition of the game is one of local rivalries. The country is currently divided into 27 states, and each state continues to hold its own separate championship, which generally take place in the first few months of the year.

For all their historic importance, these competitions have long since passed their sell-by date. Between January and May, the big clubs, with giant fan bases, play against teams so small they barely exist as professional concerns. Average crowds are tiny, TV audiences are shrinking. For the big clubs, these competitions have become a waste of time.

Worse, they eat into time that could be better used. The national league is crammed in from May to December. Any league structure needs a pause beforehand, to build up drama for the big kickoff. This cannot happen in Brazil, where the state championships come to a close less than a week before the start of the national league. The big kickoff is a damp squib; not least because it coincides with the decisive stages of the Copa Libertadores, the continent's Champions League equivalent, so some of the clubs field understrength sides.

Brazil is thus thrown out of sync with the rest of the world. The existence of the state championships eats up valuable space. It makes it all but impossible for the clubs to take part in high-profile international preseason tournaments.

It means that there is no space for the national league to pause for FIFA dates. This year there was not even any pause during the Copa America. Clubs are paying their stars big money while they are off representing their national teams; and in this year's Copa, it was not only Brazilian players who missed many rounds of the league. Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay all had Brazilian-based players called up.

In a globalised era, the state championships make it all the harder for Brazilian clubs to compete. No ambitious player wants to play in them, and they prevent the clubs from realising their financial potential.

A little bit like their pre-1992 English counterparts, Brazil's big clubs are caught in a structure that is not in their interests. The game is organised on a state basis. Inside each state there are many more small clubs than big ones. So the small clubs, with no supporters, have a dominant voice.

Many of them are only active in competitive terms during the state championships -- demonstrating the failure of the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) to organise a viable calendar for the game at all levels. And so these competitions continue. Worse, the balance of power in the CBF lies not with the clubs but with the state federations, where, in turn, power is held by small clubs. The entire system is based on the tail wagging the dog.

The big mystery has been the passivity of the big clubs, their acceptance of such an antiquated setup. But there are now strong signs that a wind of change is about to blow.

Brazil's most popular club, capable of drawing a crowd all over the country, is Flamengo of Rio. Their president Eduardo Bandeira has made it a priority to sort out the financial affairs of an often chaotic outfit. He has done the sums, and come to the conclusion that the Rio state championship is a waste of time.

"Something has to be done about the first few months of the year," he told me a few months ago. Now he is trying to do it.

Last week, Bandeira hosted a meeting attended by 13 big clubs with a view to setting up a competition to run at the same time as next year's state championships. Two of Rio's big four (Flamengo and Fluminense) were present, plus the two giants from Belo Horizonte (Cruzeiro and Atletico Mineiro) and the two from Porto Alegre (Gremio and Internacional). Also there were Coritiba and Atletico Paranaense from the state of Parana, and five teams (Criciuma, Figueirense, Avai, Chapecoense and Joinville) from Santa Catarina.

The biggest city, Sao Paulo, was not represented. It is the power base of Marco Polo del Nero, CBF president. His organisation, though, will be worried.

The CBF are anxious to avoid the prospect of the clubs launching a breakaway league. And this proposed new competition, provisionally known as the Sul-Minas (states of the south plus Minas Gerais, of which Belo Horizonte is the capital) has the potential to snowball. Join it up with the already existing Copa do Nordeste (North Eastern Cup) and, with the exception of Sao Paulo, the modernisers have almost all of the country in motion.

Tim Vickery covers South American football for ESPN FC. Follow him on Twitter @Tim_Vickery.