In the end, Kaka's rejection of Manchester City came as a relief on several fronts.
If nothing else, it shifted the focus back onto the football side of the game and forced the 24-hour global media channels to turn their attentions to a new story of the week.
More importantly, Kaka's rejection was a slap of reality for the money-mad merchants trying to rewrite the record books at Manchester City.
None has been as clueless as City's Birmingham-born executive chairman Garry Cook.
Having made his name in the United States as a high-ranking executive at Nike, Cook parachuted in to City on the back of deposed Thai Prime Minister Thakshin Shinawatra's supposed "fit and proper" football revolution. Shinawatra's empire turned out to be little more than a house of cards, but Cook stuck around after Shinawatra scuttled out of Eastlands in disgrace - no doubt pleased to hear the plans of new owner Abu Dhabi United to turn City into a "global brand."
Yet City's plans of worldwide domination suffered a major blow when Milan's 26-year-old Brazilian midfielder Kaka turned down a proposed weekly salary of £500,000 to stay at his current club.
Kaka's refusal to seal a move to the City of Manchester Stadium had Garry Cook befuddled.
The brash-talking chief executive launched a string of bizarre invectives at both club and player - all well-documented, though none particularly worth recalling - with Cook seemingly baffled by Kaka's loyalty to his present employer.
That a deeply religious, family-orientated Brazilian should choose to stay loyal to the Italian club that plucked him from the Sao Paulo first team at the age of nineteen and nurtured him into the FIFA World Footballer of the Year in 2007 should come as no great surprise to any genuine football fan.
But it did to Garry Cook.
And therein lies the folly of this new brand of football. It is being run by entrepreneurs at the behest of Arab sheiks eager to stroke their own egos - but with little understanding, or regard, for the human side of the game.
Garry Cook was stunned by Kaka's rejection of Manchester City because money talks in Cook's vision of a "brand-heavy, relegation-free" English Premier League - and it talks louder than any notion of player loyalty or devotion to one's team-mates.
No surprise, then, that the decidedly less philosophical Craig Bellamy was happy to usher himself through City's front door as soon as it was apparent that Kaka was going nowhere.
If the Kaka saga hadn't turned some fans off the farcical circus that the Premier League is rapidly becoming, then no doubt Tottenham Hotspur's decision to re-sign Jermaine Defoe and Robbie Keane surely has.
Quite what Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy was thinking when he originally decided to sell Defoe to Portsmouth and later Keane to Liverpool is anyone's guess - particularly when fellow striker Dimitar Berbatov was clearly destined for the White Hart Lane exit door.
Yet Levy was convinced he'd done a shrewd bit of business, even though Tottenham went from finishing fifth in the league under Martin Jol to floundering in the relegation zone under Jol's replacement Juande Ramos.
Having made their worst start to a top flight season in their history, Ramos was predictably sacked, and with a decidedly threadbare strike force to call upon - even allowing for the arrival of the erratic Roman Pavlyuchenko - Tottenham's retro-inspired new guv'nor Harry Redknapp decided that the old-school stylings of Defoe and Keane was just what his team required.
From "surplus to requirements" to "must-have items" at the same club - it's a funny old world, the English Premier League.
And Daniel Levy is a strange kind of businessman. He may fancy himself a football-savvy chairman of considerable nous, but as the otherwise forgettable Daily Mail put it in one recent headline, "in football… even money can't buy brains."
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