Putting aside the question of whether a man who kicks a football for a living is worth a figure equivalent to the gross domestic product of a small country, the £37 million sterling that Real Madrid paid Barcelona for Luis Figo dealt another blow to the battered self-image of British football.
First Manchester United failed to hold on to the European title that many partially-sighted patriots had eagerly used as evidence that the Premiership is best. Then Kevin Keegan's England were exposed as not even second best in Euro 2000. Now the Premiership has been handed conclusive proof that not only is it not the best league in the world, it is not even the richest.
United's interest in the Portuguese playmaker ended at the first mention of the fee; arguably the world's richest club could not afford arguably the world's best player. The feeling that the Premiership generally is becoming the Coventry City of European football - ready to wheel and deal and scrimp and save rather than splash the cash - is compellingly reinforced by the figures.
England's top five clubs have spent £69.3 million on new arrivals this summer. The Serie A champions Lazio alone have bought players worth more than £70 million. Of this summer's 12 most expensive transfer deals, only one involved an England purchaser - Chelsea paying £15 million to Atletico Madrid for Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink.
Top of the shops was Figo's move from Barcelona, followed closely by Hernan Crespo's £36 million-rated cash-plus-player switch from Parma to Lazio. Even at 32, Gabriel Batistuta was valued at £22.5 million when he moved from Fiorentina to Roma, while Barcelona picked up Emmanuel Petit and Marc Overmars for £32 million. On and on the list goes. But no matter how many players appear on it, the number of English clubs buying them increases only as the fees fall.
"We cannot compete with Barcelona money-wise, that is obvious," admits the Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger. "Nor can we compete with Lazio on the same basis."
So why is it that a league that has just sealed a world-record television deal worth more than £1.5 billion cannot compete for the world's best players and, with a few exceptions, is prepared to make do with the world's former best players looking for a final big pay day in their dotage?
Well, the Premiership's macho image may not have suffered too much damage. One look at the Italian and Spanish giants who stride across the transfer landscape reveals them to be not so much a group of football clubs as the private playthings of a wealthy few - Agnelli at Juventus, Berlusconi at Milan, Cragnotti at Lazio, Moratti at Internazionale. If the club needs a player, they write a cheque.
The king's ransom that Real paid for Figo was money promised by Florentino Perez in his attempt to be elected the club's new president. Not surprisingly, he won.
But as Peter Kenyon, the new chairman of Manchester United, defiantly points out, his club is not going down that seemingly gold-paved road. "What we are not going to compete with is the magnanimous benefactor of a Berlusconi or an Agnelli in Italy or a guy who is running for presidency in one of the Spanish clubs and dipping into his personal fortune - that is not what we are about.
"We have to think smarter: how we are going to create that money in order to reinvest in our youth policy, the stadium and players themselves. I know people say that you should speculate to accumulate but it doesn't work that way." Certainly, if Kenyon ran Manchester United, a publicly listed company, with the same disregard for financial prudence as the top men at Real Madrid, reportedly more than £100 million in debt, he would have a lot of shareholders asking a lot of questions.
It is a situation that annoys Wenger. "Clubs should spend what they have. There should be an international control panel to look at transfers. I feel very frustrated that clubs who have a difficult financial situation still go out and buy what they cannot afford."
None of the other top English clubs come anywhere near matching United's buying power, and the underlings of Serie A and La Liga also struggle to keep up with the Joneses of southern Europe, with their artificially inflated transfer policy.
But the lack of players of the very highest quality does have its downside in the Premiership. "It wasn't that Arsenal had a lack of talent or good players," said Petit on leaving Highbury, "but we didn't manage to win the Champions League. At Barcelona I will be alongside the best players in the world. There is more chance of winning the Champions League here than with any other club." "I want to win the Italian league," said Batistuta of his move to Roma. "That's why I said no to Manchester United."
English clubs are at least, and at last, showing signs that the penny has dropped somewhere. This past week has been dominated by story after fantastic story about the measures clubs are taking, not to buy the best, but to keep the best. Stratospheric salaries are reportedly about to be offered: David Beckham £80,000 a week; Michael Owen £75,000 a week.
Apparently Middlesbrough have been forced to offer Christian Ziege £50,000 a week to try to prevent his move to Liverpool and Bryan Robson has had to deny reports that he agreed to pay Alen Boksic more than £60,000 a week.
Maybe it is only a matter of time before Premiership clubs start straining to match the European giants in transfer fees too. The pressure to succeed can never be underestimated.
