Antonio Brown walked into his workplace on Tuesday and declared ... free agency. Sort of. How did we get here to the point where one of the league’s best receivers is publicly divorcing one of the NFL’s premier franchises.

The separation has been a couple of years in the making. Brown has long had a frosty relationship with quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and coach Mike Tomlin, as well as other prominent members of the Steelers’ locker-room. Management, and by extension Roethlisberger, believe the quarterback helped turn Brown into a star; Brown believes his greatness has helped Roethlisberger age gracefully.

Disputes about who is responsible for a team’s success is nothing new in professional sports. But, like his on-field game, Brown has taken the concept to rare heights. The 30-year-old has continually complained about his lack of touches, despite being the most targeted receiver in football. In response, the Steelers have churned the leak-machine into overdrive. There have been accusations of pouting; concerns that Brown cares too much about individual achievements, not the collective; and that, shock horror, he wanted to be paid according to his market value.

Things came to a head in the final week of the 2018 season. Brown and Roethlisberger reportedly got into an altercation at practice, with Brown throwing a ball in anger and storming off. Brown left the practice and skipped the team’s final Saturday night meeting. Despite turning up for the game on Sunday, he was left out of the lineup before leaving in frustration at half time. According to CBS Sports Jason La Canfora, it was the third time Brown had gone awol during the 2018 season. “You can call it what you want,” Tomlin said when asked if Brown quit the team prior to the week 17.

It was the final straw for both parties. The relationship was burnt beyond repair. Owner Art Rooney II confirmed in a postseason interview that he “doesn’t envision” Brown being with the team at the start of training camp. The end was inevitable. Tuesday served as confirmation.

Brown’s contract makes the timeline tough for the Steelers. He is due a $2.5m roster bonus on 17 March, the start of the new league year. If he’s traded or cut prior to that date, the Steelers would absorb a whopping $21m dead cap charge. Trade him after, and that figure balloons to (avert your eyes) $24m. That’s a contract the Steelers reconfigured in 2018, by the way, despite concerns swirling around Brown throughout 2017, in order to free up money to re-sign Le’Veon Bell, who looks likely to leave too. Whoops. Pittsburgh seems content to wait it out regardless of Brown’s public demands. What’s a $24m sinkhole if you’re down $21m anyway?

Rooney’s earlier comments won’t help with any leverage the team had in trade negotiations. But they’ll be hoping to push this thing back closer to the draft – 26 April – in order to spark more interest and drive up the price they can get for Brown in a trade. Adding $3m to your cap sheet to grab a higher draft pick is a trade-off any team would be happy to make.

Brown’s on-field play has never been in doubt to those paying attention. Off-the-field, though, there’s been a steady drip of issues that may cloud any Brown decision, culminating in a domestic dispute that was reported by TMZ last week. The NFL confirmed it is “looking into” an incident involving Brown and the mother of his child, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Brown was not arrested or charged over the incident. One of Brown’s lawyers told ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler that the allegations are “baseless and false.” Brown is also facing a lawsuit in Florida for throwing furniture off of a 14th-floor balcony and nearly hitting a child. And mere hours before his Instagram post announcing his trade request, Brown no-showed for a court hearing in which he was found guilty of reckless driving.

Any team that adds Brown will inherit his legal issues. And that’s not to mention his football crimes: a stint on Dancing with the Stars; the Instagram Live feed with James Harrison during a press conference in which Mike Tomlin answered questions about his communication with Brown, which, amazingly, was not his first Facebook Live infraction; an ill-timed appearance on Fox’s The Masked Singer. All are perfectly normal activities for famous people from the non-football world. The NFL, however, likes to strip away all personality; doing anything non-football related is tantamount to treason in the NFL’s repressed ecosystem. At 30, some teams will decide the juice is no longer worth the squeeze, financially or emotionally.

They would be wrong. Brown is in the midst of a six-year stretch that not even Jerry Rice could compete with. Brown has totaled over 100 catches in each of the last six seasons and averaged over 1,500 yards and 11 touchdowns in the same span. Want to know how many players have ever scored at least eight touchdowns with at least 100 catches and at least 1,200 yards for six consecutive seasons? One. Brown is the only guy. Not Terrell Owens. Not Rice. Not Randy Moss.

Brown is an elite receiver in every capacity. He has torched the league with a blend of smarts, body control, and immense short area quickness, the likes of which we’ve never seen rolled into such a slender package. His small stature and low draft status – he was selected in the sixth-round in 2010 by the Steelers – has fueled Brown’s Me-v-Everybody complex, the kind that continues to burn in Tom Brady to this day, as well as his work ethic.

“He’s the hardest working man, I think, in football,” Raiders head coach Jon Gruden said of Brown earlier this season. “Hardest working player I’ve ever seen practice. I’ve seen Jerry Rice, I’ve seen a lot of good ones, but I put Antonio Brown at the top.”

Brown has had to work for everything. From his point of view, he wants his credit. He feels he was never quite as respected or beloved within the Steelers organization as he should have been. “It’s like wifi,” Brown once said of his relationship with Roethlisberger. “Sometimes the connection is poor. Sometimes the connection is great.”

It appears the connection has finally gone out and it’s time to pull the plug.