The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. In which case, as the Premier League unbuckles its belt and lets loose a great shivering belch of satisfaction at the excesses of the transfer window just past, we can presumably expect a state of contemplative calm to settle as the process of digestion begins.

A total of £1.4bn spent, more than 200 player moves and countless disruptive hours in negotiation are surely enough to satisfy even the most voracious league in the world that enough is for now enough, although on the other hand perhaps not. As TV rights deals diversify this is unlikely to be a one-off. Clear the dishes. Take a breath. Revive the kitchen staff. In reality we are just getting started with all this.

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A great deal of energy has already been spent on picking out exactly what has been changed by the last few months of unbound commerce, what certainties washed away. For a while there was some talk of the rise of player power, that this was the window when the humble superstar-employee finally got to call the shots on his own career moves. By the end it was probably less so.

Perhaps this would instead be the window where the seas boil, discontent rises up and the public finally loses its appetite for this ceaseless inanity of greed; the window where state intervention in the market at Paris St-Germain is finally censured; the window where someone at Arsenal finally decides, just maybe, it is not really working out with Arsène. Or again perhaps it is not.

Instead this was the window when something else changed. In terms of excitement, cliffhangers, drama and indeed global impact there is a fair case to be made that the summer transfer window has overshadowed the Premier League season that preceded it. The league may no longer be capable of dishing up races to the wire, of projecting a sense of Europe-wide muscle but, no matter, the window has this.

But then the Premier League has only ever partly been about the football. It is instead the acknowledged master at continuing to happen all the time, at plastering the gaps at the edges with a high-grade football-shaped entertainment product. This summer was the jackpot, a demonstration once again of one area – dramatic acquisitiveness – in which the Premier League is undoubtedly world-class.

At which point the question will now raise its head. Do we really need a season at all? Or should the season be curtailed to give the window greater freedom, prevented from looming at its edges, intruding on the place where the real money is made.

There is of course a serious point here. Football, from its birth as a Victorian leisure product, has always been, at bottom, a business. But this is something else. When the variables of league positions and on-field glory are increasingly narrow, when signings are cheered like goals by the digital diaspora, when having a “good window” is a season’s goal, commerce really is beginning to intrude inside the chalk markings.

The Premier League has suffered a decline in playing standards in recent years. This is surely a function in part of this transfer-driven instability, the disorienting effects of flux, possibilities, botched deals. A large part of the current season will now be spent recovering from the intoxicating events of the last few months, just as the opening rounds of matches have been overshadowed by parked and absent stars. Increasingly the interests of the window are distinct from those of the season, quantified only in balance sheets and product shifted. And right now the window is winning.

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Not that it has not been fun, wild and at times utterly insane. A rise of 23% on last year’s spending showed Manchester City as the biggest gross splurgers on £215m, followed by £180m from Chelsea, then Manchester United and Everton on £145m. Overall Premier League outlay was almost double that of Serie A, second in the European spending stakes.

Trying to learn anything from this is in itself a baffling task. It is essentially guesswork, trying to get a feel for which rapidly assembled jigsaw looks to have the most convincing sense of symmetry. Manchester United have handled the window well, buying early then getting out. Romelu Lukaku seems a much better deal now than he did at the start of the hyper-inflationary summer. No goals conceded in the Premier League, no pieces to be integrated through the autumn: this is a damage-free window.

Chelsea kept missing out on their man, no doubt leaving Antonio Conte tearing out his chestnut-brown nylon weave at times. But Danny Drinkwater is a good signing and Tiémoué Bakayoko a fascinating one: Bakayoko is a convincing midfield cruiser, although the Premier League may ruffle that splendid strolling style.

Manchester City will be satisfied with the good – Bernardo Silva, Benjamin Mendy – but frustrated at failures elsewhere. Liverpool bought well and, even better, retained well. Finally getting rid of Mamadou Sakho is a good move for everyone. Joe Gomez, who is an excellent young player, may get his chance to step in.

Further down the Expected League Table there were other fine windows. West Brom have been quietly decisive, with Grzegorz Krychowiak the outstanding move. Brighton and Huddersfield have signed 11 players apiece, a policy of complete revolution that at the very least suggests an energy for the fight. Burnley have made some sound moves, with Chris Wood likely to show scoring goals is not that hard if you know how, whatever the level.

Stoke have lost the slightly overrated Marco Arnautovic, with Jesé Rodríguez on a season-long loan a good replacement. Kevin Wimmer, Bruno Martins Indi and Kurt Zouma look authentically Old Stoke at the back. Renato Sanches to Swansea is perhaps the most fascinating move of the lot.

Overall Spurs might win this one again, if only for the snake-eyed evil genius of Daniel Levy when the hour gets late. Serge Aurier and Davinson Sánchez are fine, aggressive defenders. Getting Fernando Llorente, an ideal Kane deputy, for less than the outgoing Nabil Bentaleb is just showing off.

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Worst window is also a matter of guesswork, although no one at Newcastle seems that happy. Arsenal look even more of a mess despite spending a club record fee on a striker; losing Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain is not much of a loss on form. Either way that fabled English spine – along with any other kind of spine – has now all but left the building. Crystal Palace look unbalanced, as do West Ham, for whom William Carvalho would have been an excellent addition.

What to make at the end of all this? The suspicion the Premier League is something of a commercial laughing stock abroad, a drowned world of meaningless values and self-sustaining financial hot air, is confirmed simply by taking a look at the biggest deals of the summer. Lukaku, Álvaro Morata, Alexandre Lacazette and Kyle Walker are among the largest transfers ever completed. None of them would get into the starting XI of Europe’s biggest clubs.

Beyond this, if there is a practical lesson from this window it is that a clear boundary is required between the window ending and the league season starting. The overlap has been horribly divisive. The window is not just interfering with the season. It is in many ways overshadowing it.