Sheffield United's appeal against the drop from the Premier League always looked doomed to failure - and so it proved as an arbitration panel rubber-stamped their relegation.
The Blades, however, still have every right to carry a heavy weight of injustice with them into the Championship.
West Ham received little more than a slap on the wrist from the Premier League for breaking transfer rules over the signings of Argentine pair Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano.
It was an expensive slap on the wrist in the shape of a £5.5m fine but, given the riches on offer and the protection it afforded to the huge Icelandic investment in the club, this was a price worth paying.
The Premier League will also heave a sigh of relief at the verdict as any prolonging of the process could have thrown next season's plans into chaos.
The tribunal accused West Ham of being "deliberately deceitful" and expressed its sympathy for Sheffield United - but not enough sympathy to give them further hope of staying up.
Any sympathy for the Blades, and it will be widespread, should also be placed in context.
If they had only drawn against a very poor Wigan side on the final day of the season, they would have stayed up and it would have been Latics' chairman Dave Whelan taking his case to Premier League headquarters.
They failed and paid the price.
But they will rightly say they at least lost when playing by the rules.
West Ham played fast and loose with the regulations and one of the players they attracted by doing that, Tevez, almost kept them in the top flight single-handedly.
Sheffield United will lose revenue, along with their best player, as Phil Jagielka will now move to Everton within days.
West Ham survive, but let no-one be in any doubt that they are the most fortunate club in England's top tier next season.
The Premier League should have docked them points for their misdemeanours and it was to its eternal discredit that it did not do so.
The words "deliberately deceitful" which were applied to West Ham by the tribunal, underscore the scale of the Premier League's mishandling of the affair.
If this was a measure of West Ham's behaviour, what does it say about the decision to merely fine them for their circumnavigating of the rules?
If this whole sorry episode leads to more transparency over transfers and the end of the sort of 'third party' deals done by West Ham to land Tevez and Mascherano, then some good will come of a desperate mess.
For Sheffield United, this was an inevitable end. For West Ham it was a very fortunate one.
As far as the Premier League is concerned, the whole story and the eventual findings present it in a poor light and should never be allowed to happen again.
