Now it’s over, was it worth it? Was it worth the average cost of £44.50 per ticket to watch a Premier League match in the season just passed, which is 40 per cent more on average than is required to attend top-flight football in Europe? Multiplied 19 times, of course.
Was it worth the £80+ a month for Sky Sports coverage? Another tenner or so for BT Sport? Over £60 for a Manchester United shirt? The £4.30 for a pie charged by Wembley to Tottenham fans? The £2.50 for a cup of tea at Anfield - boiling water, a tea bag and a splash of milk, so work out the overheads - which Crystal Palace manage to serve up for a quid?
Most pertinently, was it really worth the £10.3million a year reportedly being paid by Arsenal to Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, along with the £15.5m loyalty bonus - and other huge add-ons - he’ll get if he stays for three years? Was our devotion to the national sport/obsession actually worthy of the estimated £391,000-a-week basic salary Manchester United are handing to Alexis Sanchez?
Is this kind of spending likely to bring the major trophies Arsenal fans demand during the period of Aubameyang’s contract? Or help United regain the ascendancy over Manchester City? I doubt it. And if it doesn’t, this will not even stand examination as the price of success. It will just be a giant cash-in.
This is a tricky and complex debate because nobody makes anyone follow football or pay for it. The same market forces which make the sport so lucrative are at work throughout the whole entertainment industry, too.
But it’s still a debate we need to have in the light of an extra-ordinary new set of figures which accompanied the end of the campaign.
Most fans have had to come to an accommodation with how much they’ll be squeezed to follow their team. They takes their choice and they pays their money, so to speak. Indeed, in recent seasons, ticket prices increases have slowed down or been frozen - perhaps the market could bear no more - while the subscription TV market is reaching its consumer limits, too.
But the astonishing disclosures of the German magazine Der Spiegel in its new book ‘Football Leaks’ revealed that the level of profiteering by those within the game is still sky-rocketing to almost surreal levels, while those compliant supporters get on with putting up with their lot - and keeping the whole show going.
Along with the extraordinary salary and bonus deals said to have been secured by Aubameyang and Sanchez, it was also revealed among a raft of staggering numbers that the Chilean gets an extra £75,000 from the Old Trafford goldmine every time he starts a game following his move from Arsenal.
Meanwhile, it was also revealed that the ‘Big Six’ clubs here have earned more than £1billion each in TV revenue since the inception of the Premier League in 1992-93.
Surely, this has to stop somewhere. Surely, the fact there is this extreme amount of money sloshing about - and being syphoned to all sorts of middle men - means that more than lip service can be paid to easing the financial burden placed on supporters.
Surely, too, while we’re praising the fabulous football of Pep Guardiola which has lit up this season, we have to remind ourselves that the seemingly endless wealth of clubs such as City and PSG is driving this arms race of transfer fees and stratospheric salaries.
That’s business again, you might say. But it taking this level of football farther away from its followers than ever.
Depressingly, the clamour among some supporters for endless new signings continues to be as ceaseless as it is misguided and infantile. To land them in a market inflated by Arab wealth, American corporate speculation and Oligarchic riches, clubs have to pay to get the players the fans crave. So this breed of supporter gets all they deserve as they are being milked.
Yet it is not actually the fact that people are getting rich that sticks in the craw: it is the extremity of the numbers now involved that just seems wrong. It is getting beyond parody.
Football fans here - the young apart - have decided they are prepared to meet the huge expense of following their team in the top flight which, without doubt, is the most exciting, compelling and fervent on the planet.
Stadiums were bulging at the seams throughout the 2017-18 campaign. There is no shortage of fans wearing replica kits at the game, in the supermarket or down the pub.
Average season ticket prices even went down slightly in the campaign just finished, according to the most recent BBC Price of Football survey published in January.
It was still £891 for the cheapest season ticket at Arsenal; but for that you get the right to sack the manager. By contrast, Huddersfield Town kept a pledge to maintain some season ticket prices at £100.
Away tickets for visiting supporters are now capped at £30 following protests, with many clubs charging less.
So there has been some progress in terms of easing a little of the burden on the millions who keep the game going.
You don’t have to subscribe to a broadcaster if you don’t wish, either.
But for most, these are not straight-forward consumer transactions, anyway. Emotion is involved; local, regional and tribal loyalty; history; social customs; folk and family roots.
It is for those very reasons that football outside the Premier League is just as important and vital - as well as less expensive. So many are turning away from the excesses of the top flight.
Others - those with good sense and perspective - greet relegation from the Promised Land with perspective and realism, which is far preferable to the pitiful blubbing of those who capture the attention of the TV cameras when the big drop happens.
For all the pliant, cash-rich new fans being courted by the big clubs and the not-so-big of the Premier League, there remain millions who support these teams because that is what they do. It is what’s in their blood.
Palace fans, for example, are no less committed, traditional and bound up in heritage just because they are in the Premier League.
These supporters are paying the high price of following their clubs in the top flight. It is a reality they have come to terms with. What ‘Football Leaks’ has revealed, however, is that the game is basically taking the rise out of them to ludicrous levels.
That is plain wrong for many reasons. But the major one is that it is just not right.
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