IS IT treason to suggest that I smiled when the last member of the League of Greed was bundled out of the Champions’ League?

Was it so wrong to smirk at the sight of Manchester City heads bowed low towards the Nou Camp turf?

Is it disloyal to question the ability of players who take home more in a day than the rest of us earn in a year?

Then I’m guilty as charged, m’lud. Send me to the Tower and orff with my head....

So you can add Champions’ League success to love on the list of things money can’t buy. Snigger, snigger.

Of course, it does help quite a lot. I’m not suggesting that PSG, Real Madrid or Bayern Munich are exactly paupers getting by on the odd nugget from the youth system.

But all we hear day in, day out is the manufactured lie that the Premier League is the best around.

The most exciting league? Probably. The most expensive league? Definitely.

But the highest quality? Never.

Manuel Pellegrini, whose golden goose was surely cooked in Catalonia, got one thing right on Wednesday when he spoke about the “absolute imbalance” of the contest.

He was talking about the magical Lionel Messi whose wizardry took football to another level and cast a spell on Man City.

But it was the perfect description of the Greed is Good League right now.

The league that pays the highest wages across the global game has precisely zero combatants in the final eight of Europe’s premier competition.

Maybe there is some sympathy for Arsenal, a club determined to do things the right way and not throw the bank at every defeat or dropped point.

They paid the price for one awful performance three weeks earlier despite a stirring effort to make amends in Monaco.

But as for the rest, au revoir, auf wiedersehen and adios.

I didn’t shed a tear for their departure – and I suspect I was not alone.

The obscene financial mismatch between the Premier League and the Football League has created an “I’m all right Jack” culture.

The teams at the top don’t give a stuff for those below as long as their own beds remain well feathered. Why should they concern themselves about the “little people”, the likes of Accrington, Burton, Yeovil and even Bradford City, when TV continue to pump astronomical figures into the bank balance?

It’s the ultimate us and them; the upstairs and downstairs of domestic football.

So naturally the resentment builds in the “servant” quarters. When the haves have to do without, the have-nots can have a right old laugh.

When City magnificently usurped Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, it was a day for every one of the 72 clubs beneath the elite. It was a glorious uprising against those who dominate our screens, our national media coverage and our sports shops – a bloody nose for the establishment.

Now the Champions’ League have dished out a proper slapping down.

Of course, the hype machine will roll on regardless. Manchester United’s showdown with Liverpool tomorrow will ensure that all eyes are back on the Premier League again as if nothing has gone on.

Roy Hodgson, who you would hope should know better, called the mass European exit “just one of those things.”

The England manager should have offered more – like the knock-on effect with the consistently under-performing national team – but he does not want to rock the boat.

The all-powerful Premier League bows to nobody, not even those pesky foreigners who keep beating them.

But the rest of us can see through the Emperor’s Clothes. We can cut through a £5.1 billion TV deal and see the manufactured excitement of the Premier League circus for what it is.

The top flight continue to exist in a bubble – one that has been pricked in France, Spain, Germany and even Switzerland, where Liverpool failed to even escape the group stages.

The show goes on in the Big Top but that won’t stop the rest laughing behind their hands outside.