It has been quite a while since we were reminded of the weird and wonderful world of our old friends at Blackburn Rovers, Venky’s, but they were always likely to return to form at some point and we should probably know enough about the way they run their football club not to be too surprised by a little gem I’ve heard from inside Ewood Park in the last few days.

It has certainly been intriguing to discover that one member of staff was apparently summoned to India a while back and what happened when he reached the farmhouse in Pune where the Rao family run their chicken industry.

As you can imagine, it is a complicated journey from the north-west of England, involving a 10-hour flight to Mumbai, followed by a long drive through the Western Ghats. It is also, by all accounts, probably advisable to keep an open mind for these assignments given that previous ones have involved turning up to discover that Paris Hilton (now the proud owner of a Blackburn shirt) was a guest of the Raos and that someone needed to be at her beck and call.

All the same, there is something rather brilliant about trying to imagine the little scene when the club official finally arrived. He was handed the family cat, the story goes, and informed in solemn tones that it was booked into a private veterinary clinic in London. The poor thing needed a catheter, apparently, and they needed someone to chaperone it back to England.

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Sadly, it is not absolutely clear whether there is a happy ending to the story and the days have gone since Venky’s employed a “global adviser,” Shebby Singh, with the mandate to explain these matters. Those were the days when Blackburn seemed hell-bent on proving Uri Geller was probably right with his assessment of the industry. Geller, you might remember, had been trying to persuade Michael Jackson to accept a place on Exeter City’s board. “When I asked Michael to be a director he said: ‘Oh wow, do you realise I know nothing about sport?’ I said: ‘You don’t have to.’”

Those were the peak years of Venky’s era at Blackburn and even if it has calmed down a little since then it is not a coincidence that Paul Lambert has already decided, after six months as manager, that he does not want to continue beyond the end of the season. Lambert is unhappy because it was his understanding, with Blackburn coming out of their transfer embargo, that they were going to embark on an extensive recruitment programme. Instead, it has become apparent it will be another cost-cutting season and Blackburn are duly looking for a new manager with a record of putting out decent teams, improving the players who are already there, and understanding there will not be a lot of money.

The irony, you might think, is that Gary Bowyer, the manager they sacked last November, ticked all those boxes. Bowyer took Blackburn to eighth and ninth-placed finishes (as well as restoring some dignity to the place) until, last summer, two of their strikers, Rudi Gestede and Josh King, left for Premier League clubs and Tom Cairney, player of the year the previous season, was sold to Fulham for £3m. It was the morning after Gestede, scorer of 22 goals last season, signed for Aston Villa that Bowyer was informed the club’s owners expected promotion, and it was against that backdrop that he was eventually fired.

Nobody should be surprised given the way the Championship operates these days, with its knee-jerk reflexes and second-rate thinking, and it seems to be getting worse, if anything, if we consider what a season it has been one level down from the Premier League. The various clubs, from Leeds United down, should be grateful that not having top-flight status spares them from greater scrutiny.

Fred Eyre used to reminisce on the after-dinner circuit about his days as assistant manager at Wigan Athletic and a director who “wanted us to sign Salford Van Hire because he thought he was a Dutch international” and, apocryphal or not, it is easy to imagine the employees of various Championship clubs regaling similar stories in future years. This has been the season when Vincent Tan, Cardiff City’s owner, told his players he wanted a shoot-on-sight policy, as long as they could reach the goal, and that he wouldn’t be happy unless they racked up 30 or 40 efforts per match. It has been a year of protests at Charlton Athletic, of Bolton Wanderers flirting with financial oblivion and Massimo Cellino, whose style at Leeds appears to be based on the theory of chaos, reminding us that a sharp tongue is not always the indication of a keen mind. No other league in English football has as many people putting the “dire” into directors. Nowhere else are managers hired and fired with so little care and attention, and I do wonder whether it will become even worse now the financial disparity between the top division and the one below is becoming even more cavernous.

Burnley and Middlesbrough have certainly chosen the perfect season to win promotion while Villa could not be going down at a worse time given the mind-boggling amounts of money that will wash over the Premier League when the new television deal comes in next season.

The desperation for one of the golden tickets probably helps to explain why 15 managers left Championship clubs from 28 September to 15 March (following on from the 20 who went last season). That works out at one, on average, every 11 days – but it is revealing to look back now and see how many of those changes actually made a discernible difference.

Derby County were fifth when their owner, Mel Morris, sacked Paul Clement, complaining that a club with no silverware since 1975, only 11 top-flight seasons in the last 30 years and the lowest points total of the Premier League era, needed to play “the Derby way”. Three months on, they are still fifth, 11 points off the automatic promotion places, rather than the five-point gap when Clement was fired.

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Fulham were 12th when Kit Symons was sacked and ended up 20th. Charlton swapped managers twice and still went down – and are now looking for another new manager after José Riga’s resignation. Reading finished 17th but were ninth when Steve Clarke left them. Nottingham Forest went from 15th to 16th after Dougie Freedman became the latest statistic of Fawaz Al-Hasawi’s bewildering reign. Huddersfield were 18th when Chris Powell went and finished 19th. QPR were 13th on the day Chris Ramsey was fired and moved up a single place. Bolton were bottom under Neil Lennon and stayed there after he left. The pattern is obvious.

Throughout the list, there are only four clubs for whom sacking the manager has brought a significant improvement. One is Leeds, who were 18th under Uwe Rösler and finished 13th with Steve Evans in charge (the irony being that Evans will almost certainly now be sacked). Bristol City climbed out of the relegation places after Lee Johnson replaced Steve Cotterill, and Rotherham did the same with Neil Warnock in charge rather than Neil Redfearn, but don’t be taken in by Brentford finishing ninth from the 19th position in which they were stranded after Marinus Dijkhuizen’s brief and unsatisfactory spell, spanning eight league games.

Dijkhuizen should never have been appointed in the first place and Brentford’s final position should come with an asterisk to remind everyone they moved out the manager, Mark Warburton, who led them to the playoffs last season. Warburton has since taken Rangers back to Scotland’s top division, reaching two cup finals and winning a manager-of-the-year award, though no doubt there will still be people at Griffin Park, fingers in ears, arguing it made sense to cut him free.

The sensible clubs can generally be found at the top of the league and, though it is probably wishful thinking, maybe the others will come to realise that Burnley and Middlesbrough have reached this point by putting in place a proper structure, with joined-up thinking, rather than making it up as they go along.

It isn’t rocket science but the fact that it seems beyond so many clubs does make me wonder whether there will ever be a time when an old line from Derek Dougan’s 1974 book, Football as a Profession, no longer feels pertinent. “One wonders what some businesses would be like if they were run on the same haphazard lines as most football clubs still are,” Dougan wrote. “The amateur director has been kicked out of most industrial and commercial boardrooms. But not in football.”

United awards say it all about Van Gaal

Manchester United set up the Sir Matt Busby player-of-the-year trophy in the 1987-88 season and since Brian McClair became the inaugural winner the names on the list tell us something about the way this club have traditionally operated.

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No goalkeeper ever won that award in Sir Alex Ferguson’s time at the club and there have been only three occasions – Gary Pallister in 1990, Gabriel Heinze in 2005 and Nemanja Vidic in 2009 – when defenders have taken the honour. Peter Schmeichel and Edwin van der Sar were greats of their profession but United were such an attacking team the votes almost always went to goal-scorers or goal-creators.

So what does it say for the modern-day United that since Ferguson retired David de Gea has won the award for the last three seasons? Or, to put it another way, where would the team have finished this season if Real Madrid had not made such a hash of De Gea’s proposed transfer last August?

“I’m very arrogant,” Louis van Gaal said during his speech at the presentation dinner, conveniently overlooking the fact his team were 17 points off Leicester City at the top. “I am one of the best managers of the world.” Unfortunately for United, it is difficult to get away from the suspicion that he may be only half-right.