The League Managers Association is worried about the Championship. Perhaps we all should be. For while as a second tier league its competitiveness, crowds and quality of football stand comparison with those of many a senior league from around the world, statistics suggest it is also one of the most brutal and unforgiving in which to manage.

According to the LMA’s figures, 20 managers were dismissed in the Championship last season. That is the highest total since 1991-92, when the Championship was plain old Division Two and there was no such thing as the Premier League. For purposes of comparison, only five top-flight managers were dismissed in the same period, 12 in League One and 10 in League Two. The LMA works out that the average tenure of a manager in English football – across all the leagues – is 1.23 years. The figure for the Championship is 0.86, less than a year, and also the lowest since reorganisation 23 years ago.

Of the 10 longest-serving managers in the four leagues, only one of them is working in the Championship. Steve Evans, at Rotherham, has been in the job for three years and three months and comes in at No9, just ahead of Brendan Rodgers at Liverpool. Losing your job in some way is a fact of life for football managers, and it should be acknowledged straight away that most of them are well-paid and reasonably well-compensated, though the Championship churn of late has been quite startling. The LMA counted only outright dismissals and did not include caretaker managers who were there in extremis and did not expect to take on the job full time. If one looks purely at the number of managers who lost their jobs in the Championship last season the number rises to 27 and three clubs – Charlton, Leeds and Watford – said goodbye to three different managers in the course of a single campaign.

Continental clubs used to be derided for this sort of thing, yet the Championship’s excesses make overseas owners – the ones operating in overseas countries, that is – appear quite tame. There were 14 managerial changes over the same season in La Liga, nine in the Bundesliga, seven in Serie A and just three in Ligue 1. Even if one goes with the higher figure of nine for the Premier League – to cover all managerial changes including caretakers and agreed departures – that is still just a third of the total for the league beneath it.

Enough stats, what is going on? To an extent rogue owners might be blamed. Not pointing any fingers or naming any names but there has been some erratic behaviour at boardroom level in the Championship recently. And not just by Johnny-come-lately foreign owners who do not fully understand English traditions either. Two of the biggest culprits were Blackpool and Wigan, owned by self-made English businessmen. Running parallel with that trend is a genuine fear of dropping off the edge of the world into League One, exactly as Blackpool and Wigan have just done. There is an almighty gulf between the Premier League and the Championship but clubs who bridge it are insured by parachute payments when they come back down and quite often the second tier is regarded as respite by supporters of teams that found winning difficult at the very top level. There is no such security for clubs dropping out of the Championship. Just the knowledge that it may be a long haul back and a different style of football with which to get to grips.

A club falling into the Championship from the Premier League has a choice to make. It can try to retain Premier League standards and climb back at the earliest opportunity, or it can lower its horizons slightly and accept Championship status for a few seasons, perhaps using parachute money as part of a long term plan to remain competitive enough to satisfy supporters. For the most part that does not happen with a drop into League One. Supporters used to Championship level or above see that as failure, pure and simple, and demand to know how and when the situation can be rectified.

But perhaps the main reason for the cut-throat nature of the Championship at the moment is the most obvious one. It is a very demanding league – 46 games – with an intense level of competition. Financially speaking, you win the pools if you finish on top and face insolvency if you end up at the bottom. The Premier League has divisions within itself – the European elite, the mid-table finishers and so on – whereas the Championship tends to be polarised

There are some extremely strong teams within the structure and unlike in the Premier League, where mere survival or European qualification can be regarded as an acceptable level of success, there is no comfortable middle ground. You are either fighting to avoid relegation or fighting to finish in the top two or three, and there are some big teams to contend with. Teams with history and tradition, teams from huge population centres, teams with money, teams with recent Premier League experience and teams with bright young managers are all in there, fighting to stay alive.

Look at how well Middlesbrough went for most of last season, only to miss out at the end. Or Derby County, who ended up so dissatisfied with Steve McClaren on missing out on the play-offs after topping the table in late February. It is a long slog and it says something that Wigan, who lasted an incredible eight seasons in the Premier League and went down as FA Cup winners after outplaying Manchester City, only stuck around for two short seasons at the lower level. Two seasons and four short-lived Championship managers.

By talking of bouncing straight back into the Premier League, a notion that struck few as fanciful at the time, Wigan probably made the classic mistake of underestimating the strength of the Championship. It is, as Middlesbrough’s Aitor Karanka said after dumping Manchester City out of last season’s FA Cup, a gruelling test for anyone. “It is a very tough division to get out of,” Karanka said, before Boro’s late fade went on to prove it. Karanka is still in situ for the coming season, or at least he is at present. Once the games get under way, negotiating the Championship is the toughest of all managerial challenges.