The executioners are an excitable lot. At Newcastle United a chief executive best known for casino management (Derek Llambias) dispatches Chris Hughton on behalf of a sports goods-selling owner (Mike Ashley). At Blackburn Rovers, a former president of the World Poultry Congress (Anuradha Desai) fires Sam Allardyce three months after seeing her first game of football, citing an aesthetic allergy to the style of play.

Analysts are working on a theorem for the new instability in owner-manager relations but the following will do for now: the less an owner knows about football the more likely he or she is to sack the manager. Desai is not the lone female culprit. At West Ham United, where Karren Brady calls the shots, the spin is that Avram Grant is required to win at least one of his next three games to keep his job: a superbly random measure that turns him into a gameshow contestant battling against eviction.

West Ham fit the template because David Sullivan and David Gold bought a debt-burdened East End institution with the aim of shifting it to the London 2012 Olympic Stadium. Therefore they are value investors (aka speculators) who will always think that way. They have already dispensed with Gianfranco Zola and will soon shut the door on Grant.

Elsewhere Carlo Ancelotti is unsettled by a Russian oligarch who is assuming a Vladimir Putin complex. The more time Roman Abramovich spends with Russia's prime minister the more he plays at politics. On Merseyside, Roy Hodgson's results have been deemed "unacceptable" by virgin American owners who arrived with a talent‑acquisition model borrowed from baseball.

So at Newcastle, Blackburn and arguably Chelsea, Liverpool and West Ham we have seen owners attacking the autonomy and prestige of managers. We could add Aston Villa. The banking crisis disabused Randy Lerner of his romantic urge to buy a top-four spot in the Premier League. At Manchester City, Mark Hughes was sacked by an owner who had yet to attend his first home game. Sheikh Mansour's debut at Eastlands came this August – nine months after Hughes gave way to Roberto Mancini.

These days the League Managers Association is forever cocked to fire off one of its indignant press releases challenging this or that brutal dismissal. But it is no longer just denouncing panic: the old justification for booting the boss down the stairs. Panic? Those were the good old days.

Now, Hughton is canned for winning the Championship title and beating Sunderland and Arsenal in Newcastle's first season back in the Premier League. Allardyce, whose Blackburn team have six fewer points than Spurs, departs with Desai saying: "We wanted good football, wanted the games to be interesting." To which Sir Alex Ferguson replies on behalf of his bruised trade: "The game's gone mad."

Relegation-phobia has been joined in the calculations of speculator-owners by an unexpected interest in art. The pattern is for arriviste owners to resent the old autocratic system and humiliate its leaders. John W Henry and the Red Sox hierarchy took their first step by appointing Damien Comolli as director of football strategy: a threatening title for any first-team manager. Ashley beat them to it by hiring Dennis Wise and Tony Jimenez as recruiters. Blackburn will use Kentaro, a Swiss player-acquisition firm that works with Jerome Anderson, who was instrumental in bringing players to Manchester City in the Thaksin Shinawatra period.

To the new breed of executive the manager is simply the head of a corporate department; his brief is to try to beat Arsenal and Manchester United while dribbling through a field of bouquets, thrown in appreciation of the team's panache. Barcelona and Spain have a bit to answer for here. On their HD screens unschooled proprietors observe the Camp Nou's glow and ask why Ewood Park should not radiate such heavenly light.

Football clubs are gradually being reinvented as entertainment centres and multimedia brands which exist to pursue TV deals and internet, digital and merchandising revenues. The drive for more attractive football reflects the need to have something to "sell" beyond mid-table respectability. A return on investment (or loans) is the first and last place to look for motives from at least half the Premier League's 20 clubs.

In the dugout a more nihilistic attitude is bound to prevail as managers see their employers hiring talent agencies to shape the first-team squad. They will know the futility of expecting Blackburn to play like Barcelona, although trying is no bad thing, as Ian Holloway, at Blackpool, has demonstrated.

Managers will become more self-protecting. They will take jobs for the inevitable payoff six months down the track and perhaps not bother introducing youngsters to the first XI because they will not be around to reap the benefits. Clubs will be places of impermanence and fear: which many already were, but without quite this level of ignorance.