It’s brutal, relegation. If you follow a team the chances are you have suffered it at some point or another and, as Aston Villa’s supporters can probably testify, it does not matter how prepared you think you might be, or how many times it might have happened in the past, it is still a desperately numbing feeling when the guillotine falls and the players are wandering around, like zombies, not knowing where to rest their eyes.

“I’ve seen childbirth twice and relegation five times,” Pete May, the author of several books on West Ham, once wrote. “Childbirth does look very painful but it lasts only a few hours. The pain of relegation lasts all summer and beyond. Plus childbirth at least results in something positive. With relegation, you’re always worried that it’s going to get worse.”

It often does, as Leicester City can corroborate bearing in mind the previous ordeals encountered by the champions-in-waiting and what those experiences tell Villa about the potential for more unravelling. Leicester’s last demotion from the Premier League, in 2004, was followed by successive finishes of 15th, 16th and 19th in the Championship and then another deterioration in their fourth season at that level – to 22nd and a place in League One.

Nottingham Forest have spent time in the third best division in English football or, put another way, the second worst. Leeds United have been down there and David Bernstein, one of the executives Villa have hired to try to halt the downward spiral, will know the dangers from first-hand experience if we go back to his days as Manchester City chairman and an era of Richard Edghill, Ged Brannan and Lee Bradbury rather than Vincent Kompany, Kevin De Bruyne and Sergio Agüero.

City went two leagues down before coming back up and when the fingers of relegation closed around their neck for a second time the Manchester Evening News carried a photograph of a young supporter wiping away tears with a flag. Bernstein asked for a copy of that picture and hung it in the boardroom at Maine Road. It was a reminder, he used to tell guests, that the club must never put their fans through the same again.

Bernstein also wrote to the club’s season-ticket holders to apologise – which is the least that Villa should be doing – while City, the official club magazine, attempted to lift the mood in an article entitled: “Reasons to be cheerful”. These included “fun weekends at a variety of coastal resorts like Blackpool and Bournemouth”, the prospect of “red-hot Lancashire derbies against grand old names like Burnley and Preston North End” and, best of all, the “chance to snuggle up together in the ‘cosy’ stands we’ll be visiting on our away trips”. Among them, Lincoln City, Macclesfield Town and York City.

Villa are not quite that broken but, equally, it is difficult finding any reasons for them to be cheerful when Walsall and Burton Albion could conceivably be on their list of derbies next season and the stench of disillusionment, built up over six years of drift, listless performances and boardroom buffoonery, has become so overpowering it is difficult to imagine that fumigating the place will be a quick fix.

The financial impact, even taking into account the parachute money from the Premier League, means losing upwards of £200m merely from television revenue if they cannot find a way back during the next three years. The new television deal comes into force in August and will be worth £8.3bn over that time. Then factor in the lost ticket revenue, sponsorship and other forms of income. However it is dressed up, there has never been a worse time for relegation.

All of which leaves Villa in a harrowing position, bearing in mind the size and history of the place and the feeling I still get, 25 years after walking down Witton Lane for the first time, that the imposing red-brick walls, the steps leading to the Holte End, the statues of the lions, the colours and the noise make Villa Park one of football’s special monuments.

The club have, if nothing else, recognised that it is not just the playing staff that has to be overhauled and begun the process by bringing in Bernstein as well as a new chairman, Steve Hollis, and creating new positions on the board for Brian Little, a former Villa player and manager, and Adrian Bevington, previously of the Football Association. That, at least, is a start and few will miss the former chief executive, Tom Fox, or the sporting director, Hendrik Almstadt, who has also been ushered off the premises.

All the same, there is an awful lot of work to be done when, trying to make sense of the Randy Lerner era, there is a jarring irony that they have just lopped off the word “Prepared” from their expensively redesigned club crest (Villa having spent more on that badge and all the necessary changes than Lerner was apparently prepared to pay for any players in January to get them out of this hole).

One long-serving employee was asked recently to undertake a quiz on Villa’s history to convince the people above her that she should keep her job. In total, there could be 100 job losses and it will be intriguing to see whether Paddy Riley, the former video analyst who now goes by the title of director of scouting and recruitment, is spared. Riley’s transfer record hardly eases the suspicion that he has been overpromoted and there is an excruciating story about what happened when the agent of one signing turned up to negotiate the contract. Riley had been put in charge along with the club secretary, Sharon Barnhurst, and the agent was so unimpressed by the absence of more senior staff he is said to have taken one look and walked out in a fit of pique. Riley did, in fairness, persuade him to return.

Nigel Pearson is an obvious candidate for the manager’s job but there are no indications that Lerner is any closer to finding a buyer and, in the meantime, the bottom line is that Villa have become a tragicomedy, on and off the pitch. One of the club’s European scouts, with responsibility for Spain and Portugal, turns out to be a journalism student. Another is said to have emigrated to Australia earlier this season, at a time when his role was apparently to cover the Bundesliga.

As for the players, what does it say for Gabriel Agbonlahor – born in Birmingham, affiliated to Villa since a young age and someone, you might assume, who would give everything for his club – that he is so bereft of professional decency he has just been placed on a two-week fitness programme because he cannot even keep himself in shape? Agbonlahor, with one goal all season, spent the last international break partying in Dubai. His attitude is symptomatic of the culture of drift and, if Villa have serious aspirations of restoring some dignity, this summer might be a good time to thank him for happier days and cut him loose.

It is a tremendous mess and, plainly, it is easier for Lerner to avoid awkward questions about his culpability when the other option is to keep his distance, holed away in the Hamptons, and communicate in occasional statements via the club’s website. “I can’t think of anyone else in Cleveland sports in the last 30 years who rode into town with similar fanfare and delivered so little in comparison,” Bill Livingston, the American sportswriter, once wrote of Lerner’s time in charge of the Cleveland Browns, and Villa’s followers will note the similarities. “The biggest constant among those Randy hired was a lack of judgment,” Livingston concluded. “He wasn’t a good owner by any means, but he wasn’t a lucky one, either.”

One day, maybe, the subject of all this criticism will be decent enough to answer the principal charge that he simply went cold on Villa, having been unable to break into the Champions League positions in his early years, and withdrew to a point that it became inevitable stagnation would follow.

Not the most important thing right now, perhaps, but Lerner could also explain why Fox’s annual salary was almost five times higher than that of the previous chief executive, Paul Faulkner, up from £265,792 to £1,255,769. Maybe he could let us know whether it was really necessary to have 496 members of staff, the sixth highest in the league, compared with, say, Tottenham Hotspur (380), Newcastle United (288) and Everton (274), and more than the combined workforce of West Ham (250) and Leicester (188).

And maybe, like Bernstein all those years ago, he might want to apologise to all those supporters who suspected this mismanagement and apathy would take them only one direction.

Kevin doesn’t need friends like these

The decision to remove Kevin Friend from refereeing duties for Tottenham Hotspur’s visit to Stoke City on Monday was always bewildering but especially now it transpires that he is apparently a Bristol City supporter.

Friend lives in Leicester and, by his own admission, has been to watch Claudio Ranieri’s team this season, but taking him off a game because a few daft people think he will deliberately give decisions against Spurs sets a dangerous precedent, as Arsène Wenger has stated, and it all seems particularly unnecessary when the Tottenham manager, Mauricio Pochettino, has made it clear he had no issue whatsoever with the original choice of officials.

Friend’s treatment comes across as a lack of trust from the organisation that employs him – even if, conversely, the Professional Game Match Officials Ltd will argue the decision was taken to protect him - and if it is true that it stemmed from a social‑media campaign from Spurs fans (one that certainly passed me by) should the decision-makers really be pandering to the Twitter orchestra?

Sure enough, there are now Everton supporters questioning the appointment of Anthony Taylor for their team’s FA Cup semi-final against Manchester United on the basis that he lives in Altrincham, just a few miles from Old Trafford.

Already, it has been noted that Michael Oliver – a Newcastle supporter, apparently – refereed Norwich’s 1-0 defeat at Crystal Palace last weekend and turned down a penalty appeal that might have led to the game being drawn and, in turn, ultimately benefited his own club. Nobody had given it a second thought until now but no doubt there will be fans of other clubs scouring referees’ profiles to come up with historic grievances or flimsy arguments why further restrictions should be placed.

A different case could be highlighted every week and the referees are probably entitled to wonder why their organisation has given credence to a fuss about nothing.

PFA awards fail to tell whole story

The Professional Footballers’ Association holds its player of the year awards next weekend and it would be a surprise, looking back at the last eight months, if the prize went to anyone bar one of the three Leicester City players – Riyad Mahrez, Jamie Vardy and N’Golo Kanté – on the six‑man shortlist. What, though, if Leicester suddenly implode from this point onwards and Harry Kane’s goals take Tottenham Hotspur to the title? Who would ultimately be the more deserving player?

It is certainly strange that the PFA holds this event a month before the season has finished and even more so that the voting slips had an 8 April deadline but actually started coming back at the beginning of March, when some teams still had 10 games to play.

In 2016, is it really beyond Gordon Taylor and his colleagues to hold the event at the end of the season and find an online voting system that means the award is for the full campaign?