It feels wholly appropriate to be talking to Mat Hodgson the day after Queens Park Rangers sacked their manager, Neil Warnock. For his new fly-on-the-wall documentary, The Four Year Plan, features more sackings of Queens Park Rangers managers than any film ever made.

The Four Year Plan was born when Hodgson approached the new owners of QPR, F1 magnates Flavio Briatore and Bernie Ecclestone, after they took over the west London club in November 2007. He pitched a film about their attempts to turn around the struggling, debt-ridden club. "They must have believed in themselves," Hodgson says, "to be up for the notion of documenting this journey."

The original intention was to film for just one year, but the owners' statement of a "four-year plan" to get QPR into the Premier League gave Hodgson both a title and a timeframe. "When I could see what great footage we were getting, that's when I felt we needed to continue."

The footage is indeed, dynamite – The Four Year Plan is possibly the most vivid insight into the running of a football club yet committed to film, not least for the way it reveals Briatore as a man with not even a passing acquaintance with self-doubt, despite his complete lack of football experience. Within minutes of the film's opening, he has described successive managers as "that fucking hooligan" and "that prick in the dugout".

The club's chairman, Gianni Paladini, fares little better. In one extraordinary scene, we see Dexter Blackstock – at that point the leading scorer in a team struggling for goals – pondering signing the forms that will see him loaned out to Nottingham Forest. "Don't sign it, Dex," urges defender Fitz Hall, before turning to Paladini. "Top striker and we're sending him to Nottingham Forest. Why are you sending our top scorer away?" To which Paladini responds: "It's not me, innit." When the manager, Paulo Sousa, expresses his bafflement about the loan to the press – which duly gets him sacked – Paladini moans to Briatore: "This idiot's going to turn the fans against us … They're saying it's our fault that Dexter Blackstock is going to Nottingham Forest. These guys [managers] start out well, then it goes to their head." A line from club director Alejandro Agag sums up the attitude of the boardroom to the men in the dugout: "If there was an idiot, we found him."

There's no narration in The Four Year Plan: the only voices we hear are those of the people involved interacting with each other. "I never wanted to do interviews," Hodgson says. "Fly-on-the-wall is real. And I also don't trust voiceover, because that can tell the viewer what to think." It's possible, he agrees, that Paladini and Briatore didn't always realise the magnitude of the material they were giving – maybe they thought that when they were talking in Italian, Hodgson wouldn't bother with translations and subtitles. Hence, perhaps, the damning sequence when the pair discuss, sotto voce, the best way for them to get instructions to the manager mid-game without anyone noticing. Hodgson sees that scene as a microcosm of the interesection between "football and business and machismo. They are all encouraging each other – it's a very male environment, and they're using power to impress each other."

Amazingly, through all the upheaval – and the period documented is one of near-constant strife at QPR – Hodgson was allowed to carry on filming. "There were some awful times, when you are not welcome in many places," he says of the events portrayed – he reckons 75% of the film was shot "when things weren't going too well".

So why did it take so long for a film like this to happen? Hodgson thinks the internet made The Four Year Plan possible, by giving fans the knowledge of and thus the interest in the backroom politics of football that means there is an audience for a film largely set in finance meetings. "Ten or 15 years ago, this film couldn't have been made," he says. For which a generation of chairmen and owners must be thankful.

The Four Year Plan is released on DVD in February. It is already available from the QPR club shop.