2,000 words on Blackburn, Lancashire

They've been here before, of course, but that doesn't make it any easier when familiar patterns are being repeated yet again. So not for the first time, Blackburn Rovers supporters have had enough.

Phone-in switchboards are starting to light up again in Lancashire. Protest banners have been spotted. The team is atrophying on the pitch and unwelcome old memories are being rekindled. It all feels like a very familiar story at a club which feels as though it’s been teetering on the brink of something like a civil war for almost a decade and a half. I regret to inform you that Blackburn Rovers are at it again.

For supporters of the club, 2024/25 must feel like the mother of all wasted opportunities. This is a decent team which showed signs of being capable of challenging for a place in the playoffs, earlier in the season, even though it wasn’t predicted before a ball was kicked. Indeed, they’ve only spent a few weeks outside the top six sinced it started.

The problem is that the last few of those have been since the start of March, and their current position of 11th is their lowest of the season so far. And as is always going to happen at a club with the recent history of this one, the current slump was always likely to switch attention back to the owners of the club.

Venky’s London Ltd arrived at Blackburn in November 2010 with a deal worth £43m, and they started very badly indeed, coming in for considerable criticism over their decision to sack Sam Allardyce as manager a month after their arrival. When Steve Kean, an assistant coach with close ties to the agent Jerome Anderson, who’d introduced Manchester City to Thaksin Shinawatra several years earlier, was appointed into the manager’s job, protests against the owners started amongst supporters.

Anderson’s company, SEM Group, had been bought a year earlier by Kentaro, a Swiss media rights company that had helped to broker the sale of the club, and it was already being suggested that they had too much influence over the club’s decision-making. Venky’s looked out of their depth, and Kean soon did too. Previous directors resigned early in 2011 and the team only avoided relegation on the final day of the season.

They weren’t as lucky again, the following season. With protests growing and rumours that the players no longer wanted to play for Kean, Blackburn dropped into the relegation places with a run of six straight defeats from the end of March and relegation was confirmed at the end of their penultimate home match of the season against Wigan Athletic, a 1-0 home defeat now best remembered for the visually arresting image of a live chicken draped in a Blackburn flag, which had been thrown onto the pitch by a protesting supporter. How, exactly, this was smuggled into Ewood Park in the first place is something of a mystery.

Things didn’t improve much in the Championship. If anything, they grew even more chaotic. A month after relegation from the Premier League had been confirmed, the club hired a former Malaysian international called Shebby Singh in an advisory position. Singh immediately fell out with Steve Kean and, and Kean left at the end of September, which sounds desirable until we factor in that there were strong rumours that this was because Singh was attempting to interfere in team affairs. Singh also left the club at the end of the season. Although widely considered to have been operating out of his depth, he was at least also credited with getting Kentaro out of Ewood Park. He died at just 61 years of age at the start of 2022.

Kean was replaced by Henning Berg, who lasted 57 days before being sacked. Berg later took the club to an employment tribunal for unfair dismissal and won his case and £2.25m in damages, making it a rather expensive two months for them. His replacement, Michael Appleton, lasted 67 days. Only a run of four wins and two draws from their last seven matches under caretaker Gary Bowyer spared Blackburn a second successive relegation, and they finished the 2012/13 season in 17th place in the Championship.

That summer, in a rare outbreak of common sense, Bowyer was appointed as the club’s fourth permanent manager in 12 months. He steadied the ship on the pitch as the club immolated around him, but by 2015 it was clear that Blackburn were in trouble. With debts rising, players were sold without the manager’s consent.

In November, Bowyer was sacked and replaced by Paul Lambert. Lambert kept Blackburn just above the relegation places until the end of the 2015/16 season, but early in 2016 the club posted debts of £104m. Venky’s again angered supporters, this time by appointing Owen Coyle, who’d previously managed local rivals Burnley, to replace Lambert. But Coyle was catastrophic as Blackburn’s manager, and by the time of his sacking in February 2017 they were heading towards a second relegation, this time to League One.

But as Blackburn sailed down into the third tier for only the third time in their history, the tide began to turn at Ewood Park again. Tony Mowbray arrived in February 2017 and came close to rescuing a disastrous season. Blackburn had looked sunk at the time of his arrival, but they finished the season on 51 points, relegated only by goal difference after winning three and drawing two of their last five matches. Mowbray was kept on and the following year they were promoted back into the Championship.

That return came seven years ago now, and there have been few signs since then that the club is ready for a return to the Premier League. Their first three seasons back were solidly mid-table. But in 2022 they missed out on a place in the playoffs by two points and six places–Mowbray left at the end of that season and was replaced by Jon Dahl Tomasson–and the following season it was one place and goal difference.

But if Blackburn supporters were starting to grow tired of these near misses, last season served as a reminder that you can’t take much for granted in the Championship. The club slumped back towards the relegation places and it took a 2-0 win at the already-promoted champions Leicester on the last day of the season to prevent them from falling into League One again. Tomasson left the club by mutual consent in February 2024 and took up the Sweden head coach position. He was understood to be disillusioned at the club’s activity in the transfer market and the lack of vision from the owners themselves.

All of which brings us up to the start of this season. John Eustace had been the manager who ended up keeping them up last season, and he was joined by a familiar face in the return of Rudy Gestede to the club as “Director of Football Operations”. And for a while it seemed as though they’d got the balance right. After seven games, Blackburn had won four, lost three, and were in third place in the table. But then they ran out of steam, winning just one of their next seven and slumping to 10th place.

Streakiness, thy name is Eustace. As the calls for the manager’s head started to become louder the team recovered on the pitch again, winning six in a row and keeping five clean sheets. But the middle of December brought another slide in form. Rovers have won just four of their last 19 league matches and were comfortably knocked out of the FA Cup by Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Eustace is no longer with the club. He left for Derby County in the middle of February amid rumours of a falling out with Gestede. It was a pretty sad indictment on the way in which the club has been run, really. Eustace admitted in his first press conference as the new Derby manager that he’d taken a risk by leaving a battle for a play-off place to join a relegation battle at his new club, but that he felt the Derby job was a better long-term prospect, and also mentioned that he’d already had more conversations with the Derby owner David Clowes than with previous ownership groups combined at his previous clubs, Birmingham and Blackburn. As of the 3rd April, Eustace had succeeded in getting Derby up and out of the bottom three.

Rovers, for their part, appointed Valerian Ismael to replace him. He’s still awaiting his first win as the club’s manager, with just one point from his five league matches in charge so far. But the club’s supporters are again losing their patience with the way in which the club is being run. It has felt for years as though the relationship between the fans and the club’s owners has only ever really gotten as good as a state of detente, and there are a lot of bad memories stored up over the last decade and a half to fall back upon when things start turning sour again.

Things may not be helped by the fact that their bitter local rivals Burnley are making a decent fist of returning to the Premier League again. When the two sides met on the last day of August they drew 1-1 at Turf Moor, a result all the more impressive from a Blackburn perspective because they had to play forty minutes with ten players following a red card. But when the two teams met again at Ewood Park at the start of January Burnley won 1-0, the sort of result that creates a reminder in supporters’ heads of the current gulf between the two teams.

Last week, a joint-statement from supporters groups called for Gestede as well as CEO Steve Waggott and COO Suhail Pasha to stop attending games, as their presence has become a “distraction”. Friday night brings a home match against Middlesbrough at which protests are expected. Waggott has been the main target of the ire of supporters, but it is clear from the nature of the joint-statement issued that the problem within the running of the club is seen as being greater than him alone. And the answer to the question of why these three are being targeted rather than owners of the club is a fairly simple one. The actual owners themselves haven’t been to Ewood Park since October 2012. There has been interest in buying the club, but this seems to have been rebuffed.

The big irony of all this is that Blackburn could yet be a Premier League club this season. They may be 11th in the table, but with seven games to play they’re only five points off a playoff place. It seems extremely unlikely, but it does remain possible. But the truth of the matter is that recent form has given little indication that things are going to swing back in the other direction again over the remainder of this season.

And this does feel like a wasted opportunity. Blackburn Rovers are, like most Championship clubs, not in receipt of Premier League parachute payments, so they’re at a huge financial disadvantage compared to other teams in the division. But that explanation doesn’t butter any parsnips when the team has been in a position in which progress looked possible, only for it to slip through their hands.

All of this raises the question of what supporters of the club ashould expect. It seems reasonable to suggest that Blackburn Rovers have no entitlement to a place in the Premier League. No-one does. But this has now been going on for almost a decade and a half, and little seems to be changing. The lack of energy on the part of the owners of the club renders them little more than absentee landlords, and while few among the supporters would demand success, the lack of effort on the part of the owners, using others to manage the day-to-day running of the club and all the flak that comes with that is clearly an unacceptable way of doing so.

So the protests start again. After almost fifteen years of owning the club, it doesn’t appear that Venky’s haven’t improved the fortunes of Blackburn Rovers, so maybe it is time to seel up and give someone else a go. Rovers supporters have been here too many times before, and if the recent history of the club is anything to go by, their current downward trajectory might not end with dropping from the playoff places to mid-table. The fans have been here before, and it’s clear that they’re sick of it. It’s time for a new broom, but there’s no indication that one is going to be arriving at Ewood Park any time soon.

Accompanying image, The Ronnie Clayton Blackburn End Stand at Ewood Park, by Steve Daniels, licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence.