Blackburn’s plummet down the Football League ladder may have been halted, but the boardroom situation at Ewood Park remains a shame of the sport in this country.

Overview

Few football club takeovers have made a mockery of the FA’s “fit and proper person” legislation quite as much as the Venky’s buyout of Blackburn Rovers in 2010.

For a start, even if they’d done a good job with the club, the motives of a group of Indian poultry farmers for getting involved in the first place were reprehensible. Blackburn Rovers, like most other professional clubs in Britain, are an asset to its community, full of history and tradition. In this country we list buildings at the drop of a hat, sometimes preserving structures most people would like to see pulled down and replaced. We stand in the way of progress and development to preserve some manky block of flats with rising damp because it’s an example of classic 1970s architecture. But we allow our football clubs to be sold to just about anybody that wants them, and then stand idly by while, for example, Coventry City are moved to play in Northampton. Blackburn Rovers is not something that should be used to further the European brand, and therefore the profits, of some Indian-based chicken farm.

The problem with the ‘fit and proper’ person test is that we’re not in Germany, where the ownership of the nation’s football clubs is strictly protected by rules and regulations that prevent any one nutcase taking whole ownership of Bayern, or Dortmund, or Leverkusen, or anybody else. There, a percentage is held back for the fans/members and the rich remedials who come along cannot take a wholly owned stake. Here, without such rules, Britain finds it legally difficult to turn away anybody who can write a cheque large enough to buy a football club because their intentions for it aren’t sound or, in the case of Blackburn, because they know nothing about football and are clearly three slates short of a full roof.

But Blackburn — along with Coventry and MK Dons — stand as a living, breathing example of why the alleged presence of the rule at all is an insult to people’s intelligence. Any right-thinking individual knows it is wholly inappropriate for Coventry City to be playing matches in front of 1,500 people in Northampton because the hedge fund that owns them is trying to leverage a better rental deal for a soulless, out of town, empty bowl of nothing on the edge of their home city — but the league does nothing. Everybody knows that solving the Wimbledon issue by allowing a music entrepreneur to move the club 70 miles north in order to secure planning permission for a big Asda, while bypassing the league’s promotion and relegation structure, was despicable — but the league voted it through. And everybody knows that taking an old club like Blackburn and turning it into a branding vehicle for cheap Indian chicken is pathetically piss poor — but here they are. And, while we’re here, probably worth holding our hands up and saying that while Tony Fernandes seems like a decent bloke who is trying his best for QPR, our own Rangers are little more than a marketing expense of the Tune Group these days.

But having allowed the Venky’s in, what happened next should surely have broken some rules, and invited intervention from the game’s governors, at some point. After all, we very diligently make all the clubs reveal, once a year, how much money they’ve paid to football agents over the previous 12 months — while, perversely, allowing them to declare the actual transfers of players as “undisclosed fee”. That suggests somebody somewhere is concerned at the influence of agents in the English game, and wants the money they’re making from a sport that charges extortionate ticket prices to be transparent. But they do not care enough to intervene when the Venky’s, advised by football agent Jerome Anderson, sack manager Sam Allardyce, replace him with one of Anderson’s clients Steve Kean — a man with zero management experience — and then set about signing a number of Anderson’s clients, including his own son, as players. Agent advising the board, agent representing the manager, agent representing some of the new signings — zero action taken.

Anderson first came to attention in this country when Thaksin Shinawatra bought Manchester City and appointed Sven Goran Eriksson as manager. It was Anderson who advised the appointment of Eriksson in place of Stuart Pearce and then set about helping engineer the transfer of eight players from all four corners of Europe into the City of Manchester Stadium at massive prices — Rolando Bianchi for £8.8m for example, Valeri Bojinov for £6m and so on.

Of course as we now know Shinawatra had one or two too many human rights and corruption issues hanging over his head in his homeland (which didn’t stop him passing the fit and proper owner test in the first place incidentally) and Man City was quickly sold on to Sheikh Mansour.

That left Anderson hunting for a new project and unfortunately for Blackburn, they’re it. Anderson advised Venky’s on the takeover — the family had previously expressed no interest in football and admit they know little about it but quickly promised Champions League football and Ronaldinho (among other outlandish nonsense).

The team started to falter badly on the pitch, quickly relegated from a position midtable security just 18 months prior, at the end of the 2011/12 season. The board stood behind Kean, who seemed much more masterful at networking and buttering his bread on the right side than picking and motivating a team, despite storms of protest from what few long suffering Blackburn fans remained. Incredibly, there was at least as much criticism of the atmosphere created at home games, and the perceived negative impact of it, as there was the scandalous way the club was being run. How, exactly, were the Blackburn fans supposed to behave while their club was sailing off down the river like this?

The nadir was arguably the two year contract to Myles Anderson, a 20-year-old who had previously managed just one solitary substitute appearance for Aberdeen in the Scottish Premier League, which we all know is a hotbed of quality footballers and extremely hard to break into. Just for reference, players who made more appearances for a dreadful Aberdeen side than Myles Anderson last season include Yoann Folly (previously released by Plymouth), Jerel Ifil (released by Swindon and Kettering), and Zander Diamond (since released by Oldham).

Kean described Anderson as a “late bloomer” blaming his lack of any first team experience anywhere on his extended time in full time education. He was only forced to comment on the transfer at all because Myles is in fact Jerome Anderson’s son. Still, the authorities did nothing.

Anderson made zero appearances for Blackburn, five sub appearances during a loan spell with Aldershot and was released on a free to Exeter in January last year. They released him in August after one sub appearance and he's now, according to Soccerbase at least, playing for Monza in the Italian regional leagues. Late bloomer indeed.

Once the inevitable relegation was confirmed Blackburn started last season with Kean in charge, only for him to finally resign under the weight of protest two months in. Having point blanky refused to sack an underperforming manager for so long, Rovers then went a bit trigger happy by appointing first Henning Berg, then Michael Appleton, and sacking both after less than two months in charge. The board’s message to a disgruntled public is delivered by Shebby Singh, who was widely derided as a clown in his previous job as an Asian television pundit.

What Rovers have now is Gary Bowyer. A man with the club at heart, who almost certainly should have been given the job last season before the dalliances with the dull and uninspiring Berg, and the terminally overrated Appleton. But they still have the Venky’s, and despite possessing the outstanding forward outside the Premier League — Jordan Rhodes — are probably going to fall just short of the play offs. Even that, given what’s gone on in recent times, must be seen as something of a success.
A shadow of their former selves, a shell of the club they were even a few short years ago. And the people that run our game do nothing about it.

When these people, whose motives were questionable from the very beginning, are deemed legally “fit and proper” to be in charge of a community asset like Blackburn Rovers, you have to wonder who on earth those rules are there to actually stop.

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sibarnes66 added 08:05 - Apr 8 Despite the history of where Rovers are... the club, albeit diminished, is now on an even keel. The Venkys have little to do with the running of the club but they do continue to fund us. Without them we would be almost certainly in receivership. The original owners are the ones who should be ashamed, as the Jack Walker trust should have selected a more viable proposal for new owners. Having said that, I, as does Supporters Direct, support the 50 +1 rule that is working wellin Germany. Did you also know that fans can travel for free on public transport to games? Just another indication of how successive governments have screwed us over.

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TacticalR added 13:22 - Apr 8 What an incredible mess. It was difficult enough when the club was being managed remotely from Puna, but a further complication last season was that you had a 3-way tug-of-war between the local board in Blackburn, the Venky's in Puna, and Shebby Singh in Singapore. They've since got rid of Singh. Gary Bowyer must be applauded for steadying the ship.
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tsbains64 added 18:07 - Apr 8 Shebby SIngh funniest person to come out of Blackburn
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