This season we’re doing football journalism differently. Join The i Paper Sport channel on WhatsApp here to vote for the club Daniel Storey should cover this week on The Journeyman

TURF MOOR — I’m walking through the Turf Moor concourse at half-time to try to make a cup of tea account for wearing one too few layers, when the stadium announcer’s voice rings out over the tannoy.

A lilting Burnley accent tells supporters that some primary school-age cousins are meeting at Turf Moor for the first time. One half of the family has travelled over from Australia for the privilege. “Isn’t that amazing?” is the rhetorical question, uttered in a cheery radio presenter tone. It is a happy story of how football connects people.

Two or three big coats down from me, a gruff voice speaks. It is not directed at anyone in particular, simply uttered into the ether. “Poor bastards. It’ll be the first and last time they come here.” Welcome to Burnley in 2026.

Before kick-off, the big screen plays a video of the good times: promotion triumph, bruising the noses of the rich in the Premier League, Sean Dyche roaring in celebration.

It is supposed to stir up the locals, but right now it is doing the opposite. Look at what you had. Now spend 90-odd minutes watching what you have got.

Burnley promptly draw 0-0 against Portsmouth, which feels so utterly fitting that I want to laugh. The home team dominate but create far too few clear chances and stuff up the ones they do create. The referee comes in for serious flak, apparently for the crime of not kicking the ball in the net for them.

This is the first match of a new manager’s tenure: Fabio Celestini is the next sacrificial lamb. At the full-time whistle there are widespread boos (eventually replaced by applause for effort when the players lap the pitch). It is Celestini’s birthday. Any more pathos and Turf Moor would sink under the weight.

Burnley have not won a home league game for almost 13 months, far and away the longest run in English professional football. The surprise is not that everyone is so angry and dejected at Turf Moor, but that there is still any evidence of belief at all.

Nowhere in the country do you get a better vista from your seat in the stand. It is just a shame that they spend most of their time wishing they were back outside.

Mostly the match left me, even as a neutral, deeply frustrated at the painful lack of identity in Burnley’s team. That was always their strength in the Premier League: everybody knowing what everyone else’s job was, everybody knowing the plan. It is the only way to punch above your weight.

Here, you have a new goalkeeper signed from Brest who clearly wants to take risks and play short passes, but defenders who frequently get stuck when playing the short triangles.

You have a lightweight central midfielder who seems to enjoy having the ball but then gets muscled off it. You have Jamie Vardy desperate for quick service and then two wingers who want two minutes of possession every time they get it.

Nicky Hayen lost his job last week because his team was bad at just about everything, but he was also let down by a relegated club who had all the advantages that brought and wasted them. He was only in place because other targets turned Burnley down. He had a squad that seemed unfit for so many purposes and still does.

Identities don’t just happen. They must be forged, curated and sculpted over time. Burnley lurched from Scott Parker to Hayen to Celestini.

They have a new chief football officer, Diego Lopez, to oversee football operations because chairman Alan Pace says they need someone with “a strong knowledge of European markets”, despite that recruitment strategy failing to work for three years.

The chief executive resigned a year into his job because of difficulty working with Pace, sources told The i Paper.

Speaking of Pace, that is where this story really gets messy. In December 2020, Burnley were taken over by ALK Capital. The deal was a leveraged buyout which, in simple terms, means that it was funded by borrowing secured against Burnley’s own assets.

There is a reason that Premier League clubs subsequently voted to ban leveraged buyouts. They are a disgrace.

A club that had previously had no debt was, overnight, plunged into it. According to the most recent accounts, that debt is now north of £130m.

Burnley, a club in the bottom three of the Championship, have the fourth highest external debt figure in England behind Tottenham, Everton and Manchester United. Two of those have massive new stadiums – the other has the Glazer family.

That level of debt can cripple a club. The interest alone is reported to be around £20m per year, or £390,000 a week. And, again at the last count, Burnley were already spending 115 per cent of their revenue on staff wages even before you factor in the debt.

Any Burnley supporter who isn’t worried isn’t concentrating hard enough.

You will never convince me that leveraged buyouts are anything other than catastrophic for a football club’s security, but on a basic level they create greater onus on owners to be communicative and transparent.

You have to work harder to convince supporters of your value. You shorten your own fuse. You must get fewer things wrong.

Related: this week, Burnley’s parent ownership company Velocity Capital (UK) Holdings was issued with a strike-off notice for failing to submit accounts. Because the company holds shares and voting rights for Burnley, the Independent Football Regulator and EFL are now involved.

Burnley say that the issue will be sorted soon (and it probably will), but the point is that it sends a rotten message to already concerned supporters.

Celestini and Lopez are the last roll of the dice for a club that is facing systemic crisis. The manager did a fine job at Basel, but less so at CSKA Moscow.

Is that the right preparation for Championship management? Was there not a clear argument for the dependable option, lower-margin football that got the job done in this division before? Or have so many managers turned down this job over the last six months that an ideal option doesn’t exist?

For now, the locals are only restless. If Burnley’s fortunes don’t improve soon, the finances will take over and then you really will see anger. That is the real story here. On-pitch incompetence is merely a distraction, a symptom of a club pushed deep into uncertainty by its own owners.

Because I am wrong – there is an identity at Burnley again. Debt is the identity. It is all the fans I speak to are thinking about.

It defines their mood. It is the reason for the “Pace Out” banners that supporters battled with stewards to display last month and the reason for the chants against the owner on Saturday. He has taken a club to the point of calamity because that was always inevitable when you own their precious club through saddling it financially.

And that is the great indignation. It is not that Burnley are bad, although obviously that is frustrating. It is that Burnley lost their chance to be bad for a bit without sirens ringing. It should be the right of every football club to go through lean times without it causing existential doubt over the future.

More from The Journeyman

Here, another bad season on the pitch, the loss of parachute payments, Everton winning their appeal against the compensation award – any or all of it spells trouble.

Burnley are living on the edge. They were pushed there six years ago, when a group of people loaded debt onto something that existed for far longer, and far more happily, without it.

Everything started there. The poor management, poor communication and poor strategy since have only made it worse. God knows where this goes next.