Claudio Ranieri’s Fulham were a mix of the disinterested & discarded, true victims of the Premier League

Fulham best embody the seductive and poisonous allure of the Premier League, having spent lavishly without any of the stability or the structures one would associate with a semi-functional club

There was a moment early in the second half of Fulham’s game at Southampton on Wednesday night that seemed to encapsulate the futility, the fury and the self-defeating ineptitude that together are about to condemn them to another indefinite stay in the Championship.

Tom Cairney scrapped to win a corner on the left wing, and a little swell of noise began to build among the parcel of travelling Fulham fans in the Northam Stand. Up stepped Joe Bryan to take it, and promptly put it straight out of play for a goal-kick. Fulham lost 2-0, and such was their absence of attacking threat that you’d have to put that corner down as one of their highlights.

Indeed, it’s been a season with precious few highlights, one that - barring a miracle that would outstrip even Leicester’s stunning escape in 2014-15 - appears doomed to end in embarrassing failure. One manager in Slavisa Jokanovic has already gone, another in Claudio Ranieri has just followed, and if the Jol/Meulensteen/Magath debacle of six years ago still feels like a nadir, then it is a measure of their catastrophic campaign that this one is certainly running it close.

So how have we reached this point? In many ways, Fulham best embody the seductive and poisonous allure of the Premier League, having spent lavishly to get there in the first place, spent lavishly to stay there, and spent lavishly to get back, yet without any of the stability or the structures one would associate with a semi-functional club. The impression is of a team run on whims and impulses, plastering over the gaping holes in its long-term strategy with floods of banknotes. Around £100 million in transfer fees alone was paid out over the summer, and with the exception of Aleksandar Mitrovic, whose loan deal was made permanent, you’d struggle to pinpoint a single success.

Meanwhile, a squad that played such bright entertaining football during the promotion season was dismembered. A remarkable measure of the turnover in personnel is that just four of the 16 players who started more than a third of Fulham’s league games last season - Denis Odoi, Tim Ream, Ryan Sessegnon and Cairney - have done so again this season. The pathway from the club’s much-trumpeted academy to the first team has slowed to a trickle. This wasn’t just strengthening. This wasn’t just natural renewal.

It was, in essence, a revulsion of the players and the principles that got them into the Premier League in the first place. Small wonder Fulham have looked so ill at ease this season: they’re a mixture of the disinterested and the discarded, a two-paced squad playing one-paced football.

After three years of patient building, Jokanovic was given just 12 games to fit these wildly divergent constituent parts together before he was dismissed. In came Ranieri - “risk-free”, in the now-infamous words of sporting director Tony Khan - and his sacking to make way for Scott Parker is Fulham’s sixth in as many years. Rather drolly, the page on Fulham’s club page listing all of its former managers hasn’t been updated since the departure of Kit Symons in 2015. Fulham are literally getting through managers quicker than they can upload their profiles to the website.

What links all of this is a sort of infantile impatience, an almost theistic belief in quick fixes and magic bullets, almost a kind of intellectual laziness. From the tourists packing the neutral stand at Craven Cottage, to the carousel of managers and backroom staff, to the bored-looking star players on enormous salaries, this is a club where everyone is simply passing through on the way to their next big payday. Even owner Shahid Khan seems to regard the club as an adjunct, a foothold in his wider strategy of plundering the lucrative UK NFL market, most recently exhibited in his bid to buy Wembley Stadium from the FA.

A fool and his money are soon departed. And while the bigger picture will work itself out in the fullness of time, in the meantime a litany of smaller problems will need to be fixed. Hiring a new permanent manager. Retooling a bloated, unbalanced squad for a Championship promotion campaign. Trimming the soaring wage bill. Mending the broken relationship between boardroom and fanbase. And finding someone better than Bryan to take the corners. Perhaps along the way, the Khans will reach some understanding of what sort of club they want this to be, of how cash and hubris are nothing without a underpinning vision. For too long Fulham have been relying on shortcuts. Now, they seem to be taking the shortest possible route out of the division.