Everton's woes show why football clubs need to be run as partnerships with fans - Stuart Rayner

No holding statement as details were sorted, just embarrassing, deafening, dismissive silence.

Meanwhile, even the BBC, so careful about reporting conjecture, was reporting Frank Lampard had been sacked as Toffees manager.

And that went a long way to explaining why a club which when the Premier League began was one of the country's footballing superpowers is fighting relegation. Again.

Less than three weeks earlier Everton Fans Forum wrote to owner Farhad Moshiri pleading he "take the earliest opportunity to speak with Evertonians directly."

Moshiri wrote back that Everton had "the most robust fan communication network of any club in the Premier League."

His real answer came on Monday.

Or rather did not.

There has been a lot of communication between Everton fans and the board recently, but pretty much all one way via banners and chants at matches. All of it negative.

Football fans are used to being disrespected.

Barnsley’s were not told until gone half-past four on Tuesday their 7.45pm game at Exeter City was off because "areas of concern" on the pitch had not thawed out.

Leeds United fans had to wait until Tuesday night to find out their team would be at Accrington Stanley, not Boreham Wood, in this weekend's FA Cup fourth round.

Rather than help, the Football Association allowed the game to be played at 12.30pm on Saturday.

Everton took it to another level.

At the weekend Moshiri, who owns and bankrolls them, told a Sky reporter it was “not his decision" whether Lampard was sacked or not, but did not say whose it was. Neither did chairman Bill Kenwright, stood alongside him.

It is possible to run a successful club with the supporters against those in charge. Hull City reached the 2014 FA Cup final and won promotion back to the Premier League in 2016 with large chunks of the fanbase boycotting matches over Assem Allam's stewardship.

But it is a heck of a lot harder.

Supporters cannot just be bought off with big transfers either.

The Football Observatory estimated Everton were the eighth biggest net transfer spenders in Europe's top five leagues between 2012 and 2022 with £765.2m lashed out on not very much at all.

On Monday Tottenham Hotspur beat Fulham to a constant soundtrack of "We want Levy out!"

Spurs chairman Daniel Levy has overseen spending which put his club 16th in that table. Top were Manchester United. The Glazers are never likely to win a popularity contest on the Stretford End.

Every fan would love a billionaire sugar-daddy happy to turn himself into a millionaire to bring success to the team they always supported yet shrewd enough to make good footballing decisions and appointments.

But most supporters are not idiots. The few canny operators prepared to plough obscene amounts of money in often do it for the wrong reasons – sportswashing, normally.

And as Everton now know, billionaires must work within football's financial fair play rules.

So most will settle for someone who gets their club, respects them and always strives for improvement – people who do not just write "I have the utmost respect for the support of (in his case) Evertonians" as Moshiri did, but act that way.

Steve Gibson has been Middlesbrough chairman so long he has made hundreds of mistakes but is regarded as one of the best.

Allam's successor at Hull, Acun Ilicali, tried to play fantasy football this summer and instead of getting the Championship play-off push he wanted, plunged the Tigers into a relegation fight. But he seems to have realised his errors and brought in a highly-talented and independently-minded coach in Liam Rosenior. The big buys from the Turkey have stopped, replaced by signings clearly picked by Rosenior.

But more than that, Ilicali goes out of his way to bring fans with him. Children's tickets are ridiculously cheap and he is paying for free coach travel to every Hull away game for the rest of this season. A competition gave more than 300 free holidays to Turkey for supporters.

If the team underperforms, Ilicali will be in the firing line too, no matter how good his PR. The team will always come first with fans.

Clubs should not be run as democracies – we have seen fads as clubs down the pyramid let fans pick their teams and even presidential popularity contests at big European clubs – but they should be partnerships.

Everyone knows a football club is so much more powerful with its fans behind them. So why would you treat your fanbase with the disdain Everton did?