8 managers and 3 owners... Milan have been in disarray since 2014

When Massimiliano Allegri was sacked on January 13, 2014, with Milan slumped in 11th and 30 points adrift of league leaders Juventus, there were plenty who believed it could not get any worse.

Allegri, all but sacked 24 hours earlier while appearing live on La Domenica Sportiva, Italy's Match of the Day equivalent, was written off as finished, but not Milan. And yet the club are now on their eighth manager in five years having turned to former Inter Milan boss Stefano Pioli to salvage this season.

Milan have had three different owners since Allegri, multiple director changes and have never again finished in the top four positions. For Allegri, he went on to win five Serie A titles, four Italian Cups and two Italian Super Cups as he wrote himself into Juventus history in that time. Ouch.

For further context on the Rossoneri's fall, the club were seventh on the annual Deloitte Rich List back in 2011, a year after Allegri guided them to their 18th Scudetto. Fast forward to the mess Pioli now inherits and the club have dropped to 18th in that list, sandwiched between Everton and Newcastle United.

'We are all waiting to see AC Milan come back to the glories of the past,' admits supporter Andrea Bricchi. 'Fans would like these last few years to have been just a nightmare.'

It was 2007 when AC Milan fans huddled into bars across the city to watch Carlo Ancelotti's side lift the Champions League trophy in Athens, Greece.

Dida, Paulo Maldini, Gennaro Gattuso, Andrea Pirlo, Kaka and Filippo Inzaghi. World class players from back to front. That was always the Milan way until the purse strings tightened, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Thiago Silva left for Paris Saint-Germain in 2012 and the club have never truly recovered.

Silvio Berlusconi loved the club but more so, he loved being rich and successful. It was the growing control of eldest daughter Barbara Berlusconi, following her father's divorce, that put paid to lavish outlays on the game's top stars. She noticed the hole the club was burning in the family accounts and decided it was time to reign in the spending.

Cost-cutting became the aim of the game and the club had gone from the grandest of banquets to a far more modest affair - maintaining previous successes was nigh on impossible without the investment of old as rivals roared past them.

Debts, some more than a decade old, had not been given the attention they deserved and Berlusconi sold up in 2017 in a €740million (£645m) deal as success dried up and frankly, his trophy-laden run had long ended.

In came Chinese consortium, headed up by Li Yonghong. Only their year owning the club was built on hedge fund investment and false promises, rather than safeguarded funds.

Elliott Management, who had helped finance Yonghong's deal to the tune of £100m, took legal action after two installments were not repaid on time and they secured ownership themselves.

Elliott, with the help of former Arsenal CEO Ivan Gazidis, have eased financial burdens, tidied up accounts but appear to have taken their eye off events on the pitch. Marco Giampaolo's club-record 111-day tenure became another forgettable episode in their short time in charge.

Gazidis' grand statements that Elliott and the board had 'saved' the club from bankruptcy amid growing unrest at Giampaolo's sacking and the worldwide trending movement to get #PioliOut was ill-timed at best. At worst it smacked of board-level arrogance.

Right now, Milan can't seem to get anything right.

Bricchi, a finance expert away from the San Siro terraces as CEO of Brian and partners, accepts the strides made off the pitch but keeps returning to one key theme - the club's systemic failure to get it right on the pitch.

'To grow up you must win,' he adds. 'This is why fans saw the arrival of Giampaolo, his sacking and, finally, Pioli's announcement, as a total and definitive mess. It seems to signal that the company puts the football in the background. And this is not acceptable for fans who were used to dominating.'

So, on the pitch, where did it go so badly wrong? Out went Allegri and in came one of the club's most distinguished midfielders, Clarence Seedorf. But 19 games later - despite winning 11 - Seedorf was sacked. Next.

In came Inzaghi, the 2007 Champions League final hero, to steady the disintegrating ship. Inzaghi, nicknamed Superpippo, boasted 10 titles during his time at the club but a mid-table finish cost him his job after one season. History counts for little when the head is on the block. Minutes after his sacking Sinisa Mihajlovic was announced as his successor.

Things improved, slightly, under Mihajlovic but he was frankly dealing with Japanese knotweed. With six games to go in the 2015-16 season, with the club sat sixth, outside of those desired Champions League spots, Mihajlovic was out. Berlusconi was giving Lord Sugar a run for his money with the speed of the sackings.

Ancelotti, perhaps wisely, rejected the chance to return and so in came youth coach Cristian Brocchi. Milan fans were forgiven if they could barely keep up with who was in the dugout. It felt like as soon as they learned the name of the latest boss he was frogmarched out of the club.

Brocchi saw out the season and then faded back into the background as Vincenzo Montella came in for his 64-game streak. What Montella, even though it eventually all went wrong, as it does with most managers at the club, managed that those before him could not was a trophy.

Winning the Italian Super Cup in 2016 following a penalty shootout win over Juventus ended a five-year drought without silverware. It was small fry compared to league titles or Champions League honours, but it was something.

A sixth-placed finish in his first season saw Milan book a place in Europa League qualifying the following year. Milan were far from rid of the weeds that blighted the post-Allegri era but Montella looked to be the closest to ripping them out for good.

Then came the heralded Chinese investors, Milan were back (or so fans thought). A €200m(£175m) spending spree followed that summer and fans were dreaming of their return to the top. But five wins from the opening 11 games in Serie A in 2017-18 condemned Montella to the scrapheap alongside Seedorf, Inzaghi, Mihajlovic and Brocchi.

And so despite the previous disasters of using former players to salvage the club, Milan ignored their own reasoning to replace Montella with former midfield terrier Gattuso. Promoted from his role coaching the club's Under-19s to step up, Gattuso was tasked with making the club hard to beat, as well as ensuring the expensively assembled machine could steamroll to success.

The now famously coined phrase that in football it is 'sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe s***,' Gattuso succinctly summed up the life of a manager in Milan.

But like his predecessors, a failure to secure Champions League football saw him sacked. He came closer than most. But close does not let you dine at Europe's top table. All this unfolded as Allegri threw title after title after title after title aloft over in Turin.

The expensive assets signed under Montella, such as Leonardo Bonucci, were shipped out to ease a wage bill that had risen to eye-watering figures for a club so long detached from the Champions League. Young players with future sell-on value became the focus, talents like Lucas Paqueta and striker Rafael Leao, signed in the summer from Lille.

Giampaolo's reputation in Italy was largely harboured from his ability to develop young players and turn them into prized assets. Look at his work with Lucas Torreira at Sampdoria before he was snapped up by Arsenal. Milan wanted that on a large scale; there was optimism he would be the man to build the club back up.

But investment was limited, Elliott keen to avoid flirting with the debts of the past. He was building a full-scale house with lego bricks and expecting it to survive the hurricane from big-spending Inter and Juventus.

Many supporters felt while early season form had real cause for concern, the ongoing hire-fire approach was a disease the club needed to be rid of. Things would never improve without some form of stability.

And yet, despite beating Genoa 2-1 recently to leave Milan 13th, four points off the Champions League places, Giampaolo became a history maker for the shortest reign of any AC Milan manager ever. A new low, even for the Rossoneri.

'If you buy a Ferrari then you need to use it, you can't just keep it in your garage as it's too expensive,' Bricchi added.

'It is just pretty sad, for a fan like me, seeing Inter get it right now. They have always been the losers, the 'born after', the funny cousins. And now we are sadly taking their place. But like in a comedy, or in Rigoletto (a three-part opera), the joker can't dominate the Duke. So we will go back to our place, sooner or later, that is for sure!'

Whether Pioli is a Blackadder fan or not, the popular British sitcom best sums up what the 53-year-old is walking into - in case he does not know the scale of his job here.

'We're in the stickiest situation since Sticky the Stick Insect got stuck on a sticky bun,' Blackadder said. Pioli would be forgiven for thinking the same.