It has probably escaped the wider football audience that Blackpool FC have a new chief executive.

Alex Cowdy, who has risen from the position of secretary, is attempting to be accessible. He recently started a column in the town's Gazette newspaper, his first article addressing transfers, community work and youth matters.

A club bigwig reaching out was the tone. One senses, though, that, no matter how open he can be, Cowdy is urinating into a particularly stiff breeze on the Fylde coast.

Blackpool, where Carlisle United played last Saturday, are a husk of a club, emptied of faith. The Oystons' despised ownership is not so much elephant in the room as an entire herd of the beasts.

Whatever the official figure, Carlisle's travelling fans vastly outnumbered the home support during the 2-2 draw. When previews had Pool boss Gary Bowyer talking about a "cauldron of noise", this was almost entirely in reference to what the away followers would create.

Aside from misadventures involving the Blues, Bloomfield Road's devoid home stands were the saddest sights I can remember in a decade covering lower-league football. The proud club of Matthews and Mortensen now effectively exist on a pretence. There are the usual bulletins that every club issues, the same sort of decent people occupying necessary positions, the same besieged few trying to keep their heads down and batter on.

Blackpool also have a reasonable team by League Two standards - an experienced keeper, some useful defenders, midfielders in Jack Payne and Brad Potts who set Carlisle some problems, a striker in Armand Gnanduillet who gave them plenty, and a manager who is a paid-up resident of planet Earth.

But the public are not having it. No matter how many of the small things the club get right or wrong, it is a deserted battleground, a target for boycott; such an extraordinary shame that it has reached this stage without any kind of fundamental, corrective action.

Everyone inside Bloomfield Road must know it, too. The miserable situation has not exactly crept up on them, yet it is now the unspoken caveat that accompanies anything else they do or say. If the Oystons were remotely satisfied with what they have presided over, it would be highly disturbing.

Given the particular nature and depth of their crisis, it would be dangerous to measure Blackpool against others - and mostly wrong. Carlisle's owners, though criticised, are certainly not to be compared with the Oystons. They have not run their club in the same apparently cynical way, and you could hardly imagine a member of the latter family sitting among the fans at a big away day, as one of the Blues' top cheeses (Steven Pattison) did last weekend, and surviving unscathed.

But there are principles from Blackpool's decline and desertion that all clubs can still observe. The main one is that people won't always be distracted from the big picture. It will remain in their minds even when things are going well, and be at risk of erupting when they are not.

At Brunton Park right now most are eager to get eyes focused on the football and the small, noticeable pieces of progress behind the scenes. This is perfectly understandable and entirely reasonable.

Yet it would be foolish to pretend such improvements are enough on their own, and that the sales pitch for Carlisle United is now comprehensive and worry-free.

There remains a great deal, after all, still to happen on the big-ticket projects. Some of them, despite recent noises, are barely any further forward than they were at the outset.

After more than eight years of "custodian" ownership, for instance, the first penny of new investment has still to arrive. This despite the 494-day courting of an overseas "billionaire" and the rather less patient repelling of other, local parties.

The "succession plan", often talked about by the veteran owners, remains hard for fans to depict. Then there is the new stadium issue, first explored in 2011 and with a hoped-for completion by 2018, yet seemingly heading back to square one this autumn.

United are, of course, rebuilding on the pitch, and it hardly bears thinking about the rubble that Keith Curle had to walk through when first taking charge in 2014. That was the result of a period when Carlisle went sharply the wrong way, run badly yet remaining stuck in some old ways, as the manager himself recalled this week.

The following is a list of clubs who have been promoted to the Championship in the period since these Blues owners took charge: Swansea, Nottingham Forest, Doncaster, Leicester, Peterborough, Scunthorpe, Norwich, Leeds, Millwall, Brighton, Southampton, Charlton, Sheffield Wednesday, Huddersfield, Bournemouth, Yeovil, Wolves, Brentford, Rotherham, Bristol City, MK Dons, Preston, Wigan, Burton, Barnsley.

Some big beasts there for sure. But also Scunthorpe, Yeovil, Rotherham and Burton. In this same period the League One play-offs have involved the likes of Stevenage, Swindon, Leyton Orient, Chesterfield and Walsall.

The size of Carlisle's travelling support last weekend suggested their club should aspire reasonably towards that. Instead, their trajectory has been dismal; from their highest position since the mid-1980s (fourth in League One in 2008) to a retrieval attempt above the Conference: something finally being accelerated in certain departments, including the team, but not necessarily at the absolute top.

And people do see this. They see the scars in the psyche left by the billionaire debacle and the stadium non-starter. They wonder what United have to show, other than owner debt, for this ongoing era.

They worry about this even as they accept the steps forward, like the spruced-up sponsors' lounge and boxes, an organised supporter group forum, good commercial work, better links with former players and a chief executive who talks a little more, and differently, than those who hired him.

Some of them were saying as much outside Bloomfield Road last Saturday, before they joined that big wave of blue. They wanted to know what it is that this Brunton Park regime are going to make happen, what legacy they are going to leave, other than the weekly efforts on the grass.

What the big picture is, in other words. Blackpool, today, is the most extreme example of what happens when those with the power imagine the people can be easily distracted from it.