It’s not a good season for Charlton Athletic supporters to feel hopeless. 20 years ago this week, they were fourth in the Premier League, midway through a run of four wins in five games that began by beating Chelsea at home and Tottenham Hotspur away. Arsenal would go on to be invincible champions (Charlton drew with them too), but supporters at least felt like they supported the young kings of London.
Now, Charlton are London’s tenth-ranked team, behind Leyton Orient and ahead of only AFC Wimbledon and Sutton United in the EFL pyramid. They haven’t won a league game since November. Even then it was only one that month and even then it took two penalties to beat the team bottom of League One 2-1. Hopelessness is inevitable.
Charlton were supposed to have endured their bad years. This club and their ground had already been saved by supporters once. If the Premier League years, missing out on Europe by three points and the Alan Curbishley-inspired glory felt like overachievement even at the time, it could have set Charlton up for decades.
Instead, those last 20 years have been almost entirely miserable, a succession of shambolic regimes, broken promises and blurred vision that could only ever lead to this. This is the story of Charlton Athletic’s fall. Sit back and grab a drink; none of it is pretty.
Belgian waffle
Every supporter will have their own moment of inglorious epiphany going back as far as you like: selling Scott Parker to Chelsea when they were fourth in the top flight; Curbishley leaving to be replaced by Iain Dowie and then Les Reed; shedding the squad after relegation and then falling into League One. But in 2013, Charlton finished ninth in the Championship under former player and popular manager Chris Powell, who had taken them up as champions with 101 points. Then, the decline had been arrested.
In January 2014, Belgian businessman and politician Roland Duchatelet paid £14m to buy Charlton Athletic, including The Valley and the club’s training ground. Duchatelet’s aim was to place Charlton within a network of European clubs, his own multi-club network.
Duchatelet upsold the advantages: sharing players, sharing costs, an ease of development for young players and a vision to take Charlton back to the Premier League. Then or since, Duchatelet owned FC Carl Zeiss Jena (Germany), Standard Liege and Sint-Truidense (Belgium), Ujpest (Hungary) and AD Alcorcon (Spain).
If the relationship between Duchatelet and Charlton supporters wasn’t always broken, it unravelled to that point startlingly quickly. Powell was sacked in March 2014 amid claims of owner interference in team selection and tactics. A string of managers followed: Jose Riga, Bob Peeters, Guy Luzon, Karel Fraeye, Jose Riga (again). The turnover in players was alarming: in 2014-15 Charlton loaned out 22 players. All the young talent was sold, often for fees way below their eventual value: Johann Berg Gudmundsson, Nick Pope, Joe Gomez.
Just as damaging was Duchatelet’s active hostility towards supporters. Amid cost-cutting and on-pitch decline, the owner released a statement on the club website that accused unhappy fans of creating disorder, interfering with the players and “wanting the club to fail”. That is the ultimate declaration of war to those who were here long before Duchatelet and would remain long after him.
Unfortunately for Duchatelet (with no sympathy intended) and his CEO, lawyer Katrien Meire, they picked the wrong fanbase to pick on. Charlton already had a long history of vital campaigning. When they were exiled from The Valley in the 1980s, their indefatigability shone through. A political party was set up to run in the local election and raise awareness of the club’s plight – it received 11 per cent of the votes and forced the issue.
“In the end, leaving The Valley was probably the best thing that happened as it changed the club completely,” Rick Everitt, former editor of iconic Charlton fanzine Voice of The Valley said.
It was returning home that reenergised Charlton and laid the foundations for that Premier League overachievement.
They protested against Duchatelet at home games. They boycotted a match to take a coach trip to Sint-Truiden, the owner’s home town. They threw beach balls and plastic pigs onto the pitch.
They carried a coffin, painted all in red, towards the stadium ahead of a home game against Middlesbrough, followed by hundreds of mourners. They reacted angrily to reports that club employees were owed unpaid bonuses. Piece by piece, they eroded Duchatelet’s stubbornness and resolve and persuaded him to sell.
Everything going Southall
After almost two years of rumours about sales, Duchatelet finally relinquished control when he sold the club for £1 in November 2019 to East Street Investments, a consortium consisting of two English businessmen (Matt Southall being one) who had been backed by Abu Dhabi money. Included in the deal was a commitment to buy Charlton’s stadium, The Valley, and their Sparrows Lane training ground within 18 months for £50m.
Initial signs were vaguely promising, albeit clearly fuelled by the departure of Duchatelet. Southall at least seemed to understand the power of the supporters and the benefit in keeping them onside. “Most important is strengthening our links with both the fans and the Charlton community so they may understand our short and long-term plans for the club and how we intend to build on the amazing support and goodwill already shown to ESI,” an initial statement read.
Things escalated quicker than anyone could have imagined. Tahnoon Nimer, the majority shareholder, took to Instagram to make a series of claims about how Southall was spending the club’s money on his own lifestyle. That included a fleet of high-end cars that were given to Southall’s associates (at a subsequently estimated £700,000) and a flat leased in the club’s name for a reported £12,500 a month for two years. The dark joke was that the flat was one of Charlton’s higher-paid players. Southall denied the accusations but seven Range Rovers were eventually listed for sale online and the club gave one away for free in an ingenious – and cheeky – “your club, your car” price draw.
After Southall accused Nimer of failing to put any investment into the club and suspended long-time club secretary Chris Parkes, staff at the club felt that they had to protest. Southall was eventually sacked from his position in March 2020, but not before offering a vote of confidence in himself via a club statement after Charlton Athletic Supporters’ Trust (CAST) had asked him to step aside. Southall initially called the police before leaving the stadium after a farcical late night stand-off.
By June 2020, Nimer had announced the sale of the club following an ongoing transfer embargo and a failure to provide funds to the EFL. The new party was businessman Paul Elliott, but that too led to reported failures to submit official documentation. At that point, code red was reached.
“The owners need to demonstrate proof of funds,” CAST board member Heather McKinlay told i at the time – she has since become the chairperson. “If they can’t do that then we’re absolutely in a Bury situation. We’re not saying that to exaggerate or scaremonger, we’re saying that because we’re in such a mess.
“There is no doubt the situation at Charlton is causing an awful lot of anxiety and despair. To see Charlton in this situation is proving quite detrimental to people’s mental health, especially with everything else going on at the moment. It is that important to supporters. When it’s been such a big part of your life for so long, it’s part of who you are.”
Supporters prepared for another battle after years of fighting the previous enemy. Reports suggest that Covid-19, ironically, is what kept Charlton Athletic afloat. The fall in operating cost and staff furloughing allowed them to stay alive, albeit with a desperately weak pulse.
It’s worth describing, at this point, just how thoroughly upsetting this all is for supporters. The constancy of the barrage is as bewildering as it is exhausting. This is a club whose support has permeated through generations of families and connects friendship groups. Your football club is supposed to be a place of relief, companionship, escape, connection and excitement. It is not supposed to be something you dread appearing in headlines or news reports, a place of disarray and angst. Clubs deserve better. We deserve better.
Sinking Sandgaards
Thomas Sandgaard was the saviour, once. When he bought the club in September 2020, finally bringing to a close the ESI mania and offering supporters relief from the penny-pinching and nervous estimates of mounting unpaid bills, he promised that “there will be less stress and drama around the club now”.
He had always been eccentric. He revealed his intention to purchase on Twitter and played a self-penned metal song “Addicks To Victory” on an electric guitar on the pitch, but he also opened dialogue with CAST and supporters were grateful for anyone who had made the court hearings and transfer embargoes go away.
Unfortunately, Sandgaard was also overly ambitious and impatient. He spoke of a Premier League dream, that albatross around the neck of so many lower-league takeovers. Charlton were in League One. They needed stability, not rampant desire.
After promotion to the Championship and immediate relegation, some familiar traits began to appear like damp patches on a wall. Between September 2020 and December 2022, Charlton sacked four managers: Lee Bowyer, Johnnie Jackson, Nigel Adkins, Ben Garner. The lack of a permanent CEO rang an alarm amongst supporters, particularly with Sandgaard residing in America and involving family members in club operations. His son Martin was the director of analysis and Sandgaard’s partner Raelynn Maloney had a role in business operations.
There were no protests this time; perhaps they had seen too much go too wrong and were left numb to only part-chaos. For his part, Sandgaard did seem to genuinely have the club’s improvement at heart. If good intentions gave way to less persuasive evidence, there were occasional admissions that the owner needed to delegate responsibility to experts. Although the Valley and training ground were not purchased from Duchatelet, long-term lease agreements were agreed.
But sacking Jackson, a popular figure at Charlton, was a rotten move and the less charitable assessment is that Sandgaard talked a good game but delivered next to nothing of note that an effective owner would have attempted to implement immediately. The squad was weakened. The managers kept on changing. The transparency stopped. When Garner was sacked, a CAST statement claimed to have “lost all confidence in the current ownership’s desire and ability to turn this around”. So what’s new there?
As ever, the end of another era was long, protracted and strewn with bitterness. Roughly a year ago, SE7 partners made a bid for Charlton, leading to Sandgaard agreeing to sell a 90 per cent stake for around £8.5m paid in to separate instalments. As part of the agreement, a new management team was put in place including Dean Holden as the new head coach. Holden took the club away from relegation trouble with an impressive run.
However, things rumbled on with SE7 accusing Sandgaard of deliberately dragging his feet. He reportedly made demands for a payment to fund the club in February, something which SE7 would not countenance (not least because the EFL had not ratified the takeover and a cash injection from an external party may be frowned upon). By 10 February, Sandgaard had terminated the deal. SE7 claimed that he had instead begun negotiating with a separate buyer.
By March, SE7 had come back with an improved offer of £10.5million and urged Sandgaard to sell the club, but that was refused. Supporters, again left unsure of the club’s future, again took to campaigning. CAST sent Sandgaard an open letter in May, signed by McKinley, asking him eight questions. The most urgent of them were “Are you still actively seeking to sell or seeking investment in the club?” and “Can you provide assurances to fans that you will continue to meet funding obligations and pay CAFC bills in a timely fashion while you remain as owner?”. Another fine mess.
As we walk through the shadow of the valley
SE7’s takeover of Charlton Athletic was finally completed in July 2023. A consortium with seven different individuals, each possessing a shareholding of greater than five per cent, had stepped in. The most public-facing of the group was Charlie Methven, former part-owner of Sunderland and “star” of the Sunderland ‘Til I Die documentary. For his part, Methven stressed that he had learned lessons from that escapade.
It is true that there is more joined-up thinking within Charlton’s commercial department. It is true too that the owners sacked popular manager Holden with Michael Appleton, who initially started with a run of six unbeaten league games. That has now given way to poor form.
To end where we started, Charlton have won one of their last 11 in the league. Supporters who are happy to give the new owners time to prove themselves believe that improvements are needed to halt another slide. At the time of writing, Charlton are 19 points off the League One play-offs and seven above the relegation zone.
If there is unease, it probably centres more around inglorious recent history than the present. Charlton Athletic is, like so many others above, below and around them, a deeply wonderful football club and a community institution. It deserved better than being bounced around between one unideal – and sometimes uncaring – owner after another. It needed protection and what it got was vandalism.
That leaves a mark on everyone who calls this club theirs. If cynicism is endemic even amongst those who probably realise that it is unhelpful, cynicism was hammered into them and so cynicism is all that they have. Some are waiting for reason to believe, not belief because they can’t stomach anything else but because they can reasonably find something to believe in.
Once bitten, twice shy – Charlton supporters have bite marks all the way up their arms.
They will scrutinise and question and gossip and take promises with hefty handfuls of salt not because their current owners are dastardly or dismally misguided, but because they are following those who turned out to be.
We haven’t really talked much about football so far – of promotions and relegations and new signings and goalscorers and potential new heroes. That is deliberate. The worst a football club should do is frustrate its supporters by losing matches, but for too long at Charlton supporters I spoke to have almost learned to forget about the football. You can only worry so much about something that is supposed to be an escape and their worries were focused on things that, sadly, mattered more than goals and wins. Football is what happens while you’re busy making plans to protest.
But there’s a grand irony to all of this. This season, it is as if Charlton supporters have finally been given the freedom to look at what is happening on the pitch. Forgive the gross oversimplification, but it is as if, after all the sorry distractions of the last decade, they have finally looked to the pitch and realised what decay does to a football club. It is nobody’s fault who is still there and no one person’s fault at all, simply the result of a thousand cuts.
Attendances have dropped this season, from 15,600 two years ago to 13,300 in 2023-24. Even that, supporters tell me, is a mirage because it counts only the number of seats sold. Most have anecdotal evidence of themselves or their friends often skipping games when they would never have considered it a decade ago. Even the truest Addicks have lost some of the addiction.
When the crises enveloped, all of those supporters stepped up and all would do again if required. But it’s hard to convince the next generation that The Valley is the place to spend their Saturdays and Tuesdays and joining a mass sense of ennui is a difficult sell. The hope is that positivity slowly creeps back into Charlton Athletic, somehow, some way, some new lease of life. But when that’s your only lifeboat, it utters the ultimate damnation of everything that caused the capsize.
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