If this has been shown elsewhere apologies
SLP Link
It may have been in the paper a week or so ago but I don't live locally so hadn't read it.
Read this my fellow Addicks. This is one of the reasons why we have real grounds for optimism.
This was very telling to me
“Gambling with the future isn’t going to happen again and it’s one of the reasons I’ve come back. I had an honest and open discussion with the owners and the club is going to evolve and be built - it’s not going to sign that player and loan in five more.
“Charlton is going to go back to be evolution not revolution - on and off the pitch.
“Chris has only been in charge for a little while so it’s going to take a while for him to stamp his personality on the team, and it’s going to take time for Stephen and myself to get it organised off the pitch. We’re all working our hardest. When you’ve got a supportive board we can get it back to what we had a few years ago.”
Amen to that.
Comments
Says it all really, that Twat Pardew had a budget three times larger than anyone else and he took us to the heights of 11th place in the table.
To think that I defended him for so long too.....
At least Peter is determined that that is not going to happen again.
man and has the audacity to say in that Danny Mills interview the money wasnt there...
what a prize pineapple...
Interesting that it was Varney who got Jiminez on board, thanks Reg!!!
League One and potholes look to be things of the past in the near future. Or something
I am assuming that was not one of the planted questions.
My recollection was that the "outrageous" ones were under the Pardew regime - Dowies buys on the whole were cleared out by Pardew. McCleod, Moutakill etc,. were def Pardews.
The mistake we made with Pardew, because he had us by the short and curlies when we employed him was to give him too much authority for purchases - something he made clear when he joined. But you are right the board - murray in particular - would have been responsible and to be fair Murray has admitted to making mistakes over that period.
Pardew has said in interviews that he see's his job as persuading the board that they should spend money that they have not got and he does that very successfully.
You can see why this happens, can't you? Managers are all too quickly fired if they do not succeed. Therefore, many see it as their job to get the board to spend so that they have got a chance of keeping their job. If it all goes pear-shaped, they walk away, the board have the debt and the fans see things sliding downwards. What's the solution, I wonder?
I don't buy this "get it back to how we used to run it." Even when we were supposedly running it "right" things were going wrong on the pitch regarding the loss of our best players, and this IMO was the main reason for our decline...
So the point is can our secret backers change that? I hope they have the intent & financial clout. Because for me that's what is boils down to... If we don't have both we can forget the Premier league, and accept that our level is very near what it is now. Championship at best...
The sound bites are great at the moment, but what will our secret backers do when we have real saleable players again? Telling fans we want to "fill the Valley again" is wonderful to hear, but if we can't keep good players/team going, it is just a sound bite!
Reid - Signed for 3m, offloaded for 4m.
Faye - signed for 2m, loaned to Rangers, Blackburn wanted him then eventually sold to Stoke for an undisclosed fee.
Traore, Signed for 2m sold for 1m (loss but still sold for a price)
Diawara signed for potentially 3.75m, sold for 2.6m (panic sell)
Most of Pardew's buys either were overpriced, overwaged and were eventually released or sold for a measly fee.
Dean Sinclair
Izale McLeod
Martin Christiensen
Chris Dickson
Luke Varney (signed for 2.5m, high wages sold for 1m to pay pards off)
Yassin Mouta
Ben Thatcher
Andy Gray
Svetoslav Todorov (Unlucky but big wages in 2007/08 season)
Nicky Weaver (Supposed 17k wages depending on bonuses)
Zheng Zhi (signed for 1.5m, left on free a year n half later)
Stuart Fleetwood
Not to forget the Countless Loan Signings
Yes, but we wouldn't be talking about his wage bill if we'd won promotion back to the Premier League and stayed there. The wage bill wasn't a huge problem in and of itself, but a high wage bill coupled with very poor on-pitch performance is a disaster.
Other than that, I agree with joeaddick
This is a good summary Kap.
The solution is good coaching and development, spotting emerging or under-valued talent, living within your means, and evolution not revolution. This is pretty much what PV is saying and also what MS has been saying.
Summing up PVs take on the past and the present.
1. The club was run on sound finances and teamwork under Curbs
2. After Curbs left, they threw money they didn't have at Dowie in a gamble to stay in the Prem. The gamble failed
3. They threw money at Pardew which was even more of a gamble and that failed as well
4. The club fell apart and before the new owners took over, it was in great peril
5. The club is now back on a sound financial footing
6. They are going to build the club up again by hard work and evolution
7. They have brought in a new manager who needs time to get things right
8. They are never going to gamble beyond the clubs means in future (certainly if PV has anything to do with it)
I think that everyone should print this out (or their own version of it) and keep it with them to remind each one of us that unless our owners have no bottom to their pit of money, the road to success needs to built on strong footballing foundations and backed up by sound financial and commercial enterprise. Any other path is too risky, tempting though it may be, and that patient evolutionary growth is the way forward.
That's my take on it anyway.
And why would our evolution be better any better than other Championship and League One sides? Well we have a good fairly modern stadium, it wasn't long ago we use to fill it and the potential to fill it is still there. We have a good academy, training facilities, a new board who will (hopefully) invest money where needed. Get back to the Championship at some point and as long as we stay there we are suddenly one of the bigger clubs outside the Prem. We have people at the club that will have learnt from mistakes in recent years and they know what made us successful just 5/6 years ago, and they're working with people with fresh ideas.
I entirely understand where you are coming from but I think that the answer to your points is given in PVs comments.
I believe he talks of the club being £30M in debt. Much of the clubs debt was restructured when RM took overall control. Some was written off, some was kicked into the long grass and some was held by RM himself.
The new owners have clearly had to deal with the debts before they put in a penny piece in terms of re-building the club.
I don't also think that he is talking about no investment in moving the club forward. What he is talking about is not taking reckless gambles with the future. Spending money in the transfer market on transfer fees is one thing, the financial impact of wage bills that are agreed on the back of transfers is something completely different. Money is often able to be found for one off investments in players, you have to be sure though that you can pay the wages in years two, three, four and five. That clearly was the failed gamble that he was speaking about in the Dowie and Pardew years.
Our club currently has costs in excess of its income. Very few clubs at our level can exist within their cost base without owners/investors shouldering additional burdens or borrowing money commercially (which is clearly very difficult at the current time).
The difficulty for us as fans is to gauge how financially robust are club owners.
I remember reading that Plymouth had been taken over by some Japanese businessmen. It appeared that as a club they had gained some financial strength. The reality is oh so different. The talk from Risdale now is that the club is in danger, not of administration, but of liquidation.
I also remember how things were at Pompey when Gaydamak took over. It seemed that the club was going to be able to really compete at a much higher level. For a while that looked good and they even won the FA Cup. However they finally came as close as any major club has got to being liquidated. I don't think they are yet out of the woods.
Frankly we don't know the detail of the financial strength of our new owners. I do have huge trust and respect for PV and RM, and if these guys believe that the new owners have strengthened the finances of the club, that is enough for me. To be honest I would be more concerned, in some respects, if two relatively unknown businessmen suddenly pitched up with grandiose ideas and seemed to have shed loads of cash but no means of showing where that was coming from. Perhaps the experience of Hulyer has made me wary?
If a known financial billionaire hove into view then I guess we'd all sit back for a revolutionary ride. Frankly every club in the league is searching for that kind of investor but as we know, they are rarer than rocking horse shit. (I also don't think by the way that Zabeel would have had the same investor profile as the people who bought Man City, despite their proximity to the Dubai rulers).
In the end, I don't care enough about what others do. Our club has been bust and wound up once. It was pretty close to melt down in the last year or so. Indeed I suspect closer than any of us might imagine. People like Derek Chappell were pilloried in some quarters because they presided over the clubs decline but to me, he and the other Directors who wrote off a large chunk of the debt owed to them,should have our gratitude because they enabled the club to survive to the start of this new chapter.
Evolution is a process not an end in itself. It can and should be, in football club terms, a process of continuous improvement which can go slower or faster depending on the prevailing circumstances and as finances dictate. It encompasses building a team which improves over time. That can be by affordable player purchases, the development of players or both. Off the field, it means developing commercial revenue, enhancing links in the community and widening/deepening the clubs appeal to new and returning fans.
Overall though what PV is saying to me is that the pursuit of long-term success cannot be achieved by gambling the financial security of the club. The club needs to ensure that any risks it takes are measured and survivable. The other way lies potential or actual disaster.
I agree with your points, Len. However, timing is important. If we don't go up this year, Wagstaff may be off next season, for example, because he will be cheap to a bigger club. If we did get promoted and got stuck in the lower half of the Championship for, say, 2 years, others would go. It's a fairly tough job getting to the Premiership, but even harder to stay there when, arguably, only 3 of about 13 sides are going to get relegated.