A thought suddenly occured to me today whilst reading through all the varied threads on here.
What if Duchatelet's plans only consisted of loading football clubs with debt which he would ultimately benefit from?
It is rumoured that Standard Leige still have money owed to him although he has apparantly sold it to a friend. Charlton seems to have amassed serious debts over a very short period since he has owned the club.
We are all bewildered by his non-footballing decisions and his ability to make the same mistakes over and over again. His appointments have consistently been "weird" and have stood in the way of any footballing ambitions.
Meire has been allowed to treat the job of CEO with absolute contempt with no sign of admonishment from him - quite the opposite.
I am sure I read somewhere that Duchatelet said at the beginning that results did not matter to him. Well, they would not under this theory.
He bought the club for £14m (although £18m is also muted). He now wants £38m? for the sale. There are various figures representing how much he has spent whilst he has been here and I must admit I am confused as to the right figure. I have never seen this figure itemised to give a clear picture so everyone understands (an overiding feature of his ownership).
The almost disinterested way he has treated the functioning of a professional football club speaks volumes of his plan being something very different from what we all might have naturally assumed when he took over. His complete lack of communication of the details of his plan has not helped.
I maybe well off target with these extreme thoughts but more than a few things fall into place looking back on his short but eventful ownership period.
I half expect to be shot down here but would welcome your thoughts particularly from those closer to the action and with a better inside knowledge of what's really been happening.
1
Comments
I'm guessing he genuinely underestimated the strength of English football, in that case?
He doesn't care much about results at this stage because I believe he sees this period as a period of realignment. He's realigning his clubs so that they are in a position to carry out his plans of player farming for sustainability, which is his stated aim. He thinks this will change football for the better. He thinks that, whilst we won't understand this at first, we will ultimately see that he was right and will thank him. Katrien has been convinced, but then, she isn't in a position to value the things that Roland is running roughshod over with reckless abandon. Those things (identity) mean nothing to her anyway. They might reasonably think: in time, supporters will learn to love their bitter medicine. This period of realignment was to be carried out as cheaply as possible, implemented by young, inexperienced, loyal and cheap mid-level management. Once carried out (Training ground improvements, consolidation of network scouting, medical staff and administrative functions—like accounting, marketing, ticketing, sponsorship sales etc.—then the machine would swing into action, Roland would assume even more of a role in directing, like a composer, the details of the vision. At this stage, he will use a data-driven approach to engineering success on and off the pitch."
Roland and Katrien no doubt appreciated that this period of realignment would be difficult. If there is a cliche to sum this up it would certainly be: "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs."
However, they didn't anticipate the strength of reaction against their plans. They didn't expect an organised and capable supporter base. "Better seeking for alternatives than doing nothing in apathy" is not supposed to be directed at Roland, but implemented top-down by him. They didn't consider that they could get it so profoundly wrong as to be relegated. They didn't intend that such poor performance and supporter action could throw the entire experiment into doubt.
Money is important though. No matter Roland's strength of resolve to implement his vision for sustainable professional football, he'll know that magic figure that represents a threshold of loss that he won't want to cross. Every supporter action in this period of realignment, that increases his losses, that puts strain on his plan, that taxes his resolve, that lengthens his ability to reach sustainable financing, that requires him to rethink his strategy, brings us closer to a Roland exit.
I think you could be very close to the truth but why do you think, if his long term plan is for the benefit of our club, he has been so reluctant to clarify his position with the fans? Surely a clear announcement of his vision at the start of his ownership would have avoided speculation and a lot of the suspicion along the way. He does not go out of his way to bring the fans onboard and the result is the current turmoil within the club. Realignment is a good explanation but without proper communication it has provoked extreme unrest within a previously very tolerant fanbase.
Whatever his long term plan, I feel it could be too late now for the fans to give this regime a second chance unless the visionary has a miracle up his sleeve which he has also kept secret.
He failed in his attempt to realign the Dutch/Belgian Leagues by dint of a proposed amalgamation and many of his so-called visionary schemes seem to revolve around an egalitarian view of the world in which everyone agrees to play fair. This failed spectacularly when he tried to promote some looney tax laws via his own political party only for the public to reject them as unworkable.
He may well have been (is still) trying at Charlton to implement all of the process (outlined in the Look Out post above) against the background of FFP and a financial level playing field but had he looked at for example Man City in the Prem and the steps they took to avoid being caught out by FFP maybe just maybe he might have had a clue that a totally fair league of clubs competing against each other where some are financially 'handicapped' but all nevertheless adhere to the rules is as unlikely to come about as the Utopian society he seems to crave.
It is frustrating that Duchatelet never seems to accept either changes in circumstances (collapse of FFP/relegation) or the effect of public ridicule preferring instead one suspects to cling to his self-confessed belief that, like his hero Alan Turing he will be proved right in the long-term. The casualties along the way to this impossible dream will be the clubs in the network closely allied to the process. Standard Liege have escaped and so must we.
Every day which passes erodes the stability of the club and no-rebuild can commence until we are rid of this deluded man and his crackpot ideas.
He failed for a variety of reasons but largely because he did not attract voters under 35 years of age. He later admitted he had made errors on this.
It is this visionary aspect that will dog us. In one respect we can agree with him, as a business, the way football is run today flies in the face of anything that we would normally consider sound business. Duch wants to change this and is convinced he can do it. Lookie is right, Duch hadn't anticipated being relegated and he is now 'reviewing the situation'.
What we think is simply irrelevant, we just don't understand how visionary he is. He can put some blame on the FFP regs. He did not understand that UK football will always find a way to dodge financial restraints put upon them. Remember how the 'Alan Sugars' ran rings around the FA? Duch seems curiously ignorant of football realpolitik, but maybe dodgy deals and dodgy money don't figure on spread sheets?
I can't see him giving up any time soon and I agree with Lookie that money doesn't appear to be a major motivator at this stage. But it remains an imperative that Burnley sees an escalation of protest. Good luck to all of you.
I don't think Venanzi was ever really a friend of RD, either. His first interest was always as a SL fan. Their relationship has been decidedly stormy, with Venanzi publicly accusing RD of fraud, at one stage.
I just think he was the last person to be picked for football at school so now he wants to take this long resentment out on a professional football itself and destroy clubs!
The duchatelet ownership would at least make a bit more sense if we was his 1st football club!