Board set to issue statement today

I think this proves just how brilliant a manager Alan Curbishley was.

"Our strategy for Charlton Athletic is that we are a financially stable club, who can be competitive in the Championship, but has Premier League ambitions."

This is not a strategy! Why, in a self managed interview, would you start with a question that you do not answer?

It's like asking Fraeye for his strategy to keep us up this season and him responding with 'my strategy is for Charlton to stay up this season'. Which, let's face it, is an answer that we couldn't rule out.

From everything that we've gleaned over the past two years it seems pretty clear to me that the aim is for the club to be self supporting financially and the strategy to achieve this is to manage costs downs and to generate revenue from two main sources: attract customers to matchdays through a mixture of cheap ticket pricing, 'matchday experience' and presence in the community (which supports knock on revenues such as sponsorship, hospitality and advertising) and player trading (be that selling on academy graduates or generating profit on acquired players).

The crux of the problem for me is, and always has been, that the footballing success of the team is secondary to the aims of the owners and those running the club. It is a by-product of their aim for financial self sufficiency. An aim which makes sense only if the owner is trying to prove a point (after all, he could have broken even on his investment by simply not investing in the first instance). Murray must know this too. And that is unforgivable. I sometimes wonder whether Roly made some obscene bet with a fellow oligarch in a rich mans' drinking den.

Though they won't spell it out, the evidence for this being the primary aim is there for us all to see. The kinds of fans that they are trying to attract; day tripping families, tourists and lapsed Tottenham cabbies, the exact type who won't really mind whether the team win or not or whether they actually have any ambition or not.

It's further supported by the annual January panic. We spend the summer cutting overheads and moving ever closer to the magical break even cost run rate only to realise come January that we are flirting with massive revenue reductions the following year leading on to panic signing players to try and preserve it.

And it's evident in what they don't do. Surely a club which had footballing ambition as its primary driver would be listening to investment pitches from businesses known to be investing billions of pounds in the local area?

And obviously, there's the fact that KM has pretty much said as much without actually saying as much.

Even Murray's stated 'strategy' (of course a rehash of Meire's own misnamed 'strategy') is back to front. 'We want to be a competitive Championship club with Premier League ambitions, managed in a financially sustainable way' would be perfectly palatable. The principal aim can't be financial stability.

As a football fan, there are few things more frustrating or demoralising than supporting a club with no sporting ambition. For me, that's why you're looking at an increasingly restless fanbase.

The only sensible aim for a football club, at least one that expects loyal fans to support it, is to sustainably achieve the best it can on the football pitch.