Once upon a time two timber merchants, Albert and Stanley Gliksten, bought a third division football club in East (as Gary Lineker would have it!) London.
Albert and Stanley appointed a Secretary manager called Jimmy Seed and backed him to the hilt. Seed spent wisely and Charlton quickly got promoted to the second division and then to the first division the following season. In the first division they confounded all expectations by finishing 2nd, 4th and 3rd in the first division before the outbreak of World War 2.
After the War Charlton hung onto their first division status for just over a decade but the Glikstens had tired of their plaything and were reluctant to throw anymore money at it. The more Charlton enthusiastic of the two, Albert, sadly died in the early fifties and Seed found it increasingly tough to keep the team in division one with the lack of support and investment from Stanley Gliksten and his board. Seed eventually was sacked in a disgraceful fashion and the new manager, Jimmy Trotter, was unable to keep the Club in division 1. Promotion was narrowly missed in the first season in division 2 and then mid table mediocrity took over in the seasons leading up to Stanley Gliksten's death in 1962.
Stanley's son Michael took over and quickly demonstrated a lack of ambition to return to the top tier of english football by cashing in on the steady production line of promising youngsters through out the sixties. With the exception of two seasons the sixties and early seventies proved to be a tale of desperate struggle to preserve the second division status of the Club. Relegation finally occurred in 1972. The manager, Theo Foley, cleverly shopped around to pick up some useful players through free transfers whom his successor, Andy Nelson, welded into a promotion winning team. This team was not over awed by being in division 2 and challenged for promotion thanks largely to the goals of Derek Hales. At this point Michael Gliksten decided to cash in on Hales rather than try to get promotion back to the first division. More seasons of decline followed culminating in the Club being 45 minutes from going out of business in 1984. Our "saviours" promptly moved the club lock, stock and barrel away from The Valley to Selhurst and later Upton Parks. Seven and a half long years later we returned to The Valley thanks to dedicated fans and directors.
You know the rest.
The point is that history is repeating itself and we are once again in decline, not just on the playing side, but off the pitch too. The Board has lost interest and will only show any real interest in the concerns of the fans if they vote with their feet by not buying ticket and attending matches.
It galls me to say this because I have the greatest admiration for the past achievements of our present Board but right now the Board reminds me too uncomfortably of the Gliksten days hence the long preamble.
The truth of the matter is that the only people who really care about football clubs are the fans and if the fans want a club then they need to mobilise themselves.
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Comments
As mentioned elsewhere I have rarely, if ever, been so cynical regarding the info (or current lack of it) coming out of the club, yet like you and many others have given the board total and well-deserved support in the past.
But now ... it's time for the blinkers to come off - we are not going to be saved by a massively rich investor - let's hear what they say on 9th July (which I still predict will be virtually nothing) and collectively make a decision on how to proceed.
There was a meteoric rise under the careful footballing stewardship of Jimmy Seed
In the first scenario, when asked by Seed if the Glickstens would spend more money on improving the ground/facilities, by erecting more covered areas, he was asked to guarantee to keep the club up in the next few years. Unfortunately Seed was unable to give the categorical assurance. The Glickstens decided not to take the risk and the ground remained under-developed. That decision had a profound impact on the revenue that could be generated. Then came the War, at completely the wrong time for the club because it was then consolidating its position in the top division. Despite cup successes and 40,000 average gates soon after the War, the fateful decisions of the late 1930's and the War, really sowed the seeds of the clubs gradual decline.
In the latter case, the club, under another careful meticulous Manager in Curbs, rose like a phoenix from the ashes of the decision to leave The Valley, and reached a level that most fans of my generation never thought we'd see. In this instance significant money was invested by the Board in the ground and facilities.
In my opinion, the main difference between then and now is that our current Board did the opposite of the Glicksten approach and decided to take a huge risk to maintain our premier league status. In this case it wasn't ground improvements that were called for but a gamble on backing a man who they knew very little about, who was not their first choice, with funds the club could not afford. Players were signed on deals that did not allow the club to reduce their wages if relegation occurred. This was completely different to the early premiership years when the club budgeted for relegation. They then threw even more money at the problem by appointing another manager with a huge price tag, again in my opinion, without taking account of what he was like in that role. (After all he had just been sacked despite getting West Ham to the FA Cup final the previous season).
Everything that has happened since has been as a direct result of the decisions which arose either in the final year of Curbishley's reign or in the period immediately after his departure. That left the club with huge costs to take out of the business, players who were on long-term premier league contracts. That shackled the manager in terms of the kind of players he could sign. Even so, the club backed him to a level that was not sustainable and further large cuts were needed to keep afloat.
I am somewhat taken with the irony of the similarity of Charlton’s plight to that of the UK economy. In both cases it involved spending sums of money up front which were ill afforded; in the hope that it can keep the decline from being much deeper and hoping that the money borrowed can be paid back in the medium to long term. Lets hope that Gordon Brown is more successful than the Charlton Board. They gambled and in doing so the decline has been arguably much greater than in may have been if a tighter ship was run during the end of Curbs/through the Dowie/Pardew era.
The main similarity I see is that in signing Seed and Curbs both boards struck it lucky, neither manager had any previous success before Charlton, or after in fact. In managerial terms both managers were big gambles that paid off with some spectacular results for such a small club, neither were employed to achieve what they eventually achieved...
Throughout their careers both managers operated on a low budget and their skills were finding 'stars' without having to splash the cash, both succeeded greatly at this....
Throughout their tenure neither board showed great ambition and both appeared to be happy at playing with the big boys in the First Division/Prem without actually showing the desire to step it up and regulalry challenge for league, cup or European honours...
Seed's demise was largely due to the lack of investment from the Gliksteins, Curbs also bemoaned the lack of serious cash to upgrade the team but instead of getting the heave ho like Seed he decided to bail out with 'honour'...
There the similarities end somewhat...
After Seed left the board showed no intentions in getting a manager to relive the recent glory days and appeared more than happy to settle for saftey in mediocrity, and worse the ground was left to rack and ruin and the financial situation became perilous, things got so bad that we nearly bit the dust for good, in my opinion this was sheer neglect.....
When Curbs left however, at least the board showed some real determination to move onwards and upwards, the fact they hired a complete donkey in hiring Dowie wasn't really their fault, no one could have predicted his incompetency. In their commendable search for a suitable successor no one realise Pards would also fail disasterously, in my opinion this was down to a subtle blend of incompetence and inexperience....
With the current economic climate and the ridiculous wage demands of players and their agents, running a football club for many clubs is going to be about survival first and competiton second, in my opinion we are about to enter the survivalist mode and unless we 'get lucky' with another mercurial manager real soon we are are heading for a few more barren years....
Curb's got out at the wrong time???
Yeah he sure did......................... with not a little help from folk such as yourself!
Yes the board has made some dreadful decisions, but events and bad luck have also contributed greatly.
That Parker should turn in his best performance against the richest team in the land, Chelsea. That Dowie became available just as we needed a new manager, same with Pardew. That the global financial crisis should hit just as Zabeel were about to take us over.
The list goes on. We now find ourselves in this situation amidst the second worst financial crisis the world has ever seen.
Many of the directors would probably have lost huge amounts of money on their business interests and investments outside of Charlton.
Someone like Chapple for example probably thought he was buying into a stable Premiership club but has ended up with a skint third division club. Do they sell now and crystalise their losses, or hang on in the hope that things improve. This is the dilemma that they are probably facing, indeed the same dilemma that anyone invested in the stock market is facing up to at the moment.