I agree with what you say BFR, but to get rid of Curbs (which I agreed with) and not to have a Plan B in place before he did it was unbeliveable and went against everything he had previously done.
Every since then it's been mistake after mistake.
Risdale is vermin, Richard Murray is a long way from that and if I was him I too try and eek out every penny I could oput of the consortium, its business afterall
Mick Collins piece seems to indicate that the consortium consider the Charlton business as not viable going forward and as such think Murray and co are not entitled to anything because if the deal falls through the club will go pop anyway and then the board will get nothing.
[cite]Posted By: falconwood_1[/cite]I agree with what you say BFR, but to get rid of Curbs (which I agreed with) and not to have a Plan B in place before he did it was unbeliveable and went against everything he had previously done.
Every since then it's been mistake after mistake.
Risdale is vermin, Richard Murray is a long way from that and if I was him I too try and eek out every penny I could oput of the consortium, its business afterall
I wouldn't call Risdale vermin, out of his depth, on an ego job, operating beyond his experience/capabilities yes, but not actively evil in any sense. To an extent he got ripped off by a lot of canny operators who knew how the system operated and saw him coming, once the word got out that he was a bit of a soft touch that was it. Eventually even the goldfish had to go...
But you are right about not having a Plan B - not so much when Curbs left, it made sense to let Curbs leave at that point. It was the end of the season, we hadn't been playing well and needed new impetus, plus the squad needed re-generating and the close season was the best time to regroup. It was then that the house of cards started to collapse - thanks to football's inherently dodgy economic basis and our club's desire not to go heavily into debt to "chase the dream" as Risdale put it we simply couldn't afford to sign good premiership players, so it was either average premiership players on cheap transfers or on frees, or you give a chance to lower league player, or take a punt on players from outside the UK who have no experience of the British game. All come with risks and for every Darren Bent you pluck from Ipswich you get an Amdy Faye, a JFH or a Traore.
As I said I get the impression that Murray knew that there was nothing that he could do to bridge the gap and instead tried to patch things up and sell the club on - and fair enough he did a great job but his pockets just weren't deep enough. When the likes of Man U, Liverpool, Arsenal, Villa, Newcastle etc are heavily in debt and others like Chelsea and West Ham are being bankrolled the playing field starts to look very, very lopsided and that is the environment we as a club have to operate in.
i'm sorry, but i'm not ready to demonise richard murray yet. i'm also not willing to overlook and write off everything positive he's done for the club. i'm certainly not ready to scapegoat him as the man solely responsible for all of this.
Murray's golden days are a long, long time ago and they were heavily assisted by our outstanding achievements on the pitch.
don't you think that his contribution is a factor in those achievements on the pitch? In just the same way that our astonishingly bad performances on the pitch recently have worsened the bad decisions off it. (and let's be honest our performances on the pitch have been worse than anyone could have imagined).
As has been said already, sailor browneye, you make some good points, but i also find bits of it unnecessarily bitchy. overlooking the positive gives the impression of having an axe to grind.
RM and the board took a gamble to try and keep us in the premier league and get the increased tv revenue. It backfired, badly. Given professional football's financial system, as BFR said "the system that Charlton have to operate in is economically unsustainable". Mistakes have been made and things have been done i'm not happy with, but don't forget the context we were operating in.
[cite]Posted By: BBClaus[/cite]i'm sorry, but i'm not ready to demonise richard murray yet. i'm also not willing to overlook and write off everything positive he's done for the club. i'm certainly not ready to scapegoat him as the man responsible for all of this.
Murray's golden days are a long, long time ago and they were heavily assisted by our outstanding achievements on the pitch.
don't you think that his contribution is a factor in those achievements on the pitch?
Why does everything have to be black or white? I'm not demonising him at all. I'm just saying that he has done such a poor job in recent years that it will, naturally, affect how he will be viewed retrospectively.
I described him as a part of our important management triumvirate in the early 2000s. How is that overlooking his achievements?
But if you don't think we are a footballing laughing stock right now, and have been for a while now, then you are never going to understand my point of view.
Murray and the Board have been shocking in the past couple of years and I'm not going to forget that, or accept it, just because he undeniably played a major part in developing our club.
I feel sorry for the guy and I wish he could have bailed out when Zabeel came calling. But it didn't happen and things have only declined even further since then. That's a fact.
[cite]Posted By: ShootersHillGuru[/cite]Mick Collins peice seems to indicate that the consortium consider the Charlton business as not viable going forward and as such think Murray and co are not entitled to anything because if the deal falls through the club will go pop anyway and then the board will get nothing.
Maybe ...... but how do you define whether a football club operating in an enviromnent that's screwed, as BFR pointed out, is viable or not?
Man Utd sevicing £800million worth of debt, because at present they can - are considered viable.
Not so far from Old Trafford, Accrington Stanley face oblivion because they can't service a shortfall of 'just' £300k.
Somewhere inbetween, clubs like Charlton who once existed on a much larger income, have seen the largesse of Sky money dwindle away.
In the meantime Charlton have been again relegated, and find a further shortfall of income projection of £3million in the coming season.
Costs have been reduced (compare to the number of higher paid players on the staff this time last year, who've since been moved on - replaced with fewer players and much lower salary levels) and Bailey was the last permanent player signed who cost a fee, almost 1 year ago.
Varney was sold to pay off Pardew, so saving on Varney's apparently high salary let alone meeting the extravengances of that manager.
The playing squad has been trimmed down in numbers, and 10 non-playing staff have also been let go.
Maybe it is a case of too little too late, but the cuts are definitely being made.
Even so, expenditure no doubt still exceeds income - but name me the football clubs who are making a profit without selling key players?
Apologies to Brown Eye and Airman if you read this. I stupidly got you mixed up......this stems from me way back being under the impression that Sailor Browneye was Rick Everitt and for some daft reason I've never shaken that misconception off, despite knowing for sometime that he isn't!
One glass of Chardonay too many me thinks!!
[cite]Posted By: Sailor Browneye[/cite]
Why does everything have to be black or white? I'm not demonising him at all. I'm just saying that he has done such a poor job in recent years that it will, naturally, affect how he will be viewed retrospectively.
I described him as a part of our important management triumvirate in the early 2000s. How is that overlooking his achievements?
i think i do understand your view. But imo the emphasis you are putting on his mistakes isn't in proportion to the emphasis you're willing to place on his achievements. That's probably not something we'll agree on, but hey! ;0)
i also think what BFR said about remembering what the club was up against in terms of the environment we operated in is important in all this. That's not saying decisions made by RM and others weren't part of it, and that they don't have any blame to take.
That is the question - there are no maybes about it, and my answer is no. If you have billions and are prepared to take a punt then it is possibly viable, but look at the two clowns who bought Liverpool and want out, or Mike Ashby's adventures on Toonside, that suggests to me that even for those with deep pockets it is a process of making a small fortune out of a larger one. Man U have won the EPL for the last couple of years, have made the CL final twice in two years, have a globally recognised name and have not finished outside the top four in well over a decade and yet are £800m in debt. Other clubs exist on the whim of their owners and perhaps only one or two clubs have a good manager who is performing miracles on a budget - Everton and Aston Villa, but both Moyes and MON have been under pressure.
This is a world where average Prem players who most likely are squad players are commanding ca £10k a week, and that's just average players. Half decent ones are on a lot more and there are plenty who trouser well over £50k a week and some who earn in excess of £100k or £120K a week. There is talk of Man City offering players like Kaka, John Terry and Eto'o salaries of £200k plus a week and they still they don't want to sign. What makes anyone think that a Club like Charlton can realistically compete against that?
This is the environment we have to play in whether we like it or not and no matter how hard we try, and Murray and co have tried bloody hard, they can't change the system. Murray might have made mistakes, but he's no fool and those queueing up to kick him when he's down simply don't understand that anyone attempting to run a football club on sound economic and managerial principles is condemning themselves to failure.
[cite]Posted By: BlackForestReds[/cite] only one or two clubs have a good manager who is performing miracles on a budget - Everton and Aston Villa, but both Moyes and MON have been under pressure.
i wonder if their chairmen would let them leave with one year remaining on their contract and turn down their offer of helping find a suitable replacement
[cite]Posted By: BlackForestReds[/cite]This is a world where average Prem players who most likely are squad players are commanding ca £10k a week, and that's just average players.
Or even worse in our case, Gray, Todorov, Weaver etc must have been on at least that...
[cite]Posted By: Miserableold-ish git[/cite]Who employed Dowie ?
And why ?
Who else was there? Realistically...
As with players - we could have pushed the boat out, offered say Martin O'Neill a massive salary, but assuming he said yes we'd have had less money to spend on players, which in turn would have reduced the chances of him saying yes in the first place...
The problem is we look at the £12m that Dowie spent on players and think it a lot of money, but for that (and bear in mind that we needed several players not one or two) you have to take on a few players who are a gamble, sometimes those punts come off - Darren Bent spectacularly, more often you end up with footballing dross that no other side wants (and with good reason), these players you have to hope will do a job until someone better comes along, or they may decide to play out of their skins.
i wonder if their chairmen would let them leave with one year remaining on their contract and turn down their offer of helping find a suitable replacement[/quote]
As I said...that season as a club we were on the slide and IIRC correctly we didn't finish that far above relegation, had it not been for Darren Bent we probably would have been relegated. That is conjecture, what is fact is that Curbs had decided not to renew the contract that he'd been offered, but that in itself does mean that Murray wanted to retain him (surely??), but once it was clear that he was going to leave then the best time to replace him is the close season - plenty of downtime to regroup without a match coming up in two days time or whatever, more so as it was clear that our squad also needed an urgent overhaul and that meant signing a load of new players. I'm
curbs last season not a slide imo
here are some FACTS
47 premiership points (one more than the previous season)
13 points above relegation
11 points from last 10 games
1/4 finals of the FA Cup
[cite]Posted By: oohaahmortimer[/cite]11 points from last 10 games
martin o'neill took 11 points from his last 13 games last season. do you think their fans were clamouring for him to go and do you think their board would listen?
[cite]Posted By: oohaahmortimer[/cite]11 points from last 10 games
martin o'neill took 11 points from his last 13 games last season. do you think their fans were clamouring for him to go and do you think their board would listen?
The thing is ThreadKiller that it really would NOT take that much for O'Neill to start coming under pressure from Board and Fans. Let's say that they lose Ashley Young (whose agent is a very busy chap, it seems) and they struggle next year in mid-table and can't get into the top six, how long do you reckon it would be before the fans started claiming that he had "run out of ideas" and the pressure started to grow on him?
Football these days is all about expectations, people "expect" a certain level of success and when they don't get it they demand instant rectification.
Richard Murray and Martin Simons will remain in my heart as fans of this club.
Seperate to the financial commitments they have worked tirelessly for the club.
The fact that the world of football finance is pure madness means Murray has tried to achieve the most difficult juggling trick and along that path has made errors of judgement which have cost the club dear in recent times. But my view is all those decisions were taken at the time in the best faith for the future of Charlton. These errors will probably cost him not only his entire investment in the club but also his status as a Charlton legend. That I think is very sad.
[cite]Posted By: Imissthepeanutman[/cite]Richard Murray and Martin Simons will remain in my heart as fans of this club.
Seperate to the financial commitments they have worked tirelessly for the club.
The fact that the world of football finance is pure madness means Murray has tried to achieve the most difficult juggling trick and along that path has made errors of judgement which have cost the club dear in recent times. But my view is all those decisions were taken at the time in the best faith for the future of Charlton. These errors will probably cost him not only his entire investment in the club but also his status as a Charlton legend. That I think is very sad.
I agree, I think BFR said in another thread that the financial goalposts in football changed, and they changed while we were in the middle of the Premiership. Everyone said Dowie pi$$ed away £12M, but what did we expect to get for that, you barely get 1 decent player and he had to add 4 or 5. It was a gamble that we lost.
[cite]Posted By: Imissthepeanutman[/cite]Richard Murray and Martin Simons will remain in my heart as fans of this club.
Seperate to the financial commitments they have worked tirelessly for the club.
The fact that the world of football finance is pure madness means Murray has tried to achieve the most difficult juggling trick and along that path has made errors of judgement which have cost the club dear in recent times. But my view is all those decisions were taken at the time in the best faith for the future of Charlton. These errors will probably cost him not only his entire investment in the club but also his status as a Charlton legend. That I think is very sad.
I agree with the sentiment.
In this day and age of football finances, every small mistake can end up being severely pounished. And our directors haven' just made small mistakes, they have made huge ones, with the serious repercussions we are now facing.
I'm very sad about it for Richard Murray, but also starting to be a little bit angry. Unfortunately he has said some things recently which have not been based on 100% fact, so either wishful thinking on his part, or attempts at spin. This has lost him a lot of credibility with people who were strong supporters of the regime in the past.
agree with Weegie. Seems like a hell of a lot of spin has been going on and the agreeing to and then cancelling of the Q&A has damaged any credability they had left. When agreeing to the Q&A they must have known there was a good chance it would have to be called off so why agree in the first place, to placte the fans? If so it hasn't worked and in fact backfired as by admitting talks were going on they brought it into the press and the public domain.
[cite]Posted By: Nug[/cite]Everyone said Dowie pi$$ed away £12M, but what did we expect to get for that, you barely get 1 decent player and he had to add 4 or 5. It was a gamble that we lost.
Ha ha £12 million in 2006/2007 season could have bought THREE above average players or TWO Good players. In fact for just 4 Million more you'd get Darren Bent!
Comments
Every since then it's been mistake after mistake.
Risdale is vermin, Richard Murray is a long way from that and if I was him I too try and eek out every penny I could oput of the consortium, its business afterall
I wouldn't call Risdale vermin, out of his depth, on an ego job, operating beyond his experience/capabilities yes, but not actively evil in any sense. To an extent he got ripped off by a lot of canny operators who knew how the system operated and saw him coming, once the word got out that he was a bit of a soft touch that was it. Eventually even the goldfish had to go...
But you are right about not having a Plan B - not so much when Curbs left, it made sense to let Curbs leave at that point. It was the end of the season, we hadn't been playing well and needed new impetus, plus the squad needed re-generating and the close season was the best time to regroup. It was then that the house of cards started to collapse - thanks to football's inherently dodgy economic basis and our club's desire not to go heavily into debt to "chase the dream" as Risdale put it we simply couldn't afford to sign good premiership players, so it was either average premiership players on cheap transfers or on frees, or you give a chance to lower league player, or take a punt on players from outside the UK who have no experience of the British game. All come with risks and for every Darren Bent you pluck from Ipswich you get an Amdy Faye, a JFH or a Traore.
As I said I get the impression that Murray knew that there was nothing that he could do to bridge the gap and instead tried to patch things up and sell the club on - and fair enough he did a great job but his pockets just weren't deep enough. When the likes of Man U, Liverpool, Arsenal, Villa, Newcastle etc are heavily in debt and others like Chelsea and West Ham are being bankrolled the playing field starts to look very, very lopsided and that is the environment we as a club have to operate in.
don't you think that his contribution is a factor in those achievements on the pitch? In just the same way that our astonishingly bad performances on the pitch recently have worsened the bad decisions off it. (and let's be honest our performances on the pitch have been worse than anyone could have imagined).
As has been said already, sailor browneye, you make some good points, but i also find bits of it unnecessarily bitchy. overlooking the positive gives the impression of having an axe to grind.
RM and the board took a gamble to try and keep us in the premier league and get the increased tv revenue. It backfired, badly. Given professional football's financial system, as BFR said "the system that Charlton have to operate in is economically unsustainable". Mistakes have been made and things have been done i'm not happy with, but don't forget the context we were operating in.
Erm, I think we *did* chase the dream and we are now in the deepest shit imaginable.
Always use the Bill Shankly ethos, Never sell a player before you have signed a replacement.
Should be the same policy with all football employees.
Why does everything have to be black or white? I'm not demonising him at all. I'm just saying that he has done such a poor job in recent years that it will, naturally, affect how he will be viewed retrospectively.
I described him as a part of our important management triumvirate in the early 2000s. How is that overlooking his achievements?
But if you don't think we are a footballing laughing stock right now, and have been for a while now, then you are never going to understand my point of view.
Murray and the Board have been shocking in the past couple of years and I'm not going to forget that, or accept it, just because he undeniably played a major part in developing our club.
I feel sorry for the guy and I wish he could have bailed out when Zabeel came calling. But it didn't happen and things have only declined even further since then. That's a fact.
Maybe ...... but how do you define whether a football club operating in an enviromnent that's screwed, as BFR pointed out, is viable or not?
Man Utd sevicing £800million worth of debt, because at present they can - are considered viable.
Not so far from Old Trafford, Accrington Stanley face oblivion because they can't service a shortfall of 'just' £300k.
Somewhere inbetween, clubs like Charlton who once existed on a much larger income, have seen the largesse of Sky money dwindle away.
In the meantime Charlton have been again relegated, and find a further shortfall of income projection of £3million in the coming season.
Costs have been reduced (compare to the number of higher paid players on the staff this time last year, who've since been moved on - replaced with fewer players and much lower salary levels) and Bailey was the last permanent player signed who cost a fee, almost 1 year ago.
Varney was sold to pay off Pardew, so saving on Varney's apparently high salary let alone meeting the extravengances of that manager.
The playing squad has been trimmed down in numbers, and 10 non-playing staff have also been let go.
Maybe it is a case of too little too late, but the cuts are definitely being made.
Even so, expenditure no doubt still exceeds income - but name me the football clubs who are making a profit without selling key players?
So the question may have to be - define viable?
One glass of Chardonay too many me thinks!!
i think i do understand your view. But imo the emphasis you are putting on his mistakes isn't in proportion to the emphasis you're willing to place on his achievements. That's probably not something we'll agree on, but hey! ;0)
i also think what BFR said about remembering what the club was up against in terms of the environment we operated in is important in all this. That's not saying decisions made by RM and others weren't part of it, and that they don't have any blame to take.
And why ?
Simon Jordan did.
He needed a manager.
;o)
..............
That is the question - there are no maybes about it, and my answer is no. If you have billions and are prepared to take a punt then it is possibly viable, but look at the two clowns who bought Liverpool and want out, or Mike Ashby's adventures on Toonside, that suggests to me that even for those with deep pockets it is a process of making a small fortune out of a larger one. Man U have won the EPL for the last couple of years, have made the CL final twice in two years, have a globally recognised name and have not finished outside the top four in well over a decade and yet are £800m in debt. Other clubs exist on the whim of their owners and perhaps only one or two clubs have a good manager who is performing miracles on a budget - Everton and Aston Villa, but both Moyes and MON have been under pressure.
This is a world where average Prem players who most likely are squad players are commanding ca £10k a week, and that's just average players. Half decent ones are on a lot more and there are plenty who trouser well over £50k a week and some who earn in excess of £100k or £120K a week. There is talk of Man City offering players like Kaka, John Terry and Eto'o salaries of £200k plus a week and they still they don't want to sign. What makes anyone think that a Club like Charlton can realistically compete against that?
This is the environment we have to play in whether we like it or not and no matter how hard we try, and Murray and co have tried bloody hard, they can't change the system. Murray might have made mistakes, but he's no fool and those queueing up to kick him when he's down simply don't understand that anyone attempting to run a football club on sound economic and managerial principles is condemning themselves to failure.
Richard Murray = Charlton hero, 'nuff said.
i wonder if their chairmen would let them leave with one year remaining on their contract and turn down their offer of helping find a suitable replacement
Or even worse in our case, Gray, Todorov, Weaver etc must have been on at least that...
Definition of viable, therefore ....... seems to be a club where it's owners are happy to bankroll the difference between income and expenditure.
Viable ? No professional football club appears these days to be viable.
The prospective takeover consortium wll know that already.
So it just boils down to the fact they are trying to buyout the club for the lowest possible sum.
Who else was there? Realistically...
As with players - we could have pushed the boat out, offered say Martin O'Neill a massive salary, but assuming he said yes we'd have had less money to spend on players, which in turn would have reduced the chances of him saying yes in the first place...
The problem is we look at the £12m that Dowie spent on players and think it a lot of money, but for that (and bear in mind that we needed several players not one or two) you have to take on a few players who are a gamble, sometimes those punts come off - Darren Bent spectacularly, more often you end up with footballing dross that no other side wants (and with good reason), these players you have to hope will do a job until someone better comes along, or they may decide to play out of their skins.
As I said...that season as a club we were on the slide and IIRC correctly we didn't finish that far above relegation, had it not been for Darren Bent we probably would have been relegated. That is conjecture, what is fact is that Curbs had decided not to renew the contract that he'd been offered, but that in itself does mean that Murray wanted to retain him (surely??), but once it was clear that he was going to leave then the best time to replace him is the close season - plenty of downtime to regroup without a match coming up in two days time or whatever, more so as it was clear that our squad also needed an urgent overhaul and that meant signing a load of new players. I'm
here are some FACTS
47 premiership points (one more than the previous season)
13 points above relegation
11 points from last 10 games
1/4 finals of the FA Cup
but i've recently added on
'would this be good enough for you now?'
;-(
martin o'neill took 11 points from his last 13 games last season. do you think their fans were clamouring for him to go and do you think their board would listen?
The thing is ThreadKiller that it really would NOT take that much for O'Neill to start coming under pressure from Board and Fans. Let's say that they lose Ashley Young (whose agent is a very busy chap, it seems) and they struggle next year in mid-table and can't get into the top six, how long do you reckon it would be before the fans started claiming that he had "run out of ideas" and the pressure started to grow on him?
Football these days is all about expectations, people "expect" a certain level of success and when they don't get it they demand instant rectification.
Seperate to the financial commitments they have worked tirelessly for the club.
The fact that the world of football finance is pure madness means Murray has tried to achieve the most difficult juggling trick and along that path has made errors of judgement which have cost the club dear in recent times. But my view is all those decisions were taken at the time in the best faith for the future of Charlton. These errors will probably cost him not only his entire investment in the club but also his status as a Charlton legend. That I think is very sad.
I agree, I think BFR said in another thread that the financial goalposts in football changed, and they changed while we were in the middle of the Premiership. Everyone said Dowie pi$$ed away £12M, but what did we expect to get for that, you barely get 1 decent player and he had to add 4 or 5. It was a gamble that we lost.
I agree with the sentiment.
In this day and age of football finances, every small mistake can end up being severely pounished. And our directors haven' just made small mistakes, they have made huge ones, with the serious repercussions we are now facing.
I'm very sad about it for Richard Murray, but also starting to be a little bit angry. Unfortunately he has said some things recently which have not been based on 100% fact, so either wishful thinking on his part, or attempts at spin. This has lost him a lot of credibility with people who were strong supporters of the regime in the past.
Ha ha £12 million in 2006/2007 season could have bought THREE above average players or TWO Good players. In fact for just 4 Million more you'd get Darren Bent!