With reference to that very one-sided poll at the top of the page, I’d undoubtedly choose Dennis Wise if the money from the Middle East was really sizeable and it could get us rapidly back up the league.
There’s so much negativity around Dennis Wise and I’m certainly not going to pretend that an awful lot of it isn’t apparently well merited.
He might even admit himself that his reputation is poor and some of his previous actions are highly regrettable. I just don’t know.
What is Dennis Wise actually like? Well, he’s been in bother before with taxi drivers and other players and he doesn’t win any PR awards that’s for sure but, Newcastle United apart, it has to be said he has been popular at pretty much every club he’s been at.
Chelsea, Millwall and Leeds have all witnessed his success either on or off the pitch.
Newcastle was a major feck up in many key respects but I don’t think it was all down to him.
Mike Ashley set up the unworkable management structure (a bit like Richard Murray did when Dowie arrived and that was a success wasn’t it?) and let’s be honest Kevin Keegan, Joe Kinnear and Alan Shearer were hardly well equipped to get the best out of that squad for various reasons including tactical deficiencies, inexperience and general crapness.
Wise found Sebastien Bassong for 500K a year ago and look at the fee Spurs paid for him – rising to 12M. Ironically the Toon might have done better last season if Wise had actually donned the tracksuit himself after Keegan left rather than appointing Joe Kinnear which, ultimately, was Ashley’s call.
Wise’s experience at our level is also very good. In the summer just gone, the ‘Guvnor’ was touted as a possible Parky replacement due to his knowledge of the lower leagues.
Wise has a similar, if not better, CV than Paul Ince.
I’m not advocating sacking Parky at all but Wise might be able to find a role which actually augments our management team.
As for Tony Jimenez, well, as the man who helped broker the Zabeel deal, I guess he deserves a chance does he not?
He almost turned us into a seriously minted outfit and if, over the past year, he has remained in touch with the original investors….
Sure, I’m not pretending this scenario is perfect but this Wise/Jimenez group ‘might’ have more financial muscle and ambition and just as much ‘decency’ as Brum’s owners.
It depends what you want as a Charlton fan. The Murray era has to move on now and RM acknowledges this. It was good while it succeeded but if you want to see Charlton kicking a*se again in the Premier League we have to take a punt on someone. It might take a leap of faith.
Don’t forget that if this Middle Eastern group does have serious cash and Wise comes in with them but things don’t work out for him, or if Parky regresses to last season’s model, maybe next in line will be someone like Curbs? The new owners, unlike the present incumbents, won’t be powerless to appoint a new management team if it is urgently required.
So if Wise and Jimenez can secure us a wealthy owner, several times richer say than Sullivan, isn’t it reasonable to at least give them a chance?
I saw a newspaper report a little while back in which Sullivan, rather arrogantly I thought, said at least 20 clubs would simply roll over to have his involvement.
Well, if that’s the case, surely Dennis Wise and Jimenez could equally have taken their own prospective takeover elsewhere too but they have allegedly selected us because they see the potential for growth. Is that a bad decision or is that a smart decision?
It’s early days and all of this might come to nothing but we could be shooting ourselves in the foot if we throw our hands up at Wise right away.
Zabeel, for instance, were very sensitive about negative press and media coverage last time round.
Do we want to create a feeling of opposition and resistance before we know all the facts?
Surely reacting in such a negative way when we don’t even know who is behind this consortium and when Jimenez, up to now at least, appears only to have tried to work in CAFC’s best interests in securing new investment seems unfair and hasty?
Sullivan and Gold is one thing but David Sullivan on his own without David Gold, which could well happen, is significantly less financial muscle and his wealth alone might not be enough to get us back to the Premier League in these inflated days of oligarchs and sovereign wealth funds.
In a week’s time, Dennis Wise’s scheme might look awful or it might appear promising or it might be dead in the water. But I really don’t think this choice is as cut and dried as some might like to think.
It is easy to jump on the anti Dennis Wise bandwagon and I won’t blame anyone that does so but he is also a man who, right now, if we believe the reports, is putting together a consortium to invest in our club and the basic aspiration of that investment will be success on and off the pitch.
It’s a toughie and God knows what will happen but if he brings the kind of money that could take us swiftly back to where we were in 2006 then some might say we owe it to Wise to give him and Jimenez a crack at a role in SE7.
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we are all impatient in life......
we all want it now....
we will see..
Do we know that this is the case? This was rumoured in the press but never confirmed.
Jimenez employed by Newcastle and was meant to be selling Newcastle, a bigger club than Charlton, for Ashley and has failed miserably. He even allowed Ashley to go boozing in the gulf while Zebeel where waiting for him to come back for a proper chat and so doing killed the deal.
I'm not sure why if it is Zebeel coming back in they need wise and/or Jimenez to speak to Charlton when Zebeel know the club well and have already carried out due dillegence and had extensive contact with the Club.
My concern is not if Wise is a good team manager or not but over what added value do he and Jimenez bring to any deal.
The current situation with dozens of clubs up for sale and many others willing to listen to offers has opened the doors for any number of middle men/brokers who see the opportunity of a quick buck. The guy at Portsmouth is a classic example.
I suspect that in many cases the wide boys claiming to represent "consortiums" do no such thing. They are playing a clever game where they negotiate a price at one end and having got a "bargain" price in the UK then set about finding a buyer in the middle east or elsewhere. No doubt a nice percentage will come their way from both parties. And if it falls through who cares? They just move on.
Charlton already have an agent working for them trying to secure outside investment. He's never managed a football team to the FA Cup Final but he's never beaten up a taxi driver either. He's also a life long Charlton fan.
And that for me is the major part of the problem. There is not one club there that I have the slightest regard for, in fact as I see it they are the very clubs sit atop the dunghill of British football. Yes I understand that he's had successes with them. But to me, however good he is at what he does, he is spoilt goods. Guilty by assocciation.
Yes I know it's not a logical position. I know that it's ill thought out. I know that in a sense it is cutting off one's nose... But for all that I just can't help it; that's the way I feel about the man. He is the living embodyment of Millwall/Leeds/Chelsea - and that's something I don't like.
Henry, if you don’t mind me saying so, it’s very odd that you refer to press reports of Jimenez’s involvement in the Zabeel deal as ‘rumours’ and yet you use the very same articles and news sources to categorically say he ‘allowed’ Ashley to go on a drinking session in the Gulf?? (I imagine Jimenez wasn’t Ashley’s nurse maid).
Funnily enough, if we are both to believe these very same news reports, it was precisely because Ashley failed to show at the meeting with Zabeel due to this drunken session that Tony Jimenez had the opportunity to mention that Charlton Athletic was an equally good investment prospect for them. If you recall, at the time, Ashley was also charging top dollar for Newcastle while we appeared a far more realistic alternative.
Henry, you also need to look at the timeline of this. Several newspapers reported that Jimenez was set to join us in some capacity due to his role in the Zabeel deal and if you look at the dates of when Ashley was in Dubai, the time of Zabeel’s declared interest in us and Jimenez’s own resignation from Newcastle United, you will see there isn’t much of a gap between the three.
You also say Jimenez was charged with the job of selling Newcastle United. Is that correct though?
You see, he hasn’t worked for Newcastle for almost a year and it has been during that time most of the alleged takeover deals have been mooted. He left them last year – around the time Zabeel made an initial bid for Charlton Athletic.
Also, I thought Keith Harris of Seymour Pierce had been brought in to flog the barcodes? I would also think Derek Llambias would have had more of a role in that too.
Jimenez’s role, while he was there, involved dealing with agents and player recruitment. But the whole Newcastle management team was top heavy and indistinct but surely we blame the Chairman for that?
Anyway, Jimenez was ‘reported’, last year, to be firmly ‘in the mix’, shall we say, regarding the Zabeel/Charlton deal and no lesser figure than Richard Murray himself described the takeover as the best deal he could possibly have got for the club!
Still, I note your views on this possibility with interest Henry and I do now wonder if the news emerging of the possible Wise/Jimenez deal might have made the David Sullivan option that bit more palatable to our loyal family-club followers. That would be a happy coincidence indeed if Sully does subsequently buy us…
Some circumstantial evidence around timelines but no more. Some "reports" in the paper that were never confirmed by Charlton and more tellingly never confirmed by Jimenez.
Of course it suits a wheeler/dealer broker to have his name linked to an organisation such as Zebeel so maybe Jimenez was happy to have the connection made regardless of the truth. But that is not fact, just more speculation.
Until the Zebeel deal was announced by Charlton Jimenez had not been mentioned in connection with CAFC.
Once the deal was announced every paper ran a different story every day about who was involved or which other club they were going to buy instead of Charlton. As it turned out having missed the original story the press also missed the fact that Zebeel weren't buying West Ham or Liverpool or Everton but no one at all.
What we do know is that Jimenez and Wise were employed by Newcastle and neither of them have come out of that well as the Keegan court case showed.
What we do know as fact and not rumour or conjecture is that Peter Varney has re-joined the board with the specific role of finding more investment.
The problem here is that we are being asked to make a choice between two unknowns.
An unknown Arab consortium with unknown plans with unknown resources led, supposedly by two people who are, in my opinion and I repeat in my opinion, a couple of chancers or two business men who having sold one club may wish to buy another but where again their plans and resources are unknown, if in fact they or the Arabs have any plans to buy Charlton at all.
Yes, it is fun to speculate and look for possible reasons or causes for events but dangerous to then take the next step of drawing conclusions or making decisions based purely on those assumptions.
Let whoever is coming in put their cards on the table and tell us what they want to do with our Club. Only then will we be in a position to say if we think they are the right people to take over the baton of running Charlton.
doubt we'd get much of a say either way.
Maybe we won't be asked but that is no reason to not have our say.
We weren't asked about going to Selhurst either, remember but people still spoke up.
Spot on.
So if they made profit on Bassong, a player who quite possibly Wise had little to do with and was just offered up on a platter by their well oiled agents, what about the multitude of very average to woeful ones they signed under Wise's approach? No the guy has failed at taking every one of his clubs onto the next level. Much of this is to do with his poor management of resources and canny ability to leave before success is banging on his door. The fact is he doesn't even turn a profit, and most clubs are left in a worse financial state; a thick half whitted version of Redknapp without the successes in the selling of players.
No we don't know the answers to that.
When it's on the OS you mean : - )
1. Dennis Wise was a football guy who by his own choice, took himself away from the cut of the game to dabble in a field he has no experience in, and is not suited to his skillset. Good player granted, an encouraging starting record as a coach, he chose to walk away from that and instead indulge himself in a world of suits, negotiation and uneasy backscratching. As the evidence out of the Newcastle case has shown, he has come out of this with no credit, nor an endorsement for a director of football role. That role would be undermining to our manager, and we already have a manager i'm currently happy with, so he brings nothing to the table whatsoever other than the possibility of a top-heavy structure, and an additional unwanted figure.
2. There are thousands of people better qualified and better suited to act as middle men, if there is a need for them at all. Wise has no credibility or experience for a fixer role, and Jimenez, who i will admit i do not no much of, rightly or wrongly strikes me as a chancer who has had a very quick elevation. Neither fill me with confidence or integrity, and smacks completely of self-interest. If the truth they are acting as middle men to some Middle East group, then i would severely question the integrity of that group who would choose to deal with this pair, when there are so many other more credible people and companies they could go through if they so wished.
3. I of course understand the need for fresh finance for our football club, but i remain extremely concerned about the way football in this country is becoming increasing governed by overseas groups, particularly what appears to be a growing emphasis in the Middle East and Asia. We are now getting to the stage where the individuals behind overseas funds owning clubs do not even have to be publicly disclosed, and it is a potentially dangerous route to go down as we have not the faintest idea of the true aims of these individuals, or in a growing trend, even their identity.
I tried to argue my points not based sorely on a 'i don't like them and don't trust them' point, but i won't disguise that is my overriding factor. Charlton will never have the best team or the biggest crowds, but i still see my club as being better than deserving the input of someone like Dennis Wise.
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There are reasons to be very wary if the money sources lead back to Dubai. We only have rumour and speculation as bedfellows, but Henry is right to keep asking the questions IMO.
This point alone changes my mind maybe it is zabeel. And maybe the forseeable future they spoke of has now been?
Its a hypothetical discussion, no harm in that, and hopefully there are decent arguments on both sides.
Agreed Henry. So many of these foreign "investors" are no more than middle-men looking to get an option on a club and then re-sell it for a very quick profit. The problem for the club is that if the "investor" can't find another buyer then you are up shit creek with no paddle.
And here we have the main thrust of my whole point here.
You were the one Henry, with respect, who has referred to Jimenez as a wheeler/dealer and a chancer. Isn’t that an assumption in itself? Do we know enough about him to say either way?
You might well be absolutely right but common sense suggests he DID have a role (how big we don’t know) in trying to get Zabeel Investments to buy our club and Richard Murray described that deal in glowing terms. Even afterwards, off record, RM has been very respectful regarding Zabeel.
What is a FACT, and not rumour or speculation, is that Tony Jimenez resigned from his post at Newcastle United the day before the news was published on Charlton’s Official Site that Zabeel had made an indicative offer.
Within days of this, his name was beginning to be linked to us in newspaper reports.
This is all hard fact.
But, in essence, you and I are saying the same thing.
I have stressed we don’t know who is behind Wise’s consortium if it even exists. But I agree entirely with you that it is dangerous to draw conclusions or make decisions based on assumptions. That’s my point.
I feel most people are doing just that regarding Dennis Wise’s possible involvement and a smarter thing to do, in my own opinion, is not to make a knee-jerk condemnation of the potential takeover just because his name is linked to it but wait to see the full picture if it eventually emerges.
Dennis Wise is a hardened, experienced football person. IF his group buys our club and he comes in as some fancy-dan Director of Football, then he’ll have to deliver won’t he? If he or Parky or whoever fail to get results, then they’ll be moved on.
He was a part of Ashley’s new regime at Newcastle but he left his post about six months ago because it didn’t work out. That’s what happens.
I’d hate to lose out on the possibility of a major takeover deal simply because Dennis Wise is associated with it. If he and Jimenez and even Peter Varney strike a deal to bring in hefty investment then I think they deserve a chance.
If Wise took us to the Premier League, I don’t think anyone would complain too much. But if he destabilises us and he seems an unnecessary indulgence then he’ll be sacked – with a nice bundle in his pocket too I have no doubt, just like Pardew and Dowie before him in the good old days...
But we’d still have our owners who will want the club to succeed if only to maximise their own investment.
My gut feeling is this Wise/Jimenez link is something of nothing but after our recent trials and tribulations, we aren’t in a position to merely turn our heads up at the first moment.
Henry, you said let’s see the cards on the table. That’s right and I think we should all reserve judgement until we know more for the reasons I outlined in my original post.
I’m not sure smearing Wise, as others have done elsewhere, is a sensible course of action just now. I understand where it is coming from but I think we should all wait and see.
No harm, but bloody difficult with some people on here!
I started last night and found that there are two long standing fanzines, only one of which, True Faith, has a web presence.
Here is the editor's view on the outcome of the court case. Very negative on Jimenez and Wise. That said, I don't get the impression he is as close to things in their club as VOTV was. But there's a starter.
Also I see that Newcastle fans are also just in the process of starting up a Supporters Trust Could be good to make contact with them.