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‘Charlton is crumbling away before our eyes’ - Voice of The Valley's Rick Everitt fumes at destructive owners
GIUSEPPE MURO
Unrest: fans make their feelings clear with a protest after the 1-1 draw with Forest last weekend, Charlton’s eighth game without a win Alan Stanford/Focus Images Ltd
Given Charlton’s plight it is easy to see why two years of frustration have come to the boil.
Their club does not have a permanent manager, their best players have been sold, attendances are dwindling and there seems no real ambition from owner Roland Duchatelet to get back into the Premier League. To cap it all, a run of eight games has left Charlton 23rd in the Championship and heading towards relegation.
Fans showed their anger with a protest outside The Valley on Saturday and are calling for Duchatelet and chief executive Katrien Meire to leave the club they took control of in January 2014.
“The club we have loved is crumbling away before our eyes,” says Rick Everitt, editor of the Voice of The Valley fanzine. “Left in charge these Belgians will destroy Charlton Athletic. The club have been cherished and nurtured by generations of us and is surely more than some absentee landlord’s plaything.”
Duchatelet is said to have not watched a game at The Valley in more than a year and supporters, who made their feelings clear with a protest after watching their side draw 1-1 with Nottingham Forest, are disillusioned by the direction he is taking the club.
Meire recently compared supporters to customers of a restaurant and a cinema. She has also angered fans by stating that Charlton’s business model is based on developing young players and selling them on to break even. Joe Gomez was sold to Liverpool last summer and it is feared talented 18-year-old Ademola Lookman will be the next to leave for a Premier League club.
Charlton have been without a permanent manager in more than 10 weeks since Guy Luzon was sacked. Karel Fraeye, whose previous managerial experience was in the Belgian third division, remains interim boss and there is no appointment on the horizon.
“We’ve had four managers in under two years since Chris Powell was sacked,” says Everitt. “And they have been a succession of coaches, who have clearly not been good enough. We’ve got concerns about Karel Fraeye’s credentials because he came from a club in Belgium that was not doing very well and is now doing much better since he left.”
Meire did little to help the unrest when she recently said it was “weird” that some supporters felt a sense of ownership of the club. Meire has also claimed that only two per cent of fans are dissatisfied, although the rows of empty seats at The Valley on Saturday and the number of dissenting voices suggest that figure is far higher.
The average attendance in the season before Duchatelet’s arrival was 18,503 and this season it is down to 15,434.
There are also issues with the way the club is run off the pitch. It was recently announced that the ticket office would be closed on Wednesdays and Thursdays, which is hardly going to help attendances. “It is amazing,” says Everitt. “I am sure there is no other club in the country that will not sell you a ticket at its ground.”
Some 1,500 season tickets went missing before the start of this season, leaving fans queuing after kick-off at the first match to collect replacements. An NHS call centre is even being run in the ticket office.
Claims have now emerged that the club have ignored an approach from former chief executive Peter Varney about potential new investors. Duchatelet does not seem likely to be moved by a demonstration from the same supporters he has refused to listen to and, as Standard Sport revealed yesterday, he has no intention of selling up for now.
But Varney has at least given supporters hope that there is a possible alternative option to Duchatelet.
“What has been holding people back is the argument that there is no one out there who is interested in buying into the club,” says Everitt. “Now they know that is not true.”
Charlton declined to comment.
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Comments
Destruction of a football club surely cannot be taken lightly.
They really are just hoping/praying/don't care that it can be turned around. I believe RD will be doing all the financial calculations in his head about scenarios etc, getting the most money back in certain scenarios. But at the moment it is very much, turn a blind eye and give KF the opportunity to turn it round.
Clueless as per the last 2 years
"Charlton deny they are for sale" headlines with repeats of the PV and protest stories.
They think that by blanking the press the story will die and with the window being open they may be right.
Just need some people to keep the story alive.
God bless her and her cunning methods of ensuring we're united and with media backing during our plight. Clearly she meant it when she said she was beginning to love the club.
Surely no one can really be as incompetent as she appears?
As the trust is not willing to align itself with the protests their board members are not able to act as spokespeople, but there is a dialogue including some of them and various other people involved in the protests and I've already said to them today that other voices need to be heard, which we all agree on.
Because they have been exposed by their own words, I think they have decided not to say anything at all. The high handed say nowt approach might be safer in the short term, but ultimately it means you have probably already lost the argument. And when you do decide to start communicating again you have a mountain of disregard to climb.
Maybe running a football club and being a flitter flutter CEO is not as straightforward as they imagined. RD did acknowledge it was a "complicated" business as the SL supporters were rioting all about him, but he does not come across as being someone who understands that he may be completely wrong about things sometimes.