Who is the worst owner?
Without a shadow of a doubt it is Giksten
After the war were a top team in the country, however with little or no investment , the club slowly sunk until it became an big embarrassment, living off memories of large crowds of up to 75,000 for a cup match, on a level with the Arsenal.
Duchatelet buying Charlton is just an experiment, one more club to add to his collection. A toy to sell when he gets bored . My opinion if the club regains promotion back to the Championship , as a business man he could sell and recoup all or most of his money.
Being an awkward bastard , he could well hang on and on.
Well who knows!
Do you?
(Answers on a postcard to Belgium)
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To be the worst owner ever!
The lowest league finish in the clubs history is entirely feasible under Duchatelet with the current gaps in the team and a central defence that involves Roger Johnson.
All this whilst having no accountability for any of the bad decisions made, and loading the club with high levels of debt that he charges 3% interest on. All this while blithely ignoring the evidence of his eyes of the failure of his strategy.
Is that the Duchatelet who's a pompous faced arse that knows nothing about football, under whose ownership things have gone from bad to worse culminating in relegation to League One.
No question, Roland is worse by a country mile.
For a second there, but no, Stig's nailed it.
We were stagnating badly under him and who knows where we would have ended up if he stayed. Equally he was part of the equation that led us to leave the valley. Alan Mullery told him if he recruited a couple of players he could get us up. His response was, can we afford to go up Alan. Hung Andy Nelson out to dry and he was the only Chairman that Bob Stokoe did not send a Xmas card to. So the only thing going for Gliksten was that he was a fan; now I have to think of a good thing to say about Roly......Hmmm.
The current owners bought a second tier team and got it relegated achieving nothing of note other than reducing the fan base, the demonstrations......sorry I can't be bothered to list their multiple failings. I find it hard to find a single positive.
If you had compared Staprix to Sunley's ownership there may have been more debate.
Not sure if I explained myself well there.
RD has been disastrous, but not for the lack of money which he has invested in the team, the training ground etc. I genuinely believe his heart is in the right place, but he has been far too dogmatic by keeping the ridiculous KM in her job, and only giving up on the network 'experiment' when it was far too late. I haven't yet developed the same dislike for him as I did for MG, and I hope that Roland gets it right. It's not the same hope that most of you have -- that he sells up tout suite, although that might be a welcome move, but I am fearful about who any buyer be. RD doesn't seem to want to move us away from the Valley, and he still has the resources to get us back to a better level.
When I was a youngster there was no news or information from the club from when the last ball was kicked at the end of the season until the new handbook was published.
Things were very different. Don't remember much wrist slitting every time a player was sold or bought.
The incessant and instant access to news now is both a blessing and a curse.
Duchatelet is a tit.
I don't think you really can compare the two and their way of running the club but if pressed I would say the Glikstein's as they were a dynasty and at some point real Charlton fans with real ambitions but everything looks better looking back 30/40 years. I also think Duchatelet would like success but we will never see what we perceive to be success as there is obviously different versions of success in the UK and Belgian.
He did regularly sell players to finance the club but did invariably reinvest a portion on strengthening the squad with two or three modest additions. He also if threatened with relegation found a few quid to bring in one or two to help the fight.
Famously both Holton and then Firmani came in as veteran players and provided the leadership to secure safety. Equally we were not afraid to bring in decent managers like Frank Hill & Bob Stokoe
His tenure did end badly. He did explore taking the club to Milton Keynes because he believed there were not enough supporters who cared, if I recall correctly crowds rarely exceeded 8,000 and he was trying to get out from under the financial commitment his family had made for over 30yrs.
He would have clearly profited from the sale of The Valley.
He made no pretence about that but no one had the appetite and/ or the money to take the club off his hands until Huyler simply because there was no "business proposition" or "revenue opportunity" in buying football clubs other than a successful team would generate larger attendances and greater revenue on the gate.
The Hulyer agreement was reported as being extremely advantageous to Gliksten but Hulyer never had the real money to make it work. Hulyer was badly let down by others who had also originally committed to the venture. It cost him a very great deal of money.
It is fair to say Gliksten had no appetite beyond keeping the club going out of respect to his father. The nature of any business proposition for him, at a time when the industry was very different, was no more than that.
To suggest a comparison of such tenure to a specific Belgian Corporate entry to the modern UK football industry, where elite clubs have significant media revenues at their disposal is beyond bizarre.
Sometimes you really do wish people would engage their brain before reaching for the keyboard.
All I would add is that Michael Gliksten became Chairman at 23, yes 23, when his father passed away in 1962.
Hardly surprising that he got the odd thing wrong in the circumstances.
The club argued that it could not continue without that land for car parking and the Valley Grove turnstiles. It then returned in 1992 with that land out of use for car parking, the east terrace still closed, the Valley Grove turnstiles demolished, and subsequently sold that turnstile area for housing (a mistake). The evidence that Gliksten forced the club out is non-existent.
As for Fryer and Sunley, whatever else they did they rescued the club from a winding-up order and achieved promotion to the top division after a 29 year absence. The only achievement likely under your heroes the Belgians is a first ever visit to League Two. And no doubt you'd still have your head up Roland's arse if they managed it.
Since the day Duchatelet bought the club we have gone backwards he has upset the vast majority of supporters, has put a CEO in that does not have a clue about football and seems to go out of her way to make the club a shambles.
Classic lack of ambition.
Crystal Palace got theirs installed the same year as us - and opened them with an evening friendly vs Real Madrid. Not sue if we did anything like that......