Charlton Athletic Takeover Attempt - The right move?

I noticed the recent article on the Kent Live news that the rumoured Charlton Athletic bid from the Australian Football Consortium (AFC) had stalled owing to a lack of capital raise.

While any move to oust Duchatelet as owner should be seen as a good thing I can’t but help think that if a consortium has trouble in even raising the suggested purchase price then questions must be raised as to their ability to maintain the ongoing financial commitment that is required for a football club.

Let’s not kid ourselves here.  Breaking even is an admirable goal and might be achievable but currently not many clubs do achieve this.  The Deloitte 2016 annual review of football  gave an average annual loss for the 2014/15 season of £1.7m for League One clubs and £0.5m for League Two clubs.

Charlton’s losses run even larger than this and given the term of existing players’ contracts, the commitment made to the training ground and the size of the Valley generally such losses cannot be curtailed immediately.

In fact the AFC’s website states that “A critical component of AFC’s strategy will be to invest heavily into the training facility so that the club can attract and develop local talent and provide them with the opportunity to represent their club at a senior level.”

Given all this, any investor would need a sizable war chest just to allow the club to continue in its current form.  This is just not going to come from a scratch investment company such as AFC. The last thing that fans want is a nervous wait while the company struggles with a whip around in order to avoid bankruptcy.  

Any debt to finance these losses would need to be raised from external commercial lenders such as banks (rather than a benevolent owner) at commercial rates and with suitable security over assets such as the football stadium.

I'm no Duchatelet fan but while I'm sure that the AFC has a board with the necessary football experience (unlike our current CEO and owner) we need to ensure that they have the adequate resources to go along with it.

Sources

Kent Live Article

http://www.kentlive.news/charlton-athletic-takeover-talks-australian-investors-attempting-to-raise-more-cash/story-30314448-detail/story.html

Deloitte Annual Review of Football

https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/sports-business-group/articles/annual-review-of-football-finance.html

Article on Duchatelet's influence at St Truiden

John Chapman the Belgium football writer (look for him on twitter under @BelgoFoot, he is worth a follow) has been a good source of information on the goings on in the Duchatelet network.

While Duchatelet has now sold Standard Liege John still provides information on St Truiden.  The latest snippet is a report from Sport Foot Magazine.  You can read the original article here:-

http://sportmagazine.levif.be/sport/foot-national/duchatelet-a-discute-avec-des-coaches-pour-saint-trond/article-normal-501551.html

If your language skills are a little rusty and you use Chrome as a your browser you can "right click" on the article to translate it into English, otherwise copy and paste into Google Translate.

The gist of the article is that it appears that Mr Duchatelet has a strong say in the running of the club despite St Truiden being owned by Mr Duchatelet's partner and him having no formal position at the club.

There are rules in the Belgium league that prevent the ownership of more than one football club so previously when he owned Standard Liege he could not be involved in the ownership or running of St Truiden.  However, now that Standard has been sold he could legitimately take over the reigns at St Truiden with a formal shareholding or directorship.

If the report is true then to flatly deny such influence when there is no formal connection with the club is frankly disingenuous and a barrier to any sensible minded person taking up any role with responsibility at the club.

The fact that Roland is doing this should be no surprise to Charlton fans.  Despite repeated assurances by the directors to the contrary we have seen the impact of Roland's meddling at the Valley.  The more this goes on, the greater the lack of credibility in the eyes of anyone looking at Charlton.  Given the alleged actions at St Truiden I doubt very much that any decent manager would want to join the club even if their contract gave specific assurances.  Perception is everything Roland!

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