Charlton can't sell stair lifts, what about funeral plans?

I have finally got round to listening to the Richard Cawley podcast on club finances and I thought it was very good value.

It starts by interviewing the financial supremo at The Valley who I thought was impressive, in particular straightforward and transparent in his answers.

It would appear that the £1.4 m profit on player sales is largely down to Alfie May.   Much criticised at the time, it has proved to be good business on and off the pitch.

The second part of the podcast is an interview with fanzine editor Rick Everitt.   Rick also worked for the club for 14 years, primarily in a development role, pioneering the 'Rickshaw' coach service which penetrated parts of Kent I did not know existed (to the fury of Gillingham)..

The Rickster stressed that he is not an accountant, but he has been studying the club's accounts for decades and knows where to look to find information that would not otherwise be in the public domain.  (One of my findings in the past was that Richard Murray had originally gone under another name which appeared to be East European).

Before jobs adverts went online, the FT was full of positions for chartered accountants.   I have always seen it as a job that is both boring and stressful.  One day a typesetter at the Pink 'Un changed an advert to 'Chartered Alcoholic'.   I got that reproduced in Private Eye.

One puzzle that Rick uncovered was that directors' pay had gone up to more than £300k which is high for Charlton.  His first thought was that it must have been to grease the palm of Charlie Methven, but he is not listed as a director at Companies House.

Rick pointed out that the commercial figures had been artificially boosted by taking the club shop in house and that the club's record on commercial were poor, as it always had been.

He thought that the explanation for this was structural in terms of geography: where the club was located and where the fan base was to be found.   I take his first point to be is that it is an unfashionable part of London (despite recent boosting of Plumstead by The Times as the  next fashionable place to live in London).

The biggest concentration of fans is in Kent which has a relatively elderly population in the coastal areas where many fans to be found and many areas of real deprivation.  There isn't much commercial mileage in stair lifts, zimmer frames or funeral plans (although given the latter market is currently very competitive, I would give it a try.)

We could have a demonstration stair lift in one of the stands and perhaps sell the naming rights so that it became the Pure Cremation Valley.    Perhaps not.

Commercial sponsors are interested in young males in particular who think they have money to spare and are receptive to brands.  My step grandson is happy to pay £300 for a top with the right label.

Finally, the Rickster took issue with the assertion by football finance guru Kieran Maguire that the finances of clubs like Charlton are not sustainable.  Sure, the current owners have put in £15m but if they backed up someone else would come along with the readies.  Maybe, but I will feel more comfortable if we owned the stadium and the training ground.

Why did Robins sack manager?

Chris Dunlavy writes in the Football League Paper yesterday: 'Why sack Gerhard Struber when the season is stone dead?   Why drag a 78-year old client out of retirement who stands no chance of being there next season?'

Presumably the board had grown weary of Struber's public grumbling over the state of City's squad and their chronic failure to tie star players down to longer contracts.

The Austrian had the Robins playing energetic, attacking football and they were in contention for the play-offs prior to the January departures of Anis Mehmeti (Ipswich) and Zak Vyner (Wrexham) - both of them key players who were sold for cut rate fees due to contracts that expired in the summer.

The dreary performances since then were inevitable and predictable, and sacking Struber will not fix that.'

I would add that Bristol must be the largest metropolitan area in England without a top flight side (Bradford may come close).

Steve Lansdown (of funds supermarket Hargreaves Lansdown) has poured money into the club and justifiably may be disappointed at the return on the pitch   He has put in £280m over the years.

The stake of the Guernsey-based billionaire in Hargreaves Lansdown is now down to 7 per cent but share sales and dividends have helped fund his sporting investments.   City lost £18.6m in 2024/25, even more than Charlton.

The writer is a satisfied client of Hargreaves Lansdown.

Clubs should handle politicians with care

You can't keep sport out of politics, but clubs would be well advised to keep out of partisan politics.  Fans necessarily hold a range of political views and appearing to favour one position can undermine unity as recent events at Ipswich Town and Sunderland have shown: https://footballeconomyv2.blogspot.com/2026/03/many-sunderland-fans-opposed-to-farage.html

There are two exceptions: politicians who have a long track record of support should be tolerated and the local MP should always be welcome as his or her help may be needed.

That applies to MPs in an area where there are many fans although the miserable Edward Heath was a Gooner and would never discuss Charlton.   Although he may not have danced in the streets of Raith, Gordon Brown was a long term supporter of the Kirkcaldy club.    Dave Cameron claimed to support West Ham Villa.

I think there was a time when Charlton seemed to become closely associated with New Labour, although to be fair to those in charge at the time they could claim simply to be working with the government of the day (and one that was long lasting by current standards).

Nevertheless, I was very interested in what Peter Varney had to say on this topic in his latest discussions with Richard Cawley.

Tony Blair asked for help with the sports side of turning Thamesmead School into an academy.  Varney recalls: 'I spent about 20-25 minutes with Tony Blair when he officially opened the academy. I found him very good on the details, which you often are left wondering about with a lot of politicians, but he was also very PR obsessed. He said it was a government initiative - that he dreamed of having these academies - more than talking about the Charlton side of initiative.'

'Not long afterwards, Gordon Brown came to the training ground. I found, out of the two of them, that Gordon was more focused on what we were doing, rather than wanting the PR.'

I never met Tony Blair, but I thought he was slippery.   A friend who was no longer with us was an education adviser at No.10 and drew up a plan to boost FE colleges which in my view are an important but under estimated part of the education system.  Blair's immediate reaction was 'Great!  Let's screw them.'

I did have a long conversation with Gordon Brown and it was like having an intellectual hoover attached to you.  I then got invited to No.11 during the Blair/Brown transition and got a second invite.  I didn't go back.  Not the easiest person to work for.

If Brown was intense, Dave Cameron was laid back and charming even in the face of rudeness from Boris at an event I attended at No.10, but even things he cared about about got delegated to incompetents.

The competition that Charlton faces

Wrexham have reported a record turnover of £33.1m for last season, a record for a League One club not receiving parachute payments.

What is more striking, reports BBC Sport is that it is almost three times as much as the £11.2 m turnover posted by Charlton   - who followed Wrexham in gaining promotion from League One last season - for the same accounting period.

In other news, 78-year old Roy Hodgson will take charge of Bristol City at The Valley on Good Friday.  Wags are saying that he was motivated to take the interim role because he had never taken charge of a team at The Valley.

Fans were taken in by April Fool jokes

In the latest installment of his reminiscence interviews with Richard Cawley, Peter Varney recalls the various April Fool jokes at Charlton that have taken in gullible fans.

He recalls: 'We pretended to change the badge in April 2002, and again that went in the programme, this time when we hosted Arsenal. The ruse sort of originated from the fact the Gunners had changed their badge a couple of months earlier, a move to secure intellectual property rights and enable copyright protection.

We claimed that Greenwich Council had “asked us to consider whether the sword in our current badge is appropriate to the welcoming environment we wish to maintain at The Valley”. We designed one crest that was really a straight replica of Fulham’s one - with CAFC instead of FFC. There were also two that replaced the sword with a smiling fish or a cartoonish robin.  We had more than 300 votes online and hundreds more rang or emailed the club to complain.'

Actually I think the best one was when a ground share was announced with Millwall with half the seats painted blue to make them feel at home.  I recall that one Australian photographer who is a keen supporter was taken in.

Varney also discusses how a humour less Sandgaard want to axe the Red, Red Robin, although he has doubts about its timing.

I also thought that my idea of branding consultants renaming the club Estuary hit home. Revisit it here: https://addickschampionshipdiary.blogspot.com/search?q=Estuary

I do have one ready for next week!

All things Welsh

Watching the Wales match last night I recalled that Addicks legend Johnnie Robinson was once player of the year for Wales.  He was born in Zimbabwe but had a Welsh grandmother.

Now we have a Welsh manager routinely referred to as 'the Welshman' by Richard Cawley, but referred to by some fans as the 'Welsh Onanist' or the 'Welsh ****.'

My own links with Wales have been reinforced recently when one of my granddaughters discovered her inner Welsh woman and moved to Swansea (Abertawe), although she does not speak a word of Cymraeg.

It's a difficult language to learn as an adult, you need to be immersed in as a child like my great niece. It can sound very melodious.   Some years back Bill Hague and his wife invited me to a summer garden party at their lovely home near Welshpool and they had a choir of local school children singing in Welsh and Ffion gave thanks in her fluent Welsh which sounded just right.

I am ambivalent about Wales.   I like Rob Brydon, but he is a classic example of a vertically challenged Welsh chancer.   When he was a radio disc jockey in Cardiff he pretended to be his own agent so he could boost his fee for personal appearances.

There is also the 'Taffia' issue.  Such a close knit society, especially in South Wales, can suffer outbreaks of corruption.

My granddaughter has just had accepted a bid on a three bedroom property near Swansea which needs a bit of TLC but the asking price is not far into six figures (and she gets the conveyancing free as she works for a firm of solicitors).   Her cousin who is looking for a property in or around Oxford and looks like having to pay £350k for a two bedder.

Mind you, they have both been eclipsed by another granddaughter who took out a mortgage at 19 and now owns a three bedroom apartment outright.

The reaction to Jones because he comes from another nationality in the UK is a bit concerning as I think if we are going to progress as a club we will need a good foreign manager (not Karel Fraeye)

Charlton present at enthronement

Watching the enthronement of the new Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday it struck me is that she is not just Primate of All England and the worldwide Anglican communion but also bishop of the Canterbury diocese, albeit that her local duties are mostly delegated to the Bishop of Dover.

A recent post showed that Charlton fans are the leading group of football supporters in Kent and it occurred to me that there should be some representation from the club in the congregation.

Lo and behold, VOTV editor Rick Everitt posted a selfie of himself there.  No doubt he was there in his capacity as a 'town hall tyrant' (copyright Lord Young of Acton) although apparently the headquarters of Thanet District Council are a 1970s redbrick building in Margate.

It all brought back memories of theology lessons at St. Margaret's CoE on Plumstead Common.  I think that the now demolished church was on the high end of the spectrum and we were told that if we went to France on holiday we could go to a Roman Catholic church.  The nearest any of us were going to get to France was a day trip to one of the channel ports: a day excursion by steam train to Margate was more likely.

However, this led me to ask whether the real difference between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church was that the Pope was Italian not English and was based in Rome rather than Canterbury.  I was thrown out of the class and the headmistress told me that I was a very wicked boy.

Returning to football, Richard Cawley has an important podcast on Charlton's finances.   I am yet to listen to it, but I am sure that it is a thorough treatment of some worrying financial results.