Football finance guru runs rule over Charlton

Kieran Maguire of the University of Liverpool is probably the country's leading football finance expert and in his latest podcast he answers a question from a Charlton fan: The price of football

The Charlton segment is about 8 mins, 50 seconds in and I could only get it to play on Chrome. The interlocutor is a Crystal Palace fan, surprisingly called Kevin rather than Nigel, and he has to get some weak jokes in about the Addicks. They thought that ESI was named in that way because of Bruce Springsteen!

The biggest revelation was that Maguire was asked to value Charlton by a prospective purchaser in the summer and he provided a figure of £25m. That seems to realistic to me, but Roland wanted his money back.

Asked whether it was a case of 'be careful what you wish for' with ESI, Maguire said that only time will tell. However, one should be careful of jumping to the conclusion that because someone came from the Gulf they were wealthy. They clearly owed Roland a lot of money in loans, but at least they had a business plan.

Maguire is the author of the recently published book The Price of £ootball which I will be reviewing in the next Voice of the Valley.

West Ham's favourable stadium deal

Kieran Maguire of the PriceofFootball reports that E20 LLP, the company that rents out the London stadium to West Ham for £2.5m, have published losses of £17m for 2018/19, following on from losses in previous years of £17m, £208m and £105m. The analyst called 'Kevin' by the media, thus confusing him with a well-known journo, comments 'West Ham owners getting a great deal, not sure taxpayers are as happy.'

Or, indeed, some supporters of Charlton. It may be recalled that former Valley Party activist and Czech Republic resident Richard Hunt ran a long but ultimately unsuccessful campaign on this issue.

Maguire continues, 'E20 the London Stadium landlord show rent from West Ham of £2.7 million on a stadium that cost £323m to convert for football use and £486m to build. That works out as a yield of 0.33%, which I suspect wouldn’t give Dion Dublin a boner on Homes Under The Hammer.'

As well as bringing a book out with Agenda on football accounts, Kieran is now doing a very successful podcast series which you can link to @PriceofFootball on Twitter.

Teams below us do us a favour

Charlton are bottom of the form table but remain 17th in the real table. Only one team below us won yesterday: Barnsley secured a 5-3 win over next week's opponents, the Super Hoops.

Shell shocked QPR manager Mark Warburton said: 'We've let ourselves down, it's as simple as that. We've had a few heated words in the dressing room. It could have been seven-all. We can't give away soft goals and expect to win.' Of course, this will fire them up to redeem themselves next Saturday.

Reading, now managed by former Addick Mark Bowen, ground out a 0-0 draw at Stoke. Karlan Grant scored an equaliser for Huddersfield at Wigan, admittedly a very good goal. Boro lost 3-1 at Abertawe. Luton lost 2-1 at Preston.

Of course, if we had preserved our lead on Friday we would have overtaken Derby who were ram raided 0-1 at home by a team from New Cross.

We can't rely on the results of other teams, but it's helpful when they go our way. The Football League Paper said today that Charlton are 'low on confidence'. There is a spread on Darren Pratley on the back page, but it seems to be recycled from the SLP.

Many are pinning their homes on the January transfer window, but it can be difficult to get value there. However, to stay up we just need three teams to perform less well than us.

BTW, someone was asking the other day how many staff the EFL have. Not easy to find, but Kieran Maguire of the PriceofFootball tells me it is a total of 75. Not a lot given their responsibilities.