The apparently neverending agony of Charlton Athletic

Every time the club has come under new ownership, there's been hope of arresting the club's decline. But every time this has happened, things have somehow ended up worse.

The agony never seems to end. Every time there’s a glimpse of a blue sky, clouds seem to cover it almost immediately and the rain starts to fall again. And every time it feels as though perhaps this time it’s bottomed out it turns out that no, actually there are fresh depths that can be plumbed after all. This has been the lived experience of the supporters of Charlton Athletic for almost twenty years now. The club has been kicked from pillar to post for the best part of two full decades, and there are certainly no signs that they’re going to get any better in the foreseeable future.

It may seem difficult to believe at this remove, but on the 13th February 2004 Charlton were in sixth place in the Premier League and just one point off a Champions League place. This evening they entertain Lincoln City in League One, separated from the relegation places only on goal difference, and with two of the four teams below them having two games in hand on them.

Charlton are without a win in their last thirteen games, a run which makes up more than a quarter of their season and which stretches back to the end of November. And while a new manager has been appointed in the form of Nathan Jones, any reasonable assessment of the club’s current predicament can only conclude that the problems at The Valley stretch far beyond the mere manager. This is a club at which a form of rot set in years ago which no-one seems to have been able to arrest.

The latest indignity came at The Select Car Leasing Stadium, last Saturday. Reading have been this season’s Crisis Club du Jour, with protests against their owners at practically every home match, including a pitch invasion by 1,000 supporters during their recent game against Port Vale which led to its abandonment.

Yet even this club, which has become the current living embodiment of everything that is wrong with the ownership of football clubs in this country this season, who have already had four points deducted this season for financial mismanagement, and who teeter on the brink of insolvency, may have greater cause for optimism than Charlton at the moment.

A 2-0 win lifted Reading two places above them in the table. In comparison with Charlton’s thirteen games without a win, Reading have now lost just one of their last twelve. And Charlton’s precarious current position is close to unprecedented. They’ve never played in the fourth tier of English football before; the last time they played in the bottom tier of the Football League, there wasn’t a fourth tier. This came in the 1934/35 season, when they won the Third Division South title.

Anybody who’s been paying attention to the nature of the lower divisions in recent years will already be aware that there certainly are new depths to be plumbed if they can find them. In 2022, Oldham Athletic became the first former Premier League club to fall all the way into non-league football. This season’s calamity upon calamity can only be considered to have dramatically increased the chances of Charlton Athletic becoming the second.

It might be a little easier for supporters to remain sanguine if they had any indication that there were serious people running their club, but every time there has been some degree of hope that new owners would improve on those who came before, this has ended up being dashed. The latest instalment in this apparently perpetual saga came in July 2023, when Thomas Sandgaard sold the club.

Sandgaard was the latest in a long line of owners who ended up mismanaging rather than managing the club. Since Roland Duchatelet purchased the club in December 2014, there has been a steady procession of these chancers. Duchatelet, whose incompetence seemed to border on malevolence at times, clung on until 2020 before selling up to ESI Investments in January 2020.

It would be a stretch to suggest that the ownership of ESI left Charlton supporters pining for the days of Duchatelet, but it’s equally true to say that they were even worse. It took just a couple of months for ESI to descend into a pathetic round of in-fighting and mud-slinging, with promised investment failing to materialise and the club getting relegated from the Championship at the end of the 2019/20 season. By September 2020, the club had been sold on again, this time to Sandgaard.

Sandgaard’s ownership of the club was at least stale rather than existence-threateningly dangerous, as that of ESI had been. The three seasons of his ownership saw Charlton finish 7th, 10th and 13th in League One, not quite the calamity that the nine month reign of ESI had very nearly become, but by no means a rising from the ashes that supporters had been hoping for.

This was stagnation rather than rot, an ‘improvement’ in the most meagre form possible. Sandgaard burned through four managers, failed to hire a permanent CEO despite being based in the USA himself, and appointed his son as Director of Analytics. Sandgaard’s eccentricities didn’t help, but he did at least secure a long-term lease at The Valley from Duchatelet (who hadn’t sold it or the club’s training ground to ESI), which was… something.

Last summer, the revolving door paused again, this time to deposit Sandgaard on the kerb and replace him with SE7 Partners and the raspberry-trouser-wearing absurdity Charlie Methven, who’d last been seen as some sort of combination of a David Brent and Simon Cowell impersonator in ‘Sunderland Til I Die’, which chronicled just how incompetently that club was being run under the ownership of him and Stewart Donald.

Again, the sale of the club turned out be unnecessarily protracted. Agreement was reached, then not reached, then reached again, and then eventually concluded in July. Methven’s plans for the club were pretty clear; “The aim is to put the club in the best position to achieve our targets for next season – a top-six finish for the men’s team and further progression for the women’s team.” The target for the women’s team is on track. Having finished 4th in the Women’s Championship at the end of last season, they’re currently top of the table and in a strong position for a place in next season’s WSL.

But for the men’s team, the situation has been somewhat less encouraging. Including caretakers, Nathan Jones is their fifth manager so far this season. They started with Dean Holden, who’d arrived at Charlton the previous Boxing Day, with the club 18th in the table. By the end of the season he’d got them up to 10th place, but with the summer bringing the new owners he was sacked before the end of August, after one win in their first six league games of the season and a first round EFL Cup defeat at Newport County, and despite his popularity with supporters.

Jason Pearce took over as caretaker, and he managed a 100% record (played one, won one) before Michael Appleton took over. Appleton initially oversaw an upswing in form which took Charlton to the dizzying heights of 10th in the table by the end of October, but then the wheels started to fall off again. At first, the decline was so slight as to be imperceptible to the human eye. But the signs were always there.

They were held at home in the FA Cup First Round by Cray Valley Paper Mills of the Isthmian League Division One (the eighth level of the game - five divisions below Charlton). Wins turned into draws, with them winning one but drawing five of their six league games between the start of November and Christmas, while League Two Gillingham dumped them out of the FA Cup in the Second Round.

The decline started to accelerate after Christmas. On Boxing Day, they were beaten 1-0 at Leyton Orient, their first league defeat since the 28th October. They’ve picked up two points since, and Appleton was sacked after a 3-2 home defeat against Northampton Town on the 23rd January. This time the replacement was Curtis Fleming, who managed one point from his two games.

And then, to complete their famous five, came Nathan Jones, whose first match in charge was the defeat at Reading. It says something quite profound about Charlton’s season to this point that their most successful manager was probably the guy who was only in charge for one match.

Jones made the right noises upon his appointment, but he comes with his own history, and while talk is easy, for Charlton Athletic this season wins have been considerably more difficult to come by. The Lincoln match offers a second opportunity at generating some new manager bounce, though it should be added that there were few signs of this appearing during the Reading match.

So perhaps the ultimate question is… how does this all end? When does this cycle finally start to run out of steam? How does it end? Where do Charlton end up? It already feels as though the colour is draining from the cheeks of the club’s supporters. There was some degree of optimism at the start of the season. 18,500 were there for their first game of the season against Leyton Orient, back in August. There were fewer than 11,000 at the Northampton match, the last before Appleton was sacked.

At a time when attendances across the EFL are as healthy as they have been in years, this is a concerning reflection upon the extent to which supporters are starting to lose patience with this ongoing soap opera. Maybe there’ll be a win against Lincoln City tonight which settles some nerves. Maybe Nathan Jones will steady the ship this season as Dean Holden did last time around. But the broader perspective on Charlton Athletic remains as it has for most of the last decade, that this is a club which has spun through its options, whether in terms of owners or managers. At this stage, it’s difficult to see what can happen to arrest this wretched state of affairs.