The Valley

The Valley could host large concerts next summer, Charlton Athletic owner says

Darryl Chamberlain
Rainbow at The Valley
Thomas Sandgaard hopes concerts will bring crowds to The Valley

Charlton Athletic’s owner Thomas Sandgaard has revealed that The Valley could stage large concerts next summer – the first since 2006.

The Danish-American businessman revealed his plans to put the stadium back on the musical map in an interview with Masthead, a magazine published by the South East London Chamber of Commerce.

The Valley’s last big gig was a performance by Elton John 16 years ago, but back in the 1970s, the stadium – which then boasted the vast East Terrace – hosted two huge shows by The Who, drawing tens of thousands of fans. The second concert, in May 1976 with The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Little Feat among the support acts, was recorded as the world’s loudest, with the sound reaching 120 decibels.

Any new show will not be as big and is very unlikely to be as loud – but Sandgaard, a rock musician who has written his own song for Charlton, Addicks to Victory, told the magazine he was looking forward to hosting the shows.

“This fits in with my background and I am really excited that we will stage some great events at The Valley,” told the magazine.

Last year the club revealed plans to host a Queen tribute show for 1,700 people, but nothing came of the proposal.

Sandgaard bought Charlton nearly two years ago after a turbulent spell under the eccentric Belgian businessman Roland Duchâtelet, whose botched sale to the East Street Investments consortium nearly put the club out of business. Duchâtelet still owns The Valley as well as the club’s training ground in New Eltham.

With the club still languishing in League One, Sandgaard’s ownership has come under scrutiny after his decision to fire team manager Johnnie Jackson in May.

Jackson was replaced five weeks later by Ben Garner from Swindon Town, who has brought over key staff and players from the League Two club, with Sandgaard demanding a more attack-minded style of football.

Sandgaard – who owns the hospital equipment company Zynex Medical – told Masthead that he saw Charlton as a “turnaround challenge”.

“In many ways a football club is like any other business,” he said. “I have been involved with many turnarounds before. It is about getting the right people on board and the right culture in place.”

Fans will get a chance to see Garner’s team at The Valley on Saturday when they play Swansea City in a friendly, with tickets on sale now.

This season The Charlton Champion will carry reporter Kevin Nolan‘s dispatches from selected home games, beginning with the match against Derby County on August 6.

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Queen tribute show for 1,700 set to come to The Valley in September

Darryl Chamberlain

The Valley
The Valley is set to host a Queen tribute show in September

Early plans for a Queen tribute show for 1,700 people to take place in September have been outlined by Charlton Athletic in a letter sent to local residents.

The show would be the first concert to take place at The Valley since Elton John played there 15 years ago. This would be a much smaller affair, with a far lower crowd than most football matches there.

While there are a number of Queen shows doing the rounds, the club have told The Charlton Champion that this will feature a West End cast and be produced by Squareleg Promotions. The event would run from 5pm to 10.15pm.

The club has set up a Zoom call on Wednesday at noon to discuss its plans with local residents – to join, email events[at]cafc.co.uk.

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Charlton Athletic saved from the brink – but Duchâtelet still owns The Valley

Darryl Chamberlain1 Comment
The Valley
Charlton fans now have something to celebrate

Danish-American businessman Thomas Sandgaard has bought Charlton Athletic, ending months of uncertainty about the troubled club’s future – but The Valley remains in the hands of its eccentric former owner Roland Duchâtelet, whose botched sale of the side brought it to the brink of administration.

Sandgaard has bought the club from East Street Investments (ESI), which in turn purchased it from Duchâtelet nearly a year ago. However, the ESI deal unravelled in March after a public falling-out between its principals Matt Southall and Tahnoon Nimer, with the two trading insults on social media and promised investment not appearing, contributing to its relegation last season. It also emerged that, contrary to statements at the time of sale, the pair had not bought The Valley or the club’s training ground in Sparrows Lane in New Eltham.

ESI was then “sold” to Manchester businessman Paul Elliott, however, the English Football League blocked the deal and the club’s future was then dragged through the courts. Last week, an injunction prevented the sale of ESI while the ownership wrangle was resolved. The club would have run out of money within a week if the deal had not been done; in July it was effectively been warned it risked expulsion from the league.

Floyd Road graffiti - Save CAFC, our club, not yours!
Fans had left ESI in no doubt of their feelings

Sandgaard – who owns hospital equipment company Zynex Medical – emerged as a potential bidder for the club last month, and this morning dodged the injunction by buying the club itself rather than ESI.

The Valley and Sparrows Lane, however, remain with Duchâtelet. Sandgaard said he had agreed to extend the lease on them from five to 15 years. The EFL, which had put a transfer embargo on the club, has agreed the deal.

“When I started negotiating with Duchâtelet, I wanted to buy the stadium, but the conversation quickly turned into a rental agreement and it seems for now that is the best for all parties,” he told Talksport radio. “I’m renting the stadium and training ground for 15 years and have got rid of all the weird side deals so everything’s cleaned up.”

Ownership of The Valley is a sore point with Charlton fans; not having control of The Valley led to the club’s disastrous seven-year exile from SE7 in 1985.

He added: “This is one of the best days of my life, it’s up there with when my two kids were born. The support I’ve had from fans during this whole process has been unbelievable.”

Sandgaard said on his own website: “With the club about to run out of funds this month, it was important that I moved quickly to complete the acquisition and put funds in to the club to ensure its survival.

“I have always had two passions – rock music and football. I was a bit of a nerd when I was 13 so decided to go out and buy a guitar because I loved music and wanted to be one of the cool kids – and become a rock musician. I ultimately ended up playing in lots of rock bands in the seventies and early eighties.

“My love of football started when I played at an amateur level in Denmark and then really fell in love with the English game when I watched the FA Cup finals on Danish television in the 1970s. In the last few years, I’ve reached a point financially where I can really do something like this. Four months ago, a friend asked, ‘Have you thought about owning an English football club?’ And I thought, wow, that could be one of the most positive things that I could ever be a part of.”

Charlton fans' protest
About 500 fans held a protest at The Valley five weeks ago

Fans held a protest against Elliott’s “ownership” last month, while a group invaded his solicitor Chris Farnell’s office in Hale, Greater Manchester.

Local MP Matt Pennycook said the takeover of the club was “outstanding news”, while Greenwich Council leader Danny Thorpe joked “a freedom of the borough is in order ASAP!”

Greenwich borough’s Conservative opposition leader Nigel Fletcher said the news was encouraging but wanted to “seek assurances on some key outstanding issues”.

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Charlton Athletic mark 100 years at The Valley

Darryl Chamberlain
Valley pitch invasion
Going up: fans invade the pitch after the play-off semi-final win over Doncaster Rovers in May

Today marks 100 years since the first Charlton Athletic match at The Valley. The centenary will be marked at tomorrow’s match against Birmingham City, with Lee Bowyer’s side hoping to continue its excellent start to the Championship season. The first match in what was then known simply as the Charlton Enclosure, a 2-0 win for Charlton’s “A” team against Summerstown, took place in the South Suburban League – league football was still two years away.

The Addicks were founded as a boys’ team at Siemens Meadow, by the present-day Thames Barrier, in 1905. They became a senior team in 1913 – capitalising on Arsenal’s move to north London – and took over a ground at Horn Lane, east Greenwich, roughly where Ikea is now. But the club closed during the First World War, and the Angerstein Athletic Ground was requisitioned as a petrol dump. After the war, a reborn club played friendlies at Charlton Park and the Rectory Field while the club’s board prepared for its future.

The earliest evidence of Charlton at The Valley is a letter found in Greenwich Council’s archives, dated January 18, 1919, asking to borrow a steam roller from the local council as the club was “engaged in laying out a sports ground in Floyd Road, Charlton”. On May 13, 1919, the club’s newly-elected president, the Conservative MP for Greenwich, Sir Ion Hamilton Benn, told a meeting at the Mission Hall in Troughton Road (now Rathmore Youth Club) that Charlton had been invited to join the Kent League and would be playing at the new ground.

Volunteers did the work of converting the Charlton Sand Pits – known locally as The Swamp – into a usable football ground. Sir Ion, whose influence greatly helped the fledgling club, offered to act as guarantor for £700 of the £1,000 needed to do the work – but all the money was raised locally.

Facilities were basic, as Jimmy Seed, the club’s legendary FA Cup-winning manager, was to write in 1958:

“What a dump it was in those days without a stand or dressing rooms. The players changed in a nearby house and took their meals in a local pub. I recall how dreary The Valley was in 1920 when I played there for the first time for the Spurs reserve team against Charlton in a friendly game… After a cold, wet and thoroughly miserable day we were unable to take a bath or a shower, but had to stroll to a nearby hut so that we could change into our dry clothes.”

The club finished fifth in the Kent League in its first season at The Valley, and went professional in 1920, joining the Southern League. The year after that, Charlton became a Football League club, when it elected ten clubs into its new Third Division South.

But the switch to League football – and the punishing cost of getting The Valley up to scratch – proved costly. An FA Cup run in 1922/23 brought in the crowds, with 41,023 squeezing in for a fourth-round match against Bolton – but fencing collapsed, injuring spectators, and the cost of compensation is said to have wiped out the profit. Crowds shrank again, and in December 1923 the directors wrote off any chance of Charlton being able to draw a decent crowd in Charlton itself – and upped sticks to The Mount, in Catford. That move was even bigger disaster, with even smaller crowds of just a thousand, and the club’s directors moved back home for the following season, tails between their legs.

In the decades to come, Charlton would rise to the First Division under Seed, and attract a record 75,031 to a 1938 match against Aston Villa. The club entered a slow decline after relegation from the top flight in the 1950s, with crowds falling away and the stadium starting to crumble – despite occasional initiatives like bringing camels to the ground…

By the 1980s, and the aftermath of the Bradford City and Heysel stadium disasters, the Greater London Council moved to close the ground’s vast East Terrace. That, and a property row, led the club to repeat its mistake of 1924 and move out of Charlton in 1985, this time to Selhurst Park, leaving The Valley derelict and overgrown.

After a lengthy fans’ campaign – first against the club, then Greenwich Council – the Addicks returned in 1992, and the rest is history. Each side of The Valley tells a particular part of the club’s recent history – the Jimmy Seed Stand, the away end, dates from the late 1970s and is the only surviving structure from the pre-1992 ground. The East Stand, completed in 1994, was the first permanent stand to be finished at the rebuilt Valley, the west stand came at the time of Charlton’s first promotion to the Premier League. The huge Covered End, finished in 2001, which faces Floyd Road, is probably the biggest reminder of the club’s spell in the top flight.

Around 2000, the club flirted with the idea of a move to the Millennium Dome site, and in the early 2010s a move to Morden Wharf on the Greenwich Peninsula was mooted by the club’s then-owners. But despite the anniversary falling under the shadow of Belgian electronics tycoon Roland Duchatelet’s eccentric ownership, there are no plans for a third move away. 100 years after the first match, it is very hard to imagine Charlton without The Valley.

Come back on Monday morning for KEVIN NOLAN’s report from the Birmingham City match. Acknowledgements: The Jimmy Seed Story by Jimmy Seed (Sportsmans Book Club, 1958); The Story of Charlton Athletic, 1905-1990 by Richard Redden (Breedon, 1990); Home and Away with Charlton Athletic 1920-2004 by Colin Cameron (Voice of The Valley, 2003)

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Addicks fans get The Valley declared an Asset of Community Value again

Darryl Chamberlain
The Valley
ACV status gives limited protection over The Valley

Charlton Athletic fans have succeeded in having The Valley declared an Asset of Community Value – meaning they can bid to buy the stadium if it is ever put up for sale.

The Valley was first made an ACV in 2013, and now Charlton Athletic Supporters’ Trust has successfully renewed the designation on the ground, which was first used for football 100 years ago. Charlton have played there ever since, apart from two near-disastrous spells away at The Mount in Catford (1923) and at Selhurst Park and Upton Park (1985-92).

With the club’s future up currently up in the air, the renewal of ACV status with Greenwich Council goes some way to asserting the importance of the Addicks to the wider community. Charlton’s absentee owner, eccentric Belgian electronic magnate Roland Duchatelet, oversaw the side’s relegation to League One in 2016 and a calamitous drop in attendances. His representatives have been in on-off talks about selling the club for well over a year.

Trust chair Richard Wiseman said: “Although ACV status might be viewed as largely symbolic it is nevertheless very important because it recognises the role of our historic ground and club in the community and offers some limited protection against worst case scenarios of asset stripping.

“I would like to thank the club, the Royal Borough of Greenwich and CAST volunteers who worked on this successful application. There is scope for strengthening the legislation to offer even more protection for historic football grounds, and we will continue to argue for this.”

Greenwich and Woolwich MP Matt Pennycook said: “I’m delighted that the council has re-listed The Valley as an Asset of Community Value. The ground and the club are an integral part of the local community and this decision reaffirms the right of the fans to be part of any discussion about their future.”

Charlton play Blackpool tomorrow in the annual Football For A Fiver match, with striker Lyle Taylor strongly criticising Duchatelet for authorising the signing of a new striker to add to the the team, who currently lie fifth in League One.

“I don’t know if he [Duchatelet] is even going to sell the club. He doesn’t seem to be that interested in anything Charlton, or anything helping Charlton at the moment,” he told the South London Press.

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Charlton Athletic fans to step up protests as club ponders flats inside The Valley

Darryl Chamberlain4 Comments

Ransom Walk

Fans of Charlton Athletic are planning to step up protests against absentee owner Roland Duchâtelet after revealing the first of series of billboard posters ridiculing his ownership of the club, which has fallen to the bottom of the Championship.

It’s also emerged that Duchâtelet’s management team at The Valley are exploring the possibility of building flats inside the football club’s stadium.

The billboard, which appeared on Anchor & Hope Lane at the weekend, features a photo of a young boy at The Valley, taken in 1992, while it was being rebuilt in anticipation of the club’s return from its seven-year exile away from the area. The slogan reads: “Here before you and long after you’ve gone”.

It echoes a similar poster used by the Valley Party, which fought the 1990 local elections after Greenwich Council refused a planning application from the club to return to The Valley. That featured a young fan with the slogan: “If you don’t support us, who will he suppprt?”

The fan in the new poster, now 28, says he is boycotting home matches in protest at Duchâtelet’s running of the club.

“We’re bottom of the league at the moment, but it’s not about results,” Phil Reeks, from Greenhithe, Kent, says.

“It’s about the mistreatment of staff, the abject player recruitment policy, the constant mistruths, the same mistakes being repeated again and again, the list goes on.

“Over the years, I’ve had roughly 12 season tickets in various places around the Covered End, but I don’t currently have a season ticket. Even the club has admitted that 3,000 of its season-ticket holders aren’t currently attending games at the moment, and it’s doing nothing to win those fans back.”

The poster was taken down earlier this week, but the Campaign Against Roland Duchâtelet (CARD) says more will appear in the coming weeks.

After 2,000 fans attended a protest following the match against Blackburn Rovers at the end of January, CARD says it is planning another protest, “with a twist” for this Saturday’s game against Cardiff City.

Meanwhile, the club is considering the possibility of building flats inside The Valley, fanzine Voice of The Valley has reported.

Duchâtelet is said to have ordered his management team to find ways of making more money out of the stadium site. His first club, Belgian side Sint-Truiden, has had its Stayen stadium redeveloped to include shops, bars and a hotel. With The Valley being in a residential area – a plan to include a bowling alley met fierce opposition in the 1990s – his options are likely to be restricted to a hotel or flats.

Rumoured plans to build flats on the site of the current club shop appear to have faded for now after the club went back on an earlier scheme to close the Valley Central community space on Floyd Road. It is believed the club wanted to move the shop into the space. This website understands staff at the Charlton Athletic Community Trust were told Valley Central – which hosts youth services on behalf of Greenwich Council – would close in May, but the club later announced it would stay open.

The 36-year-old Jimmy Seed Stand – the stand furthest away from Harvey Gardens – has been identified as a candidate for redevelopment. The stand, used to accommodate away supporters, is the only significant structure to survive from the days before the club temporarily switched to Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park in 1985.

The Jimmy Seed stand is named after the manager who won Charlton the FA Cup in 1947
The Jimmy Seed stand is named after the manager who won Charlton the FA Cup in 1947

Club executives are said to have visited Leyton Orient’s Brisbane Road – which has flats built in each corner, with balconies overlooking the pitch – to see how it could be done.

However, such a move is unlikely to be popular with fans, who fear it will restrict the possibility of increasing The Valley’s 27,000 capacity should the club return to the Premier League. Greenwich Council gave outline approval – since lapsed – to a plan to expand to 40,000 a decade ago, a capacity that would be unlikely if there were flats in the stadium.

There are also some practical difficulties – while the current stand is rather old, it allows the police to segregate away supporters easily. There’s also the question of how residents of any flats inside The Valley would access their homes, as the south stand does not sit on public roads.

Charlton’s defeat to relegation rivals Bristol City on Saturday leaves them at the foot of the Championship table, and leaves recently-reinstated head coach José Riga with a far harder task than his last stint in charge two years ago.

The club faced further ridicule this week when a prankster faked chief executive Katrien Meire’s signature on a document sent to Companies House, apparently resigning her role at the club.

Instead of playing down the hoax, the club – which has recently appointed a new head of communications after months of bad publicity – responded with a terse statement saying it was “investigating the matter as it is something we take seriously”, leading to press coverage of the joke in both the UK and Belgium.

In a possible indication of the mood inside the club, a security guard was posted at the entrance to the stadium on Tuesday when Duchâtelet – who has not attended a match since October 2014 – arrived for meetings.

Local MPs Matt Pennycook and Clive Efford met Meire last month to discuss fans’ concerns about the running of the club. However, Greenwich Council leader Denise Hyland told a council meeting two weeks ago that there would be no similar approach from the town hall, saying she was sure the club’s management were aware of fans’ views.

Charlton Athletic crisis: Greenwich MP asks for meeting with troubled club’s boss

Darryl Chamberlain6 Comments
The Valley
Dark days at The Valley: Rumours claim the club shop could be replaced by flats

Charlton Champion exclusive: Greenwich & Woolwich MP Matt Pennycook has asked Charlton Athletic chief executive Katrien Meire for a meeting as the crisis surrounding the club intensified following its 5-0 defeat at Huddersfield Town last night.

Fans have been alarmed by the handling of events both on and off the field this season under the ownership of Belgian electronics tycoon Roland Duchâtelet. A group – Coalition Against Roland Duchâtelet – was formed today to force the businessman out of the club.

2,000 fans held a noisy protest at The Valley earlier this month, following revelations in the Voice of The Valley fanzine that Duchâtelet and Meire had rebuffed attempts by former club boss Peter Varney – who ran the side in its Premier League era – to introduce them to investors who were interested in buying the Addicks from them.

Pennycook has written to Meire – who has not made any public statements since a video emerged of her implying the clubs fans were “weird” – to seek her side of the story. He is also talking to Eltham MP and shadow sports minister Clive Efford, whose constituency includes the club’s training ground in New Eltham.

The Addicks – second from bottom of the Championship, English football’s second tier – have haemorrhaged experienced staff both on and off the pitch, with cost-saving measures including leasing out the space formerly occupied by its ticket office as an NHS call centre.

The ticket office windows are closed Wednesdays and Thursdays – making it impossible to physically buy a ticket from The Valley on those days – while it is heavily rumoured that Duchâtelet plans to demolish the club shop on Floyd Road to build flats. When asked by this website late last year, Greenwich Council said there had been no correspondence about such a proposal.

Spell it Out
Fans have been mocking Katrien Meire’s public statements on social media

An indication of what may be planned for The Valley can be found at the electronics magnate’s first club, Belgian first division side Sint-Truiden, whose Stayen ground has been redeveloped to include high street retail units, bars and a hotel.

Duchâtelet appears determined to run the Addicks at a profit – despite the fact that most Championship sides of Charlton’s size run at a loss – by relying heavily on cut-price transfers of players from other European sides he owns and stepping up the use of Charlton’s academy players, as well as slashing the numbers of administrative staff. Meire told a conference in Dublin last November that the club would sustain itself by selling younger players to Premier League sides.

Fans – who have taken to wearing black and white scarves as a display of their unhappiness – fear that Duchâtelet’s cost-cutting has sent the club into an irreversible spiral of decline which will be made worse by relegation to League One, where revenues are tiny. The man himself has not spoken to fans or the media about the situation. (Read more about the situation at The Valley.)

Charlton Athletic banner
“Kids go free”… except they don’t

One function that appears to have been badly hit has been the club’s marketing department. Banners placed in streets near The Valley boast “KIDS GO FREE” at Charlton – except children have always been charged admission fees there.

Charlton’s last spell in League One saw the team maintain healthy season ticket sales – but disgruntled fans are threatening not to renew this summer, meaning big drops in revenue not just for the club, but for other local businesses too.

Tuesday’s 5-0 hammering at Huddersfield saw “interim head coach” Karel Fraeye – a long-time associate of Duchâtelet – refuse to speak to the press, leaving clearly distraught goalkeeper Stephen Henderson to field questions.

It is reported that Nebojša Vignjević, manager of Duchâtelet’s Hungarian side Újpest, is lined up to replace Fraeye, who has lost most of his matches in charge since being appointed in October. (6pm update: Fraeye was sacked this evening without replacement, after an aborted attempt to persuade Vignjević to come to Charlton.)

Further protests are planned for Charlton’s next home match, against Blackburn on 23 January, although it is not yet clear what form they will take.