The bookies make Charlton one of their favourites for relegation, but could their model and collection of budget foreign signings actually break through a league of poorly run clubs.

The mad, the bad, the happy to be here and the creative thinkers. The modern day Championship. A frantic, fraught, frequently entertaining hotch-potch mess of clubs from all over the country stuck in a halfway house. The footballing equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded cinema — everybody scrambling over everybody else trying to escape from the darkness.

Giving the team that finishes last in the Premier League £100m for their troubles was always going to have serious knock-on effects for the second tier they’re dropping into, particularly as the Championship has tried to enforce rules preventing clubs from spending much more than the meagre amounts they’re able to bring in.

Apart from the newly arrived teams from the division below, and those relegated from the top division hoping to turn their parachute payments into immediate return tickets, the division seems to be dividing up into clubs run poorly by foreign owners who came for the Premier League money but find themselves funding Tuesday night matches at Rotherham instead and others who are coming up with weird and wonderful models to survive and succeed.

In the former group we must count ourselves, Cardiff City and Vincent Tan’s amazing technicoloured home kits, Leeds United and Massimo Cellino’s Henry VIII approach to hiring and firing football managers, Blackburn and the mad chicken farmers, Nottingham Forest’s seemingly well meaning but disaster prone Kuwaitis and the entertaining man with the big moustache who could scarcely have done a better job running Fulham into the ground if he’d tried to do it deliberately.

In the latter we have Brentford, who are attempting to treat the whole thing like a big maths equation to be solved, and Charlton who are in a similar situation to Watford who were promoted from this league last year. They’re asking, probably quite reasonably, why they should compete in the same manner as everybody else in a world where Robbie Brady and James Chester cost £8m each.

Charlton used to be able to. A Premier League mainstay for years under Alan Curbishley, they were held up as an example to others of how to run your football club. The fans who used to call 606 and moan that Curbs had “taken the club as far as he can” surely now realise he’d taken it as far as it was ever likely to go. A couple of wrong moves — replacing Curbishley with Iain Dowie, replacing Dowie with Les Reed — and a free fall was in full motion. Alan Pardew couldn’t stop it, Phil Parkinson couldn’t stop it, and soon the model football club was heavily in debt, with the parachute payments spent and heading towards League One so quickly they whistled through the air as they went.

Watford have a similar back story, albeit with less time spent in the Premier League but the same money spent, the same wrong moves, and the same result with relegations and near bankruptcy. Brentford kicked round in the lower leagues for years, not in the second tier since the early 1990s.

Roland Duchâtelet, a Belgian businessman, bought Charlton shy of two years ago. Like the Pozzo family that owns Watford he owns several other clubs in Europe —Belgium’s Standard Liege chief amongst them until he sold up there this summer. Like the Pozzos he likes to swap players between the clubs he owns. Why not pool resources? Why not have a club in Belgium taking advantage of Charlton’s UK scouting and intelligence and vice versa? Why not loan Charlton a striker from one of your clubs that has too many if they have too few? Fulham paid £11m for Ross McCormack, why on earth would you want to get involved in that?

But then doesn’t this strip away the identity of the club? Doesn’t it make it feel like B Teams being introduced by stealth? The Standard Liege sale changes the game for Charlton somewhat as they’re probably now the biggest club in Duchâtelet’s collection (German fourth division side Carl Zeiss Jena, Spanish second division team Alcocon, Belgian second division side Sint-Truidense and Hungary’s Ujpest) whereas previously it felt rather like a dumping ground for whatever Liege had lying around. Last time QPR played on this ground Charlton had Liege’s reserve goalkeeper Yohann Thuram-Ulien
between the posts — not only did he not seem to have ever played in goal before, but he also seemed incapable of dressing himself and turned up for the match in his pyjamas. Duchâtelet rarely attends Charlton games and leaves the running of the club to the CEO. This all feels a little hollow and pointless for a club that was in the Premier League under its own steam until relatively recently.

But then Charlton fans, and plenty of QPR ones, would probably say it’s no worse than spending the last four years lining the pockets of Joey Barton, Jose Bosingwa, Shaun Wright-Phillips and a variety of opportunist agents while losing every week.

The thing with Charlton is it’s difficult to really know what Duchâtelet’s aim is. At Liege he faced fierce supporter pressure for persistently selling the club’s best players — is the target at Charlton to simply use the network to unearth hidden gems in European football, buy them for a pittance and sell them on? The Addicks flogged promising youngster Joe Gomez to Liverpool this summer with little fight.

He’s been, like so many, a serial firer of managers so far with Chris Powell, Jose Riga and Bob Peeters all shown the door — two of them his appointments. Guy Luzon, the current incumbent, had been sacked by Duchâtelet at Standard Liege a couple of months before taking the job at The Valley.

The bookmakers reckon he could soon have a League One asset on his hand. Most only have Rotherham below them in the Championship betting this season. That may well reflect more on the lack of knowledge of Charlton’s new signings, rather than because they’re not very good. Summer arrivals include El Hadji Ba from Sunderland, Ahmed Kashi from Metz, Zakara Bergdich from Valladolid, Cristian Ceballos from Spurs, Mahamadou-Naby Sarr from Sporting Lisbon and Patrick Bauer from Maritimo. Simon Makienok, on loan from Palermo, is a 6ft 7in Danish striker with a life-sized tattoo of an owl on his thigh. It’s an eclectic bunch.

All anybody really knows about this new-look Charlton team is that they seem to be making a concerted effort not to top the fair play league as they did in 2014/15 — Luzon has added pace, height and power to the middle of a defence when Tal Ben Haim used to plod around never getting close enough to foul anybody and the aforementioned giant Dane to his attack. If Charlton are to be relegated as the bookies say, they’re going down fighting. It looks like a slightly lazy prediction in truth.

People mocked Watford for being Udinese’s feeder club until last season when they romped away back to the top division in a newly redeveloped stadium — totally impossible under the more traditional, almost completely bankrupt, model they were operating under before. Charlton fans can only hope and pray they go the same way.

Links High player turnover breeds uncertainty and intrigue — interview >>> Official website >>> Forever Charlton blog >>> Nothing Else Matters log >>> Into the Valley message board >>> Charlton Life message board >>> Not606 Charlton forum >>> South London Press local paper

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TacticalR added 18:16 - Aug 7 Thanks for your oppo profile. There does seem to be a hell of a lot of change at Charlton. You sometimes wonder how football clubs can function when they're shifting on players and managers at this rate, and nobody seems to know what Duchâtelet is doing.
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