Bizarre Takeover Process at Charlton

Things at Charlton are never straightforward are they ?  I’ve spent the last 20 years buying and selling businesses of all shapes and sizes and its very difficult to understand exactly what’s going on in the Charlton sale process.

It is reasonably commonplace for ‘ auction’ processes to occur where more than one interested bidder undertakes due diligence, generally at their own expense. Different parties do this “dd” in different ways , some people pay specialists to undertake the diligence which would involve financial, commercial and legal analysis. A couple of deals I have done over the last few years have even involved commissioning specialist political due diligence. Some parties might try to do this work in house rather than appointing advisors.

Some of this work might be done before a price is agreed with the vendor , but the heavy lifting which incurs the cost of lawyers and accountants is generally done after a price is agreed and is completed with the one preferred party during a period of exclusivity which is generally one to three months to enable the buyer to get comfortable and complete the transaction, including the legal process.

Heaven only knows how this Charlton process works. It seems that they have agreed the price with 2 interested parties who have both completed due diligence and are both now at the legal completion stage. I can understand why that would be attractive to Roland to keep both bidders ‘ honest’ and provide him with a fall back, but I’ve never experienced a situation where 2 bidders are prepared to continue to a legal completion incurring further cost knowing that you might not get the deal.

Unless I am missing something obvious, Uncle Roland can only sell the club once so one of the bidders is going to be very much out of pocket.

Anyway, every deal is different so who knows what is really going on. Our owner is not exactly conventional in his business or indeed in any sense. None of us will care how the deal gets done – so long as it gets done – and the eventual buyer reignites the passion amongst our supporters and has real ambition for the club which has been so lacking over the last 4 years.

We can only hope that the end is truly in sight and that a glorious dawn will indeed follow the night.

Charlton lucky to get nil

I don’t know what it is about football for a fiver but we always deliver performances like this for our biggest crowds. For me it is always synonymous with losing to Exeter 3-1 at home in front of c 20,000 whilst the ridiculous and useless Thierry Racon took time to take off his gloves and throw them on the floor in the centre circle after he had been disposessed for Exeters third goal.

Today we were flying for about 2 minutes after which we were outplayed , outthought, outmuscled, and outclassed for the remaining 88 minutes. Shrewsbury were excellent and really deserved to win by 3 or 4 goals. Games like today remind us that we really aren’t that good are we ?

The loss of Mavadidi and the reluctance of Robbo to change his system meant that we were back to Magennis looking like a lost sole again up front with no support close enough to him. We’ve got loads of skilful , small winger type players but not enough strength , athleticism and leadership – Shrewsbury took advantage and dominated us all over the pitch – it was men against boys.

Id love to think that there is a chance of us getting promotion via the play offs but I really don’t think that we are anywhere good enough. It is easy to blame the manager and certainly his unwillingness to play Aribo over the last few weeks was a big mistake, but ultimately the players he has available to him lack the physicality in this division  to sustain a proper challenge.

Let’s all play up front

Well that was all a bit strange wasn’t it – we appear to have changed style completely which (on the whole) I prefer – whereas we used to play 30 passes around our own box before we got the ball forward we now get it forward a lot quicker – Harry Lennon appears to have a homing device to Josh Magennis’s head which resulted in an excellent performance from Josh. Steph Mavadidi looks like a brilliant player – let’s hope his injury is not serious.

Apart from that, everyone now wants to play up front , Fosu, Kaikai, Marshall (disappointing again) Zyro, which is all very exciting and great fun but it leaves the fullbacks exposed, notably poor old Chris Solly who definitely looks like he needs more help on his wing.

I think that if we are going to play in this more open way, it is a mistake to bring JFC back at the expense of our best player for the last few weeks, Joe Aribo. It puts more strain on the midfield two and Joe has more energy and athleticism.

Overall, it was obviously disappointing , but hard to believe that Robbo can’t mould this lot into a play off position.