Charlton Athletic chief executive officer Charlie Methven on current league position, transfer window and style of play
Charlie Methven says that nobody at Charlton Athletic is “jumping up and down with joy” over their current position in League One but that there is confidence that the South Londoners are moving in the “right direction”.
The Addicks won 5-0 at Northampton Town on Saturday and that moved them into the top half of the table, 11th to be exact, four points adrift of the play-off positions.
A top-six finish had been the target before a ball was kicked this season.
Methven was a key figure in Global Football Partners’ deal to buy the South London club in July 2023.
Charlton were 16th in the previous campaign, their lowest finish in 98 years. This is their fifth successive year in the third tier of English football.
Methven, part of the ownership umbrella under GFP, was appointed chief executive officer of the Addicks in June. He was executive director at Sunderland, who he also had an ownership stake in.
He told the South London Press: “We’re about five or six points short of what the target was at the start of the season. Whether it be as a board, or the manager, we wouldn’t exactly be jumping up and down with joy about where we are right now. But, at the same time, we are very far from being out of it.
“We are 20 games into a 46-game season. There are 26 games left and what you’ve seen is there has been a very, very significant turnover of players during the course of 2024. I think there were five permanent signings made in January and then another 11 made in the summer.
“When we first came in at the end of the summer transfer window in 2023 we weren’t really in a position to do anything substantive at that point in August – just a few loan signings and one or two permanent ones. It has really been the January and June transfer windows that have been the transformation moment for the first-team playing staff.
“When you have a level of human turnover that great – and when you add in new management and coaching staff, new medical departments and new data departments – it is just a massive turnaround of human beings in one relatively small organisation.
“Much as one would like all of that to come together – to gel and produce optimal output in a really taut and compact space of time – that is somewhat unrealistic.
“In some of the other clubs I’ve been involved in, in similar exercises, like Oxford United, around 12 years ago, and Sunderland, six years ago – the first thing you have to do is arrest the decline. It is easier said than done, because organisations which have got negative momentum – that is a very powerful form of momentum.
“You have to gradually start turning the oil tanker around and that is a painful process. Every single thing the club does has to be unpicked and analysed – put back together again or restructured. I said it from the moment I came to Charlton that these are two to three-year processes. Three years at Oxford and three years at Sunderland before the club started to achieve what might be called a good performance level, relative to budget and size.
“That has proven to be the case at Charlton. Just under a year-and-a-half in and I’m very confident a large chunk of the changes that have been made across the whole club, not just the playing side, are going to be positive changes but fully understanding, at the same time, for the fans and other onlookers than until that means positive results then nobody else is going to take our word for that.”
There has been talk that the main priority in the January transfer window is to cut the size of the first-team squad.
Last January the Addicks did permanent deals for Conor Coventry and Macaulay Gillesphey, signed from West Ham and Plymouth respectively, with Rarmani Edmonds-Green arriving from Huddersfield. Kayne Ramsay was bought from Harrogate while Thierry Small, unattached after being released by Southampton, arroved just after the window had shut.
They also did loan deals for Chem Campbell, Lewis Fiorini and Freddie Ladapo, the trio all struggling to make a serious impression.
Charlton manager Nathan Jones told our paper recently that the focus was on “streamlining” the playing roster.
“That is both Nathan and Andy Scott’s advice to the board,” said Methven, when asked about Jones’ comment.
“Both the technical director and first-team manager say we have too many first-team professionals at the moment. There is only one main training pitch and the maximum number of players you can get on to it at any one time is 22 – at the moment I think we have 27 first-team professionals. And then another 12 to 13 U21s, several of whom have played first-team as well.
“The vast majority of the squad, touch wood and god willing, are fit. So there are too many players. Nathan wants the right kind of competitive tension, on the one hand, but, on the other hand, that everyone feels they have got a chance of making the first team.
“There is the need for a bit of pruning. Is there a desire to make a couple of tweaks in the right areas? Again, that is the advice we’ve been given by our football professionals – that they would like to see one or two new players come in. But it is very much in that type of realm as opposed to more of a wholesale change.”
Prior to the thrashing of Northampton there has been some criticism levelled at Jones for the style of football played.
The Welshman said after the big weekend victory that he and his players had been “villified” and “hammered” in recent weeks.
Methven – asked about the footballing fare served up – said: “Anyone who watched our game against Northampton would have found that very pleasing on the eye. And anyone who watched us beat Birmingham would have found that very pleasing on the eye. The truth is when you play well or execute the game plan well it tends to be pleasing on the eye. When it is not quite there yet, then it tends to not be very pleasing on the eye.
“There is a good reason why Nathan signed a long-term contract. It was the opinion of the board, once we had a chance to look under the bonnet in those opening five months that we were at the club, that the club was going to need quite significant wholesale change and that change was going to need to be bedded down over a significant period of time.
“Therefore it needed a project manager who was the type of manager who built something over time, as opposed to the type that makes some quick changes, gets some instant results but perhaps isn’t so suited to the medium to long-term.
“There is that football cliche truism that we all grew up with – that a good manager builds from the back. It should come as no great surprise to any of us that Nathan’s priority has been making sure defensively the club is in a much stronger position. Football people will say that is not just a question of signing more defenders – it is a constant drilling, organisation and culture within a football club to want to keep the ball out of their own net. It sounds simple but it is not as simple as it sounds.
“Once that is lost from a club then clubs can really struggle with it – even ones as mighty as Manchester City are finding that right now. Without it, it is very difficult to win consistently.
“Working from the back through the team, effectively you are starting to see the foundations put in place for the oil tanker to get back moving in the right direction. But Nathan has been very open and honest, both with the board and with the fans in public, in saying that he and his coaching staff are frustrated that the play towards the attacking third of the pitch has not been as fluent as he, his staff, we and the fans want it to be. To that extent, everyone is on the same page.
“Nathan described the performance at home to Crawley Town as indefensible. So it is not like everyone is watching different games here. The difference is the professional appreciation of how this is going, how long it is going to take and whether there is progress in the right direction. Obviously there is a natural impatience in the fanbase, who see their club in League One and has been in League One for quite some time now. There is a natural desire to see the final bit of that change happen as quickly as possible.
“Within the club we have total sympathy for that sentiment – because we are frustrated and impatient at times. The players are frustrated at times. Greg Docherty, the club captain, did an interview over the weekend and you could hear the frustration in his voice – that some of the things they have been working on in training are not showing through in matches. These are experienced professionals who have seen how it should be done elsewhere.
“The frustration has been widely felt. Everyone is in the same place but there is an inner confidence within the club that things are being done in the right way and that things are moving in the right direction. That for the most part it is two steps forward and one back – not the other way around. That gelling process of people, processes and structures is just going to take a bit of time.
“We set points targets and KPIs across every part of the business about where we should be at certain points in time. Whether that be retail sales, hospitality sales or sponsorship. And there are a whole load of other KPIs over the football department.
“At board level we are about five points behind where the target would be at this stage of the season. The performances at Bristol Rovers and Crawley at home would be the two really poor performances. We will all know the club is fully steaming in the right direction when you don’t get performances and results like those two games.
“But we are under no illusions – we’re not at that point yet. We and the manager are very clear about what needs to happen to get to that point.
“There is a lot of alignment and sympathy for this process. It doesn’t happen overnight. A number of us have been through these situations before, so we kind of know what we’re looking at. I’ve been there. I know what it is. You have to keep on sticking together, stick to the plan. Asking and challenging each other in a respectful way. Working out how to make improvements and then, at some point, everything is in alignment and heading in the right direction.”
The catch-up with Methven was part of a wider interview which covered a variety of topics on the running of the club. Stay tuned to www.londonnewsonline.co.uk for a further feature being released in the coming days.
MAIN PICTURE: PAUL EDWARDS