Charlton Athletic takeover: How the story of Standard Liege offers hope of life after ‘dictator’ Roland Duchatelet

Duchatelet’s ruinous reign over Charlton was part of a wider trend at clubs he owned across Europe, but the revival of Standard under new leadership offers a template for change

You may already be familiar with some of Roland Duchatelet’s more infamous work. You’ve probably heard about the email he sent popular Charlton manager Chris Powell, shortly after buying the club in 2014, demanding to know why the goalkeeper he’d loaned in wasn’t playing. You might have read about the mysterious Belgian 20-something Thomas Driesen, handed bizarre sway over transfer policy. Or the member of staff who had to ask HR before eating a packet of crisps as cost-cutting measures sunk in like a creaking dictatorship. Lights were turned off at the stadium, paper-towel dispensers sealed up at the training ground and bottled water banished from the academy.

But dig a little deeper into the Duchatelet network and what emerges are the recurring themes of a repeat offender. With his wife Marieke Hhofte and his son Roderick, Duchatelet has been involved in six different clubs across England, Spain, Germany, Hungary and their native Belgium, and with each one he has created problems.

Everywhere he goes there is a pattern. Buying an historic club with a loyal fan base; installing a dictatorial ownership model with no other large shareholders; stripping the playing and coaching staff to the bare bones; eradicating rebels, whether that be scouts, managers or star players, and removing ‘locals’, those with an emotional stake in the club’s future like the former Charlton player Powell; sacking managers who didn’t do as they were told and replacing them with yes-men. Where he did invest, it was almost always in some tangible asset like training facilities or the stadium which could retain value. All the while Duchatelet would be absent, slowly sucking the life out of the club in infinitesimal measures, like he’d run a hot bath and walked off with the plug.

At Belgian side Sint-Truidense VV, bought for €31m in 2004, Duchatelet sold key players without adequately replacing them and they were relegated within four seasons. At the tiny German club FC Carl Zeiss Jena, local ultras boycotted games in protest at Duchatelet’s arrival in 2013 and at his plans to build a hotel complex on the stadium’s site; ultimately his influence there was limited by fan ownership rules which restricted him to a 49.9% stake in the club. The Hungarian club Ujpest, bought in 2011, served a ban from European competition in 2016/17 for getting into financial difficulty and were handed a transfer embargo for breaking the rules.

The Ujpest captain told a revealing story of life under Duchatelet. The club were set for an historic meeting with Sevilla in last season’s Europa League but first needed to beat Azerbaijani side Neftci Baku in qualifying. The team were forced to travel by road to the first leg in order to save money and were given only sandwiches to eat en route, according to captain Robert Litauszki. To make things worse, two of his teammates’ visas were not arranged in time and they were sent home at the border. Ujpest eventually arrived in Baku at 2.30am the night before the game, and were beaten 3-1. The fact they managed to win the second leg 4-0 revealed the impact of those cost-cutting measures.

From Charlton’s perspective, Standard Liege have always been the most relevant comparison, a club across the Channel with a similar sized ground and a fanbase who’ve experienced many of the same problems.

Duchatelet bought Standard in 2011 for €41m, which meant he could no longer own Sint-Truidense VV given they were playing in the same league, so he sold them to his wife. The following summer he raised more than €30m in sales, offloading key players Axel Witsel, Eliaqium Mangala, Steven Defour and Christian Benteke. Only €6m was reinvested in the squad, and this became something of a theme at Standard. If a player shone for a season they were almost certain to depart in the summer. Talented youngster Michy Batshuayi was another, sold to Marseille for €6m.

Managers came and went via revolving door. He appointed the popular former player Mircea Rednic, who led them into the Europa League, but they came into conflict over team selection and he was sacked. “I didn’t let anyone tell me what to do,” Rednic said. “Roland Duchatelet didn’t want a good coach, he wanted a marionette who does exactly what he tells them to do. I’m an adult, I won’t take lessons from a president. This is why I was sacked.”

In fairness to Duchatelet, results held up for a while. Standard almost won the league the following season under Guy Luzon, who Charlton fans will remember from an ill-fated stint at The Valley in 2015. But in the background, his relationship with supporters was deteriorating rapidly.

“OK, we had some results at that moment, but the identity of the club was gone,” explains Mario Bronckaerts, president of Standard Liege supporters’ club federation. “It was all about money and the supporters were afraid that at any moment the club was dead, that he would take all the money and be gone. There was lots of demonstrations. He was a little bit like a dictator. He was also a micro-manager. I think he selected the team, he was involved in the positions of the players. Normally a president has a team of staff with him to do transfers, the sporting side of the club, but he did it all. It does not work. His vision for football as a business is not what Standard’s fans like to see.”

At their most exasperated, thousands of supporters marched on the streets of Liege and several invaded Duchatelet’s office, bursting into a meeting room to confront him.

“He never got the concerns of the supporters and that’s why we had a lot of problems at Standard, and I think this is what was happening with Charlton,” says Mario. “This is someone who is a really smart guy, but he is closed, not open to dialogue. When you buy a football club you have to take the supporters with you. You have to talk with them and that is what the problem was with us, and also with Charlton and the other clubs.”

Above all, this is the point. Charlton is a community club at heart, one with award-winning initiatives in the local area, but Duchatelet never showed an interest in what they stood for. He surely didn’t buy Charlton with a dream of maliciously destroying something; he just didn’t get it, and never endeavoured to. A century-old football club is a cultural artefact, not a business, and the fans are its curators, not its customers. That never sunk in, but had he visited more often perhaps he would have understood.

Charlton fans protest the ownership of Roland Duchatelet (Getty)

Not many fans of Duchatelet’s clubs have actually met him, but Mario did once. “One time, yes, before I was president of the supporters’ club. I spoke to him. I said three words and he didn’t say much. He is a very closed character, and you see when you talk to him that the moment you start talking, he’s already thinking about other things.”

Duchatelet sold Standard in 2015 for around €30m, making a small loss, but he is thought to have made plenty of financial gains over his time there, paying himself a hearty executive’s salary replete with bonus and dividends payments, including a €10m divestment to Standard shareholders (himself, mainly) shortly before selling the club.

Standard was bought by Bruno Venanzi, an Italian businessman and the club’s former vice-president who has made a point of engaging supporters. Standard have risen under his ownership, facing Arsenal in the Europa League this season and competing for Champions League qualification in the Belgian top flight. Their former legendary goalkeeper Michel Preud’homme has been the manager for almost two years. The Independent contacted Venanzi but he was not willing to discuss his predecessor’s controversial reign.

“In the beginning it was hard with transfers because Duchatelet was still involved,” says Mario. “Now after a couple of years with Bruno we have progression. The new owner is open to dialogue. He is someone who made his career as a CEO in the energy sector, someone I have got to know well as president of the supporters’ club. He is someone who is very sociable. He is president of the club but he is reachable to the fans, and he tries to talk to the fans when there are problems. He tries to solve them when he can. That’s important for us. First you have to listen to the problem and then you can solve it. That was the problem with Duchatelet, he never listened to the fans and you see for yourself.”

For Charlton fans, there is hope of something similar. The new owners, East Street Investments, have certainly made positive noises, with new chairman Matt Southall making a point of attending matches since news of the takeover broke in November. “[The fans] have reminded me of what Charlton stands for both as football club and as part of the wider community,” Southall said on completion of the deal this week. “Rest assured, we will never lose sight of that and will do everything in our power to protect that legacy and the long-term future of the club.”

He has also backed manager Lee Bowyer, who has been such a galvanising figure at the helm in his first senior job. “I have no doubt that the group that have come in are good people,” Bowyer said.

The moment Charlton clinched promotion back to the Championship (PA)

That Duchatelet waited and sold the club only once they were back in the Championship shouldn’t be a surprise. He wanted his money’s worth, and as Patrick Bauer’s dramatic 94th-minute winner hit the net in last season’s League One play-off final, you suspect that if Duchatelet was watching at all, he was celebrating for different reasons.

So it was strange that Wednesday night’s defeat to Swansea was accompanied by a feeling of relief. There is a long way back for a club who shed several thousand season-ticket holders during the Duchatelet regime, but there is a feeling of unity at The Valley, one that has ironically been strengthened by the determined and innovative protests of fan-led groups like CARD (Coalition Against Roland Duchatelet). CARD will now disband, with half of their remaining funds going towards initiatives to rebuild supporter engagement, and the other half donated to Charlton-related charities. Finally, their work is done.