Varney spills the beans on Valley life
3:05pm Tuesday 6th May 2008
OUTGOING Addicks chief executive Peter Varney recently gave an extensive interview to sports editor Paul Green about his time in SE7.
In the first of a two part story, Mr Varney reveals his views on some of the highs and lows of his 11-year reign, what he misses most about Charlton not being in the Premiership, the Jimmy Seed home only debate, this season's failure to win promotion and Alan Pardew's future.
How did you get the job initially?
Steve Gritt is a good friend of mine and I was the director of a national charity, which we sort of set up from scratch. It arose from Steve's daughter getting a brain tumour so the idea was to raise £100,000 for brain research.
Because I was doing it with Steve and I was a long-standing Charlton fan who saw his first game in 1960, I kind of got involved with all these fundraising activities which brought me closer to the club.
Four years into the reign as director of the charity I got a call out of the blue from Richard Murray asking if I would like to come for lunch because there was something he wanted to talk to me about.
At that stage Charlton were a middle of the table first division club, with low expectation levels from the fans and gates of just under 10,000 which wasn't really going anywhere.
Having got us back to The Valley, Richard wanted to move us to a new phase where we could start to do something about the stadium, build a team and he had a plan to do it.
I was initially appointed as commercial director and then on the Thursday before I started, Richard rang me to say he was stepping down as managing director. I asked who was coming in and he said I was doing it, so I never actually became commercial director and came in as managing director instead.
Sometime later the structure was changed and I became chief executive.
Did you imagine you would still be here 11 years on?
If you see the pictures when I came, I still had darkish hair so everything has deteriorated physically since then.
Probably not in truth.
I suppose 11 years is a long time in football because of the nature of the game, which is a very up and down industry.
If you look across the leagues, people at the top don't tend to last for years and years, especially in the modern game.
You only have to look at Liverpool and what is going on there at the moment. Expectation levels about what you can achieve increase all the time, but I kind of came in with a fairly clear idea about what I wanted to do.
When you have been a fan, I was desperate for the stadium to be rebuilt because I felt Charlton would never get away from having the tag of being one of the lesser London clubs and not really being taken seriously.
That would only change if we did something about the stadium because it says a lot about you as a football club.
It was really a collection of sheds and portacabins and the north stand took three years to bring about.
Having got involved with the club early in the 1997/98 season, did you have any idea you would end the campaign as play-off winners?
The first thing I did when I came was a three-year business plan for the club in conjunction with Richard Murray.
Our first priority was to redress the problem of needing to sell players.
The crowd kind of expected us to sell our best players and within the first three months of my arrival, QPR bid £1.2m for Shaun Newton.
Rejecting the offer was pivotal because the plan was to use the listing on the stock exchange to go out and raise new money, invest it in the team, the team hopefully would do a bit better and as it got success, we would build the stadium.
The share issue raised a sizeable sum of money in those times of £2m and we got Eddie Youds, Danny Mills, Sasa Ilic and suddenly we went on this unbeaten run and hit the play-offs playing very well. I think the rest is history.
What are your memories of the Sunderland game at Wembley?
You are within touching distance of this multi-million pound prize, you've got it, you haven't got it and then you've got it again and so on. Penalties going up to five is bad enough, but when it is seven it is diabolical.
And Charlton held their nerve to win the penalty shootout. What were the expectation levels going into the following season in the Premiership?
We sat down and decided we would have a go. We weren't going to break the bank and if we survived then great, if we didn't then we would be a lot stronger next time around.
There was a kind of two-year focus on it. It went to the last game against Sheffield Wednesday and we didn't make it after a fantastic result at Villa the week before when we won 4-3.
We still had a chance in the last game, but in truth I think Southampton were always going to stay up.
Next time around we came back stronger after going on a fantastic run which helped us win the title.
Our initial decision after the play-off final probably set the scene for the seven consecutive seasons we had in the Premier League.
Do you miss the top flight?
Massively and for lots of reasons. As a fan, you miss it because you are seeing the best players and the best football.
When you look at those seven years you recall the likes of Di Canio, Kinsella, Parker, Jensen, Kiely and all these quality players who represented the club during that era.
We've had some fantastic occasions here.
The 4-2 win over Chelsea on Boxing Day is probably not only the best result, although it led to Parker leaving, but it was also Charlton playing attacking, stylish football in the best league in the world to a full house.
The Premier League is a very dynamic organisation. The meetings are quite interesting and there is always something new coming up like the 39th game idea which came up recently.
On the other hand, the Football League is a much bigger body where you've got look after the interests of Rochdale and Darlington at the same time as some of the bigger clubs like Wolves and Charlton.
I miss the Premier League because you are involved right at the pinnacle of English football and then suddenly you aren't doing it, Sky are not interested in you because they are only interested in the Premier League so for that reason, of course you miss it.
I'm not one who misses going out there and grooming their hair and going on television, I don't miss that.
What it does give you the opportunity to do is give Charlton a profile.
When you are in the Premier League, people can see you have opinions about things and you stand for something.
People understand we are very passionate about being involved in the community and it is why we have grown this kind of trust in the way we have.
You miss it because you aren't able to get any messages across because you are in the Football League and the only time the television companies show any interest is at the end of it when they want to know who is going into the Premier League.
The play-off final is branded as the £60m game and the rest of it is about who is going up automatically to the Premier League.
Other than that, you don't really see a lot of the cameras.
There will be no promotion or involvement in the play-offs for Charlton this year. What are your views on what happened this season?
It is disappointing really, but I do think it is very complex.
When you come down from the Premier League as an established club, your wage bill has risen in the Premier League in a way if you just went up and came straight back down, it doesn't.
You therefore build up your squad over a period of time and if you fall out of the Premier League as we did, you have a massive financial problem to solve inside 12 weeks.
There aren't many businesses which can do that. I'm sure if the News Shopper had to make £16m worth of cuts and you were told to sort it out in 12 weeks, you would be asking: "How do we do this?"
What it means is we had to totally revamp our squad.
If you look at Charlton, Watford and Sheffield United, although we are getting parachute payments, there is massive disruption within the squad.
Now you could be lucky and all the people you bring in work out and you go straight back up.
However, the stats show you over the years the majority of clubs don't go straight back and this is the reason I think.
In the second year, people get more settled and fitted in to the strategy you've got and if you look at West Brom, they've done very well this season and look a stronger team and squad than last year, even though they got to the play-off final.
They've probably got the best chance of competing back in the Premier League in my view.
It is a time factor really and although it is obviously disappointing, we've got to pick ourselves up and say we've got to do this next year.
Alan Pardew will be the manager here next year and he got West Ham up in the second year and not so much in the first year for the same reasons.
You just are trying to blood in a new squad and everyone you play raises their game a bit because facing the relegated sides is almost like playing a Premiership side.
The chairman at Preston was saying his players were really lifted by the atmosphere and that is part of the problem here as well.
Alan probably had it even more so when he was at West Ham where there was 30,000 plus crowds and everyone wants to come and play there.
It is a problem when you come down and not unique to us.
Alan Pardew raised the possibility of making the Jimmy Seed stand a home only end earlier in the season and his views struck a chord with lots of News Shopper readers. Is there any chance it will ever happen in the immediate future?
I can't see it because the problem is you would have to give away fans another area of the ground.
They can't to be given the east stand because to get there from where the coaches park would mean away fans would have to be escorted around the ground.
Imagine if they had to escort 3,000 Crystal Palace fans around past the home end.
That brings you to the west stand. It can't be the upper tier because the police will not allow away fans to sit there and anyway we have a lot of season ticket holders there.
If you went to the lower west, you would have all away fans from the directors box and you are moving out some of your own supporters to sit in a stand which is the worst stand in the ground.
For this reason, it can't happen.
But obviously as we've planned the development, once the ground has all joined up you can start to do it in a different way.
It has been planned for in the development but at this stage it isn't possible, although I understand where Alan is coming from because of the acoustics.
Charlton recently announced it would be extending their offer of free season tickets to supporters if the club were to gain promotion next season. Is this not something of a gamble?
The Premier League now is worth so much money, effectively you want people to stick with you while you are in the Championship.
We've averaged 23,000 here this season which is one of the highest in the division.
If this support were to tail off, it has an impact on the whole picture because you need the passionate atmosphere to be sustained.
As we get the football right, the atmosphere gets better and better and we go back to 26,000.
What we are trying to do is have a structure which encourages the fans to stick with us while we are in this kind of low point in order that when we go back to the high point, they are still there.
Secondly, we take the view if you get £40m from Sky, if we keep £36m and give the fans £4m, isn't this the right thing to do because they've backed us in the lean period.
If we had the £4m we would probably buy one more player, but our view is it is probably better to reward the fans for the loyalty they've shown during the difficult period.