Business of Sport Ep.35: Charlie Methven, Co-Owner @ Charlton Athletic, The real cost of football club ownership

Business of Sport

This week, we are delighted to welcome Charlie Methven to the show. Charlie is the co-owner and CEO of Charlton Athletic. He was part of the consortium that bought the London club in 2023, and was appointed CEO earlier this year. But as many of you will have seen in the infamous ‘Sunderland til I Die’ Netflix documentary, this isn’t his first dabble in football club ownership.

He was part of the group that took over Sunderland as they attempted to recover from back to back relegations. What followed was the most transparent insight into what happens when it all goes wrong at a club, both on and off the pitch. You can’t rely on the owner to pick up the tab at the end of every month; you have to build a sustainable business behind the passion and fanfare. That’s not as easy as it sounds.

It’s the realities of decision making at the highest level, the understanding that universal popularity is impossible, underpinned by what goes into running a sports entity as a business.

We’re delighted to welcome Charlie to the Business of Sport.

On today’s show, we discussed:

Navigating Football Finances:

• What did the business of Sunderland look like when Charlie and the new owners bought the club in 2018?
• How to manage going from £200m a year revenues to £20m.
• Owners cannot be left to pick up the bill. A club has to be sustainable if it wants to progress.
• What does it cost to buy a team outside of the Premier League?
• How are budgets spent? The cost of running the academy, first team, women’s team, behind the scenes staff.
• The problem with relegation clauses; why they’re very important but often hard to implement when attracting the top talent.

The Sunderland Experience

• Balancing the business objectives of a football club alongside fan expectation can be the hardest job of an owner. How do you navigate it?
• There were ingrained cultural issues at the club. How did Charlie go about changing these?
• Managing a player wage bill that was more similar to a Premier League club than a League One club.
• How did they go about turning a £27m a year loss making club into a breakeven Championship team in just a few years.

Buying Charlton

• What did the new ownership buy Charlton for and how does that compare to the current revenues across the club?
• The unique academy set-up that plays a huge part in the successful running of Charlton, and the strength of the local population that feeds it.
• What are the ambitions of the team over the coming years and how are the ownership looking to achieve them?
• The challenge with running a women’s team in an environment that isn’t set up for success; how the FA missed a golden opportunity to make women’s football great.