It’s 24 hours until game day at the Valley. In a hospitality suite, as tables are laid with silverware and a portable bar stands ready for action, Paul Elliott points across the West Stand to where he used to bunk into the stadium with his brothers.
“I lived in 31 Jutland House, half a mile from the ground,” he says, “and went to school at Woodhill down the road. My in-laws still live about five minutes’ drive. I’ve always been emotionally attached to this club. I used to support them, but it was always that user-friendly club where you could get that opportunity, that equal opportunity as a player. So the whole journey has been absolutely full circle.”
Elliott began his playing career as a schoolboy at Charlton, converted from a speedy right-winger into a graceful centre-half who made his debut at 16. Now, more than 40 years later, the former Chelsea captain and co-founder of Kick it Out is back at the club as a director, working with Charlton’s new owners to plot a fresh direction after years of uncertainty and decline.
“When I came back to this club my heart just sank because the whole culture and set of values, its longstanding reputation as a community club, it was like it had been ripped out,” Elliott says. “That was the result of the last two marriages and it created a lot of scepticism, as it would. I think one of the key strategic priorities is the reconnection with the fanbase, to build that trust.”
Charlton, once a byword for stability during the club’s remarkable run in the Premier League, have in recent years come to stand for something closer to chaos. After a six-year programme of footballing austerity under Roland Duchâtelet, an owner who at one point demanded the EFL buy the club from him because the costs of running it were too high, things became more unstable.
The Belgian completed a sale, for £1, to East Street Investments in January 2020. That deal was finalised without the EFL’s approval and a transfer ban imposed. Ownership was transferred again within months, only for three proposed directors to fail the fit-and-proper-person test. By the end of 2020 the club had their third shining knight in a year, the guitar-wielding Thomas Sandgaard, who promised the Premier League but delivered League One stasis. This summer Sandgaard sold out, to a group of investors fronted by Charlie Methven, the old Etonian who once part-owned Sunderland and achieved notoriety not only for a perceived lack of investment but for a series of insulting exchanges with Sunderland fans which Methven described as “intemperate”.
Elliott makes no bones about his support for Methven’s takeover and his approach to running the club. “I would not be here if I didn’t believe in the senior leadership and their strategic vision,” he says. “There’s been lots of stuff said about Charlie Methven but I work closely with him and I like him. I trust him. He’s the one that’s brought in the investment. He’s responsible, and the club could have again been in a dark place if it wasn’t for his intervention.
“Ultimately people invest in people. They’ve invested in me and I’ve invested in them. I know this club, its culture and what it can do. We have to be pragmatic and live in the real world. We’ve got an infrastructure that’s worthy of the Premier League, we have some fine assets, but we’re a League One club. You’ve always got this reality check of where we are. The club is losing £7m-8m a year. We have to plug that deficit. But throwing money at the problem is not the solution; we’ve got two big clubs in this division, Derby and Reading, that have had serious challenges. Incremental, steady, phased investment is the right approach. It’s the approach Ipswich Town took and the one I think Charlton should follow.”
In returning to his boyhood club, Elliott also brings insight he is uniquely qualified to deliver. He is perhaps the foremost evangelist in Europe for the power of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) to change football. “The work I do is about understanding why difference of opinion is good,” is how he puts it. “Not just in social and human terms but the upside for a business from diversity of thinking.”
Elliott was an ambassador for diversity during his playing career. He left Charlton for Luton in 1983, playing under David Pleat in a team led by black players such as Ricky Hill, Mitchell Thomas and the Stein brothers Mark and Brian. From Bedfordshire he headed to the Midlands and Aston Villa, then Tuscany and Pisa, the first black British defender to play in Serie A. His debut came against Van Basten, Gullit and Maldini of Milan. His second match was against Napoli and Diego Maradona (“I got sent off, I clumped him”). He says that thriving in Serie A, where racist abuse was a given, made him feel “like a colossus”.
He left Pisa for Glasgow and success at Celtic, becoming the first black player to be named Scotland’s footballer of the year. From there he returned to London and Chelsea under Ken Bates (another controversial figure Elliott has affection for), where he became the Premier League’s first black captain.
When Sir Herman Ouseley, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, approached him to discuss bringing people within English football together to tackle the blight of racism, Elliott was a willing listener. Alongside Ouseley and others, Elliott set up Kick It Out, an organisation that has forced racial equality on to the agenda, not just in sport but in British society.
Elliott went on to forge a lengthy career inside football boardrooms, leading on EDI development. He sits on Uefa’s human rights committee. He is a special adviser to the chair and CEO of the Football Association and his work led to the recent creation of the FA’s football leadership diversity code, the first tangible plan to reverse the woeful shortage of black and other minority ethnic coaches in English football.
So when Elliott says Charlton’s future is about embracing the diversity of south-east London, where close to 50% of the local boroughs of Greenwich and Lewisham are non-white, it’s not just a slogan. “There’s a huge commercial upside for diversity, for difference,” he says. “You’ve only got to look at the elite clubs; they are brands with global appeal. On our doorstep we’ve got more than one million people from a very diverse community that we haven’t even tapped into. They are your current and future supporter, player and workforce.”
Charlton recovered a two-goal deficit to draw with Blackpool last weekend, extending an unbeaten league run to five matches. Elliott acknowledges it will be results that kickstart change – “Football is driven by what happens on the field” – but that culture is not far behind and a new dawn for Charlton is possible. “What we’re saying is your brand on the field, within the community and in your corporate structure, has got to be representative of what the world looks like and, in our case, what south-east London looks like,” Elliott says. “The support is out there. What’s incumbent on me and on the senior leadership team is to give them a reason to come back again.”
