This article compares two disastrous owners who have been ‘bad in new and innovative ways’, Randy Lerner at Aston Villa and Roland Duchatelet at Charlton. Duchatelet was the target of renewed protests at The Valley yesterday in which visiting Brighton and Hove Albion fans joined,
This article compares two disastrous owners who have been ‘bad in new and innovative ways’, Randy Lerner at Aston Villa and Roland Duchatelet at Charlton. Duchatelet was the target of renewed protests at The Valley yesterday in which visiting Brighton and Hove Albion fans joined,
The article castigates Duchatelet for his ‘half-baked inter-league player franchise plan’ and says that Lerner is the least successful owner in Premier League history, although it concedes that he is a ‘nice man’.
The conclusion places the blame for this on the market economy and that protean target ‘neo-liberalism’. But would tighter checks on owners have spotted that Duchatelet was a ‘mild oddball’ or that Lerner would turn out to be a poor decision-maker? Charlton were on the verge of administration and at Villa there was a desire to end the Doug Ellis regime.