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Methven still claiming credit


The Fitter said:
Like it or not, it's on his C.V. Same with Charlton, something went right whilst he was there. He's a PR bloke, of course he's going to big himself up.
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What's on his CV regarding Sunderland? Being on the board while we were at our lowest ever league position?
 
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Ruleigan said:
As big a twat as he is, the TV show proves him absolutely right about the culture they inherited.
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Agree. That episode with the finance people and they didnt have a clue and the boxing day game aiming for a sell out. That lass was all negative and that was the culture. Years bailed out by Ellis Short, thousands of pounds on plants iirc and nobody cared. Didnt like the double glazing salesman chancers one bit but yes absolutely right about the culture.
 
Lonz said:
The club was in an almighty state when they took over. I don't think they necessarily steadied the ship, but did was required when the club had already hit rock bottom. How they didn't manage to get a club of our size out of League 1 really doesn't look good for their CV.
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2 words to answer that one - Jack Ross
 
Not reading that as I’m not a fan of him but one thing I will say about those two. They stripped all the crap out of the club, like a £1k pw plant waterer, to make us more saleable. This has allowed KLD to buy a blank canvas and take us to where we are today.

Let’s face it, taking over a club which had Oviedo of £50k pw in league 1, more that’s most league 1 whole team budgets, just shows how close we were to going bust.

Like I say. Not a fan of those two but they did serve some purpose behind all of the other shit.
 
Good on the marras giving him shite in the comments.
nessen said:
Not reading that as I’m not a fan of him but one thing I will say about those two. They stripped all the crap out of the club, like a £1k pw plant waterer, to make us more saleable. This has allowed KLD to buy a blank canvas and take us to where we are today.

Let’s face it, taking over a club which had Oviedo of £50k pw in league 1, more that’s most league 1 whole team budgets, just shows how close we were to going bust.

Like I say. Not a fan of those two but they did serve some purpose behind all of the other shit.
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They knew the cost of everything but the value of nothing.
 
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I'm no finance expert but didn't they leverage the parachute payments to buy the club and then leave it in a hole for KLD?
 
kingmonkey said:
As soon as the other bloke starts talking, he looks away, bored.
He talks about culture in dressing rooms and fair enough, it would have been shite, but he is talking about the team that just got promoted, like it's the one he put together, rather than the Parkinson years, which has his time involved.

Also, a big part of our success is down to academy, him and his mates almost killed it
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I have a feeling if we didn’t get kld in to sore up the financial side then the aol academy etc was in the chopping block next. Like you say they were selling off kids as quickly as possible. Imagine how quickly rigg etc would’ve been out the door had they still been here. The best thing they did was to get kld involved it would still been in the shit if they had control of it.
 
nessen said:
Not reading that as I’m not a fan of him but one thing I will say about those two. They stripped all the crap out of the club, like a £1k pw plant waterer, to make us more saleable. This has allowed KLD to buy a blank canvas and take us to where we are today.

Let’s face it, taking over a club which had Oviedo of £50k pw in league 1, more that’s most league 1 whole team budgets, just shows how close we were to going bust.

Like I say. Not a fan of those two but they did serve some purpose behind all of the other shit.
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Lets be honest, anyone on this forum would know that you had to cut out the shit like maintaining plastic plants and to move on the players that were earning premier league wages.
It doesn’t take some kind of business mastermind to do that.
He’s taking the acclaim for implementing the strategy to grow the players through the academy, to buy young players before their peak and sell players once they were approaching their peak value.
That does not reflect their approach one bit. They stripped the academy and brought in journeymen like Maguire and Louvens et al. They did not invest in young players at all.
The bloke is full of shit and living off other peoples ideas, actions and success.
 
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I think the bloke is deluded and makes stuff up to give the impression he is t a fraud. I’m not a fan of him at all and the day he left the club along with his sidekick is the day the club started to move forward.
 
hertsmackem said:
Where to start, a week on from the tumultuous play-offs weekend of the EFL? Probably the most professionally satisfying weekend of my career. Not because I was there lifting trophies - I was not, being here in Jamaica watching on the TV - but because promises had been kept; plans had come good.

When I met with Ellis Short in April 2018 prior to taking the club over a few weeks later, it is hard to overstate just how broken Sunderland AFC was. £180 million in debt (much of it to aggressive money-lenders at exorbitant interest rates), and losing £27 million per annum on an operational basis, the club had just finished bottom of the Championship, four points behind Burton Albion. The average crowd that season at the SoL had been a paltry (by SAFC standards) 27,000. We inherited players on multi-season multi-million £ contracts who were quite open about not wanting to play for the club (indeed, several failed to report for pre-season training)

Now is not the time to recount the whole rollercoaster ride (losing twice in the play-offs and making a notorious failed signing!) but certain recollections merit re-visiting, as seminal moments in the re-birth.

Sat alongside Stewart Donald at a Wearside desk, with our red pens systematically chopping out the waste that had brought the club low; Luke O'Nien driving up from L2 Wycombe Wanderers, with his worldly possessions packed in the back of his battered old VW; interviewing (Sporting Director) Kristjaan Speakman on Zoom during the pandemic and seeing his IQ as something rarely encountered in football; being told not to let (head of recruitment) Stuart Harvey get into his car without signing him up, after his interview; travelling to the Italian Lakes in late 2020 to persuade Kyril Dreyfus that he was the guy that could take the club to the next level. From the co-owners to the Sporting Director, the head of recruitment and the club captain, Stewart and I brought them all to the club, believing that they could continue and complete what we had started. Seven years from disaster and possible extinction back to the Promised Land is not bad going, though it is a year or two more than I originally predicted!



Charlton was a different kettle of fish. Much of the club was healthy (not least its Academy and Community Trust), and its fanbase resilient.

However, the business operation and the First Team environment were muddled. The culture (unlike SAFC's) was not toxic but weak. Learning from Sunderland, where we were slow to get the executive team right, strong appointments were made early. In amidst all the deserved praise for others this week, a word for Andy Scott, who left the club in January, but who signed Kayne Ramsay, Thierry Small, Conor Coventry, Greg Docherty, Macualey Gillesphey and Matt Godden for a combined £450,000. Nathan Jones was always Andy's first choice manager, but we eventually got him in Jan '24... and the rest is history. A hugely gratifying 2 year turnaround for a club I'll always love.
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hertsmackem said:
Where to start, a week on from the tumultuous play-offs weekend of the EFL? Probably the most professionally satisfying weekend of my career. Not because I was there lifting trophies - I was not, being here in Jamaica watching on the TV - but because promises had been kept; plans had come good.
When I met with Ellis Short in April 2018 prior to taking the club over a few weeks later, it is hard to overstate just how broken Sunderland AFC was. £180 million in debt (much of it to aggressive money-lenders at exorbitant interest rates), and losing £27 million per annum on an operational basis, the club had just finished bottom of the Championship, four points behind Burton Albion. The average crowd that season at the SoL had been a paltry (by SAFC standards) 27,000. We inherited players on multi-season multi-million £ contracts who were quite open about not wanting to play for the club (indeed, several failed to report for pre-season training)
Now is not the time to recount the whole rollercoaster ride (losing twice in the play-offs and making a notorious failed signing!) but certain recollections merit re-visiting, as seminal moments in the re-birth.
Sat alongside Stewart Donald at a Wearside desk, with our red pens systematically chopping out the waste that had brought the club low; Luke O'Nien driving up from L2 Wycombe Wanderers, with his worldly possessions packed in the back of his battered old VW; interviewing (Sporting Director) Kristjaan Speakman on Zoom during the pandemic and seeing his IQ as something rarely encountered in football; being told not to let (head of recruitment) Stuart Harvey get into his car without signing him up, after his interview; travelling to the Italian Lakes in late 2020 to persuade Kyril Dreyfus that he was the guy that could take the club to the next level. From the co-owners to the Sporting Director, the head of recruitment and the club captain, Stewart and I brought them all to the club, believing that they could continue and complete what we had started. Seven years from disaster and possible extinction back to the Promised Land is not bad going, though it is a year or two more than I originally predicted!

Charlton was a different kettle of fish. Much of the club was healthy (not least its Academy and Community Trust), and its fanbase resilient.
However, the business operation and the First Team environment were muddled. The culture (unlike SAFC's) was not toxic but weak. Learning from Sunderland, where we were slow to get the executive team right, strong appointments were made early. In amidst all the deserved praise for others this week, a word for Andy Scott, who left the club in January, but who signed Kayne Ramsay, Thierry Small, Conor Coventry, Greg Docherty, Macualey Gillesphey and Matt Godden for a combined £450,000. Nathan Jones was always Andy's first choice manager, but we eventually got him in Jan '24... and the rest is history. A hugely gratifying 2 year turnaround for a club I'll always love.
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A **** of a man.
 
You do realise that we weren't paying £1000 for someone to rotate plastic plants don't you?
It was a contract with a company to provide corporate dressing for the events rooms. So they supplied and maintained the events rooms at the stadium. But saying we cancelled a corporate dressings contract doesn't sound as good as we were paying someone to move plastic plants. The fact that it was lapped up by the local press and fans probably contributed to him saying his disparaging comments about how people from up north didn't understand business as well as him.
 
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