Charlton Athletic: when The Valley was vacant
The story of the exile of the Addicks
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Charlton Athletic: when The Valley was vacant
When somebody mentions The Valley, I have only two points of reference.
The first is that I’ve been there, once, as an away supporter. I don’t remember it at all, such is the extent to which it wasn’t my proudest moment. I’m told it was a good day despite the match itself deserving its goalless outcome.
The second is James, a kid who was in my class throughout primary school. All of the football supporters there followed our local team, AFC Bournemouth, to some degree, but most were tied to a Premier League club.
There were Manchester United and Liverpool fans. One followed my lead and adopted Aston Villa, my hometown club. One of my closest friends was a Coventry City supporter.
And there was James, who showed up for Games on a Tuesday afternoon in a Charlton shirt emblazoned with a massive Viglen logo.
In the mid-nineties, the Addicks were basking in the glow of a return to their stadium and roaring towards eventual promotion to the Premier League. Without there being a Charlton supporter in my school, the chances are I wouldn’t have known about their exile at all.
All these years later, Charlton having played home matches away from The Valley for seven years isn’t as widely known as one might expect.
Wimbledon’s own stint at Selhurst Park took them into the Premier League era and almost to oblivion. Brighton & Hove Albion’s spell at Gillingham was remarkable because of the sheer distance between the two, never mind the explosive political underdoings that took the plight of the Seagulls into the national spotlight.
Coventry’s years at Sixfields and St Andrews were recent enough to be remembered in their own right and to enjoy the amplified airtime of the internet age. There have been other examples, mostly but not exclusively lower down the league. These were the most high-profile.
Charlton were a little different. Their time away from home happened in one of the most historically significant periods in English football. They left The Valley with Heysel raw in the public memory. Some of England’s bleakest seasons followed first. Then Hillsborough. Then the Taylor Report. Then the Premier League.
The tectonic plates of football were shifting. Charlton’s location on one of them doesn’t really register for outsiders thirty years later.
I’m minded to think that its relative lack of infamy is due to the club standing firm while they were away and a happy result of the fact that The Valley was back up and running by the time the Premier League kicked off, a sorry tale lost in the shadow of football's new monolith. I’m sure James told me all about it.
“There were too many clubs and Charlton had been in decline for 30 years,” wrote Rick Everitt in 2017 on his interpretation of the national media’s fleeting interest in the fate of The Valley and the football club that called it home.
“For them, Selhurst was just a staging post en route to the knacker’s yard. Obituary to follow.”
Charlton had been in turmoil since long before James and I were born. The 1982 signing of Allan Simonsen, a Ballon d’Or winner brought in from Barcelona to play for a club in the Second Division, became the first great symbol of the financial mess at The Valley.
Such extreme folly was destined to be short-lived; Simonsen played just a handful of times before unpaid wages kiboshed the transfer and he was gone, for nothing, within months.
The second totem of mayhem was The Valley itself. The East Terrace was in such disrepair by 1982 that it was condemned by the local council. The football club was sold by former chairman Michael Glikstein but The Valley was not.
Charlton later went into administration and were subsequently saved at the last minute in 1984. The club’s new owners weren’t able to acquire The Valley from Glikstein. With neither owner nor tenant willing to invest in the improvement or even upkeep of the ground, its closure loomed.
On 7th September 1985, Charlton supporters were informed by way of a leaflet that they were leaving The Valley. From the end of the month, the Addicks would be groundsharing at Selhurst Park with Crystal Palace, their opponents that afternoon.
Two weeks later, manager Lennie Lawrence guided Charlton to a 2-0 win over Stoke City in their final home game. Midfielder Rob Lee scored the last goal at The Valley.
“It didn't seem like a big deal at the time, partly because you're always expecting someone else to score five minutes later, and also because at the time we didn't realise we would be away from The Valley for so long,” Lee explained to The Guardian many years later.
“The players thought we'd be off to Selhurst Park for a few weeks and then back there after that. I don't know if the fans thought something different, but there was some kind of protest on the pitch at half-time.”
It’s to Charlton’s credit that they kept themselves together as well as they did over seven years in exile. Getting off to a positive start on the pitch certainly helped.
They won more than half of their Second Division matches in 1985/86 despite the remainder of their home games being played at Selhurst Park in front of small crowds. Promotion to the First Division was secured in early May thanks to a 3-2 win over Carlisle United at Brunton Park.
The Addicks finished second behind Norwich City, while Wimbledon – who later endured their own unwanted interlude at Selhurst Park and suffered a rather more severe outcome – pipped Portsmouth at the post to go up in third. It was Charlton’s first time in the top flight for three decades. They spent four seasons there and never once played a true home game.
Charlton claimed a little piece of football history in 1986/87. They beat Queens Park Rangers on the final day of the season to avoid automatic relegation and send Leicester City and Manchester City down with Aston Villa on the same day as a remarkable conclusion to the relegation battle in the Fourth Division.
It wasn’t so much last-day survival for Charlton as a rare chance for a reprieve. The Football League had introduced play-offs, initially with the fourth-bottom team competing against the top three from the division below.
Charlton were the only First Division team to avoid the drop by this method, seeing off Ipswich Town before two Peter Shirtliff goals lifted them to victory in a replay against Leeds United at St Andrews. It was a fitting end to a season of big wins when they mattered most. Beating Manchester City 5-0 and Aston Villa 3-0 made all the difference.
The following season was one of marginal improvement under the constant threat of relegation. Charlton were winless in August. They were bottom at the end of September and the end of October. They were in the relegation zone at the start of January and the end of it too.
In May, a 1-1 draw against Stamford Bridge at Chelsea sent the Blues into the dreaded play-offs and took Charlton to safety on goal difference. Chelsea were beaten by Middlesbrough and relegated to the Second Division.
1988 was the year the Addicks finally managed to get the wheels moving on a possible return to their rightful home off Floyd Road. Board members Roger Alwen and Mike Norris secured the freehold to The Valley, uniting club and stadium for the first time in six years. The task now was to put them back into the same physical space.
Still playing at Selhurst Park, Lawrence’s team improved again in 1988/89. They finished in 14th place in the top division but were only three points outside the relegation zone. There was no play-off safety net for Middlesbrough, West Ham United and Newcastle United but nobody in football was much concerned by such trivialities.
The Hillsborough disaster left a scar on English football that will never heal. The deaths of 97 Liverpool supporters as a direct result of being on the Leppings Lane terrace were a national disgrace, covered up by the authorities with the help of an acquiescent tabloid press whose insidious slander still gets wheeled out in the name of tribal fanaticism to this day.
Hillsborough necessarily played its part in the eventual reshaping of English football and The Valley, condemned on safety grounds and consequently vacant, was an unwelcome analogue for doomed days gone by.
Stadium safety reform raised the bar for a return even higher. The Taylor Report, the Premier League and Italia ’90 helped to change the culture of English football and the process began while Charlton were operating out of a bindle.
Relegation caught up with the exiled Addicks in 1990. They were in the relegation zone by the end of September, bottom on Boxing Day, and seemingly destined to return to the Second Division. In April they were beaten by Wimbledon at Selhurst Park and relegated. A year later, the Dons left Plough Lane and moved into Selhurst themselves.
As Wimbledon’s exile began, Charlton’s moved slowly but surely towards its denouement.
Greenwich Council rejected the club’s application to return to The Valley, resulting in the formation of the Valley Party. Its single-issue candidates stood in local elections and breathed life into the public debate about the club’s situation. Within a couple of years, a new application was approved.
Away from the attentions of the national press, the work to take Charlton back home never stopped.
There were protests by supporters and an ongoing campaign by the local newspaper, The Mercury, kept the searing light of scrutiny trained where it needed to be throughout.
There was work to be done on the pitch in the meantime and relegation hit the Addicks hard. In the first season after the World Cup in Italy, Charlton were pointless until the middle of September and spent a good part of the season in the relegation zone before recovering to finish eight points clear in 16th.
In July 1991, Lawrence departed to take over as manager of Middlesbrough. He was replaced by Alan Curbishley and Steve Gritt, promoted from the coaching staff. Both stayed on as players too. With construction on The Valley underway, everything about the club had about it an air of the temporary that proved misleading.
Charlton gave up their tenancy and moved to West Ham’s Boleyn Ground with a return to The Valley slated for December 1991. Instead, they stayed in East London all season and found their feet in the Second Division. They started well and put together an excellent run of form through the spring but lost the last two games to Tranmere Rovers and Bristol Rovers, finishing in seventh and three points short of a play-off place.
Overjoyed activists, supporters and reporters got their delayed moment the following season. Charlton played at West Ham until they moved back to The Valley in time for a joyous homecoming victory against Portsmouth on 5th December 1992.
“There was bright sunshine, and there was quite a surreal atmosphere that after all this time and all those battles we were finally playing a match at The Valley,” said Everitt.
“The match itself unfolded in exactly the way people wanted it to – Charlton won and we scored the only goal early on. The ground was full of very emotional people, myself included.”
Charlton finished 12th in the Second Division in 1992/93 and nobody really cared. Now back on solid foundations off the pitch, Curbishley revolutionised the club over the course of a decade in sole charge after Gritt moved to Brighton & Hove Albion in 1995.
They were promoted into the Premier League in 1998 after the most dramatic play-off final, beating Sunderland on penalties after a 4-4 draw at Wembley Stadium. They were relegated the following season but promoted again as second-tier champions at the first time of asking.
Curbishley’s achievement in keeping Charlton in the Premier League from 2000 until he left at the end of 2005/06 shouldn’t be underestimated. His contract expired in the summer of 2006. By December he was back at the Boleyn Ground as West Ham’s manager.
Charlton had three managers that season and were relegated into the Championship. They’re now in their fifth consecutive season in League One. Curbishley resigned from his role at West Ham in 2008 and won a constructive dismissal case against them. He hasn’t worked as a first team manager since.
As for The Valley, it’s barely recognisable 32 years after it reopened. Three sides have been rebuilt. The East Stand was finished in 1994 and is now The Alan Curbishley Stand.
It might seem as if the tale of Charlton Athletic and The Valley belongs to another time. It conjures mental images of crumbling terrace steps and buckling crash barriers, rusted turnstiles and chipped paintwork. It’s a powerful piece of football’s social history but it is, when it comes down to it, history.
Yet the affair offers warnings for supporters to heed even now. Warnings about clubs signing players beyond their means. Warnings about absent or uninterested owners. Warnings about clubs being separated from their stadiums, so often a harbinger of bigger problems to come. Warnings that Charlton supporters themselves have become familiar with in this century just as the last.
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“I took it. I didn't look back. It didn't take me long to make the decision because I knew that was what I wanted and I'll never have any regrets in my life. As soon as I put my mind to something I want to do it, that's it. There's no holding me back.”
Scott McTominay on moving to Napoli in a recent interview with BBC Scotland’s Jonathan Sutherland.
Dessert
The New Balance 1000 “Lunar New Year” is right up my street. Don’t let me stop you, Santa Claus.
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