New role for Gallen. Roddy ‘resigns’
Happy Christmas Eve all, and a busy Charlton news day it was too.
Ged Roddy had become a bit of cult figure amongst Addicks’ fans, not for anything that he’d particularly done, but for what he had supposed to have done. He gave one early interview when he came across as knowledgeable and excited about the role, but ever since whispers of his baneful operating style out-noised any responses from the man himself.
Today Thomas Sandgaard announced that Roddy had resigned from his role as club Technical Director, a soft landing for Roddy himself and less egg on the face of the owner who selected him initially and sung his praises as the next coming. Thomas has a habit of that.
Roddy appeared to be in the middle of selecting Nigel Adkins, a poor summer recruitment plan, and allegedly many in-house staffing problems. He did take credit for introducing the club to Thomas in the first place, and if this is indeed fact, then we should be grateful.
Roddy will continue his relationship with Charlton and consult on the club’s efforts to gain category one academy status, for which Sandgaard is full steam ahead. Initially Sandgaard said he would also support the efforts of the Women’s, sorry Ladies, team.
Steve Gallen has a change of job title as well, and moves to Director of Recruiting, which is less grandiose than his previous title of Director of Football, but more defined and suited to Gallen’s skill set.
Helping him though is now Thomas’ son Martin, in a newly formed role of Director of Analysis. I think we will have to see how this develops and if Martin possesses the skills required and how he oversees Jacko’s support analysts already on the payroll.
Chicago Addick 
Ged Roddy was only recently promoted/given a new job/moved sideways – and put in charge of the Academy and the Women’s team, but it seems that he is now off to work for FIFA, in what capacity I don’t know. Maybe a fortuitous bit of job hopping, his newish role did hint at being moved away from a job where his presence was complicating rather than enlightening things.
I was never quite sure what to believe about his clout behind the scenes – there were a lot of rumours that he was having too much of an influence and consequently we ended up with a “too many cooks spoil the broth” situation when we were rebuilding, similarly I heard plenty of rumours that Thomas Sandgaard was apparently having a cashflow problem at Zynex and so wasn’t pumping enough money into the club. Rumours eh…Maybe he simply became a useful person alongside Nigel Adkins to blame for our early season form. Our recruitment process was certainly an issue in the summer, I expected a lot more work to be done before pre-season training started but as we know that wasn’t the case. I wonder if the truth was a bit more simple – clubs and agents knew we had money to spend and jacked up the prices that they wanted for their players while we were trying to negotiate a little bit harder?
At any rate as has been proven by the form under JJ many of the players we acquired have worked out, perhaps only Pape Soare and Harry Arter look to be poor signings and that’s because they came with a lot of experience of playing at higher levels to L1 and haven’t really shown it. Others like George Dobson, Craig MacGillivray, CBT and Sean Clare, all free transfers, look to be very shrewd bits of business.
I like the idea of taking analysis seriously, the data revolution in sport came to prominence with the publication of “Moneyball” but is still finding its feet in football. There are potentially hundreds of players out there that we could sign, the key though is to find good quality players who fit our style of play and ethos while not costing the earth. A lot of Premiership clubs for example are taking on kids for their Academy sides, training them up to a high level and then dropping many of them in their early 20s because they aren’t quite good enough for that league, a lot of these players are though good enough for L1. Then there are those playing in the levels below the four divisions, many non-league teams have Academies plus there are educational academies like Aspire where DJ and several other pros started out at. While we have some kind of analysis in place it needs to be industrialised to meet the reality of talent identification in the modern era, and then there is the women’s team…
Ladies SP, ladies….