Thomas makes new appointments
Hopefully this is a pre-requisition of an active summer player window as Thomas Sandgaard has had a busy week with three new senior staff appointments.
The highest profile appointment is that of Brian Jokat as Chief Operating Officer (COO). The 60-year old has had a very varied career across Europe working in England, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey and Bosnia & Herzegovina, where he was head coach of the national hockey team.
In fact Jokat, Canadian born, has spent the majority of his career in ice hockey including being the CEO of the London Knights twenty years ago.
Jokat’s involvement with Charlton Athletic Community Trust from 2005 to 2012 plus his varied career has obviously appealed to Sandgaard, and I wish him well.
Jon De Souza has been appointed as First-Team Development Coach. His role according to Sandgaard will be developing and improving players from the first team and the academy.
De Souza has 17 years of experience in football having worked previously with Luton Town, Brentford and most recently Colchester United, where his departure appears to have been met with great glee!
De Souza was initially Colchester’s Academy Manager but three season’s ago he took the role of Technical and Performance Director. Statistics will show that his guidance has not had the desired effect.
The future will tell if this was a Jackson appointment or not.
The final appointment was forced in that the long-serving Chris Parkes is retiring and Sandgaard has chosen Ron Dangerfield to replace him as club secretary.
The biggest asset a football club secretary can have is that they operate behind the scenes with little or no news attached to them. That means that the job is being doing right and efficiently.
The wonderfully named Dangerfield was also at Brentford like De Souza, the Bees being Sandgaard’s most admired club. More recently Dangerfield was Chairman of Maldon & Tiptree, who play in the 8th tier Isthmian League Northern Division.
I’m not sure if that was a vanity product, or he had a local connection but I hope six years outside of the EFL doesn’t make Ron too rusty on it’s rules and regulations.
Sandgaard thinks he has the skill set and I hope the new club secretary has a extremely busy summer.
Good luck to Brian, Jon and Ron.
Chicago Addick 
CA, as always a clear informative posting. All three appointments have a ‘left-field-ish’ element to them, not unlike Nigel A. I very much hope that these thoughts are wrong and that they are well thought-out calculated appointments and I wish them all well.
Likewise Paul. TS does seems to have a very random personnel selector!
As you know I follow the academy and the young players within closely and all I can say regarding DeSouza is that in recent times Colchester U18s have punched above their weight .
This season our U18s have played Colchester 3 times twice in the league and once in the league cup. With CAFC winning one game 3-2 and losing the other two 6-4 and 5-1 albeit with weakened teams because of players missing to play in the U23s. Your comments are therefore worrying as the last thing the academy needs is someone who could be unpopular with players and their parents.
DeSouza’s appointment is very worrying as it’s yet another coach who has been really poor for the last three season and that’s with a club a league below us and who have been around the bottom half for those years.
That’s why the club released him before the end of this season, due to a lot of pressure from the fans, with the continued poor performances of the players.
No doubt Charlton snapped him up as he was on the cheap, being out of a job, as can’t have been to do with his current CV? Though I suppose can’t be any worse than the other coach Jackson recently brought in, to sort out our defence and the continued errors!!!
Jon De Souza looks to be a replacement for Ged Roddy who had a similar role at the academy before departing for a job with FIFA a few months ago. Although he has been at Colchester for a few years his previous job was at Brentford and they had a decent track record of developing talented players, but they closed their Academy putting him out of work.
Like the other two he fills an important role, if we are to start motoring up the leagues and want to try and do it organically we need these sort of roles being filled.
Totally underwhelming, rather like the next 3 months methinks.
Hope against hope I am at least partially wrong.
Interesting John Desousa the Colchester supporters so very happy and yes all these recent appointments and before from the lower reaches of the football pyramid!!!
If Thomas Sandgaard now has sufficient funding to bolster the administrative and management side of things (hopefully the right choices?), one has to hope that this same philosophy will extend itself to the securing of a few guys this off season who know how to play football, because most of the ones currently making up the senior squad don’t have a fricking clue!