Tragic News: Nathan Jones, the athletic manager at Charlton, and His Family Are Threatened With Death By An Unknown Enemy
Away from the glare and media spotlight of the Premier League, Nathan Jones is quietly rebuilding his career at Charlton Athletic after a bruising spell in charge of Southampton. Jones returned to management at the start of February — almost a year to the day since being sacked by Southampton, then a Premier League club, having spent just 95 days in charge. In his last match there, a sorry 2-1 defeat at home to Wolverhampton Wanderers, a young fan tried to hand him a large home-made mock-up of the UK’s P45 end-of-employment certificate, while irate Southampton supporters joined in with chants of “Sacked in the morning” coming from the away end and also sang “Nathan Jones, get out of our club”. However Jones, who believes he could have made a difference at Southampton if given the opportunity, and he hopes to learn from the experience and improve as a manager in the long run.
Jones signed a four-and-a-half year contract to succeed Michael Appleton, who managed Charlton for barely five months after succeeding Dean Holden. Since then, Jones has only lost once in ten games.
Though they were on the verge of dropping to the fourth division of English football when he took over, the south-east Londoners, who were a top-flight team as recently as 2007, have managed to stay out of danger and there is genuine excitement as attention turns to the upcoming campaign.
Jones said to The Athletic, “We want to get the club back to where it was in previous seasons.” “We think this place has amazing infrastructure, a fantastic fan base, and a history of winning the Premier League. With wise planning, wise choices, and a lot of God’s will, that’s where we’d like to go back.”
Jones, who mentored players like Kasey Palmer, who left, and Joe Gomez, who is currently an England international at Liverpool considering that the conclusion of Appleton’s reign turned poisonous in the stands, evoking comparisons to Jones’ demise at Southampton, to Chelsea and is a Jamaica international, having played for Charlton Under-21s in 2012–13, has already established a solid bond with the supporters.
Charlton was in the top half of the Premier League twenty years ago, but since then, the team has been in a dismal fall due to a high manager turnover rate and unpopular owners, most notably Roland Duchatelet, who continues to own both the club’s training facility and home stadium, The Valley. The takeover was finalized in July of last year by new owners, SE7, of which Charlie Methven, a former executive at Sunderland, was the most well-known member.
In order to have enough time for a full preseason with the appropriate players already collected, Jones is eager to have “99 percent” of his team for the upcoming campaign in place by late June. He declared, “That’s the kind of thing we want to create here, not going into pre-season where we’re six players short and signing guys in August.”
As he shown during his two stints as manager of Luton Town, Jones is a hands-on coach who performs best when his team fully commits to him.
Alfie May, who has scored a division-high 21 league goals this season despite Charlton’s difficulties, will be crucial to any success.
Jones started his managing career at Luton in 2016, when they were ranked eighteenth in League Two, and it has been quite the journey.
Two successful tenure from 2016 to 2019 and 2020 to 2022 saw him lead them up the Football League ladder to the verge of the top flight, either side of a difficult Championship run with Stoke City, where he won only seven of his 38 games. He acknowledged even though Stoke was still recovering from their Premier League relegation in 2018, he never managed to get the greatest performance out of the team, as there were conflicts stemming from a bloated roster and a two-tiered wage structure.
His feats at Luton earned him that crack at the Premier League with an inexperienced Southampton side already mired in a relegation dogfight when he arrived. He lasted 14 games, although they did manage to beat Manchester City en route to the semi-finals of the Carabao Cup. City won the other three competitions they entered last season.
In a brief 51-word statement confirming his departure, Southampton did not do the traditional thing and thank Jones for his efforts. He struggled to settle on a playing style during his time there — once changing formation five times during a single match against Brighton & Hove Albion.
So how does the 50-year-old Welshman reflect on his managerial journey to date?
“Southampton was an anomaly. You don’t change anything in eight games,” Jones says. “Stoke was a real learning curve, it was a real tough place, the squad was disjointed. I learned so much from it, and then implemented those in the spells I had at Luton.
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