Post by Deleted on Oct 18, 2023 10:15:28 GMT
The date was October 22, 2022. Michael Beale was lapping up the applause of the Queens Park Rangers faithful after a 2-1 win over Wigan Athletic put them top of the Championship.
Fast forward a year and the outlook has shifted dramatically. After narrowly avoiding the drop last season when their results nosedived, the club are mired in another relegation scrap.
Since that victory over Wigan, they have won just once at Loftus Road and have discarded two managers, with club legend Gareth Ainsworth in danger of becoming the third.
There are concerns off the pitch too. Their latest set of accounts, from March, showed the club was losing around £2million ($2.4m) a month, and sporting director Les Ferdinand left his position in June and has not been replaced.
This is the sorry tale of a club stuck in an ominous downward spiral.
QPR’s campaign kicked off catastrophically as they lost 4-0 to Watford with all the goals scored in the first half. This followed a calamitous final pre-season match where they were humiliated 5-0 away to League One side Oxford United.
Following a brief uplift, results and performances have quickly gone downhill. Their last outing saw them thrashed 4-0 at home to Blackburn Rovers, who were in 20th when the game kicked off. On the same day, club chairman Amit Bhatia was playing golf at the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship in Scotland.
Kevin Gallen, who scored 97 goals for the club, says: “That felt like a turning point. It was a low. The club needs to sort this out. It can’t go on.”
It was a view shared by Clive Whittingham, from fan blog Loft for Words.
He says: “The team isn’t going to stay in this league as it is. It doesn’t score any goals. The last few games have been awful. At Leeds, the game before Blackburn, we looked like a pub team. It’s really sad.”
A first-team source, who, like others spoken to for this piece, has been granted anonymity because he did not have permission to comment, says: “We’ve got ourselves into a situation where we’re looking for a bit of a miracle to stay in the league.”
It was hoped February’s appointment of Ainsworth as manager, the charismatic former player who had great success in charge of Wycombe Wanderers, would galvanise the club.
gareth-ainsworth
Ainsworth led Wycombe to the Championship in 2020 (Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)
His predecessor, Neil Critchley, had won one match in 12 games after replacing Beale when he jumped ship for Scottish side Rangers in November last year.
Beale had come close to joining Premier League side Wolverhampton Wanderers but insisted he wanted to stay at QPR as “integrity is a big thing for me, and loyalty”. The following game, away to Birmingham City, the fans unfurled a banner saying, “Loyalty will always be remembered”. A month later, he was in the Rangers hot seat.
Ainsworth, who developed a reputation for creating great spirit and togetherness during his 11-year spell at Wycombe, took over with QPR in 17th.
One of his first acts was to bring in a guest speaker to the training ground to teach the players and staff a ‘haka’, a traditional dance from Maori culture, to improve morale.
QPR won just three matches from 13 under Ainsworth last season. They finished 20th, one point ahead of Cardiff City in 21st and six points ahead of 22nd-placed Reading, who had a six-point deduction for breaching the EFL’s financial rules.
Whittingham says: “We were lucky not to get relegated last season. It was a combination of Reading getting the points deducted and the luckiest win I’ve ever seen in my life away to Burnley. We had 19 per cent possession. One of our midfielders, Tim Iroegbunam, attempted one pass in 67 minutes with a completion rate of zero per cent.”
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A big part of QPR’s problems has centred on their recruitment, namely their inability to cash in on prized assets.
Gallen, who now works as a full-time scout for Crystal Palace, says: “Recruitment in a football club is the most important thing. QPR’s recruitment over the years hasn’t been good. That part drastically needs to improve.
“QPR need to start producing more young players and develop them. The club haven’t produced quality younger players over the last eight to 10 years — even Eberechi Eze came from Millwall when they let him go.”
A first-team source puts it even more bluntly. “I fear for them. The recruitment has been appalling, they look lost.”
Whittingham describes the club’s recruitment as “not coherent”, with different players signed by certain managers or the recruitment department, leaving a jumbled assortment.
“We’ve got players because Gareth wants them here, some because Beale wanted them, some because Les Ferdinand wanted them, others because the recruitment department spotted them,” he explains. “You end up with weird things like Kenneth Paal, who the recruitment guys picked out from the Dutch league, pumping channel balls for a Gareth Ainsworth team. It’s not joined up or coherent. The manager is a really odd match for a lot of players they’ve got.”
Les Ferdinand
Ferdinand left his job as director of football in June (Photo: Stu Forster via Getty Images)
Last week Ferdinand expressed his regret at deviating from the club’s model.
In an interview with Kammy and Ben’s Proper Football Podcast, he said: “When I came through the door at QPR we talked about how we needed to bring players in, develop them and then sell. We did that with Eze. And we knew that was the model.
“The next season, we had Chris Willock, Ilias Chair, Seny Dieng, Rob Dickie, who we could have sold for good money. But we were in the top six. So the owners went, ‘We can’t sell our best players, we’re in the top six’. I said, ‘Well, hang on a minute, the remit is we need to raise money, we need to sell players’. Your players are going to be at their most valuable, unfortunately, when they’re in the top six. If I could change anything it would be having the plan and sticking to the plan rather than changing the plan.”
Ferdinand’s role remains vacant, a decision that has been met with surprise by the fans.
Chief executive Lee Hoos is now responsible for the day-to-day running of the club.
Whittingham says: “I don’t think there’s a club in the country that needs a director of football more than QPR because our owners are benevolent. They pay for everything, they’re just forking out money at over £2m a month — they make loads of mistakes but they do pay for their mistakes, we have to remember that. It’s this awkward situation: we can’t live with them and can’t live without them.”
Gallen agrees, saying Ferdinand’s departure had left a vacuum. A month after Ferdinand quit, co-chairman Tony Fernandes ended his 12 years of involvement at the club.
“I find it quite amazing you go into the transfer window without a director of football,” says Gallen. “One of the big jobs is to head up recruitment and get the right players in. We need to get someone in as soon as possible so we can plan for January — we need reinforcements.”
Ferdinand divided opinion. A former fan favourite, he came under intense scrutiny last year.
Whittingham says: “You can’t spend eight years saying you’re creating a development club and then have to bring in Chris Martin (a 34-year-old journeyman striker) to rescue your season because there’s no one at the club who can replace Lyndon Dykes.”
Hoos played down the importance of the sporting director role and hit back at claims the club’s recruitment was muddled.
“I’ve been working in football for 25 years — Les is the first director of football I’ve worked with and it was great but I’m very used to not working with a director of football,” Hoos tells The Athletic. “In terms of negotiations, I can negotiate a deal just as well as a director of football.
“As long as I’ve got a head of recruitment (Andy Belk) and manager that both agree — and that, by the way, is the only way we sign a player — that it’s the right way forward. There isn’t any kind of incoherent or inconsistent approach.”
He said the club had not shifted from their model but simply not received any firm offers for their best players. “I’m not going to talk about specific players but there’s only one that I’m aware of — we didn’t even get a formal offer — that something was coming about where there could have been a decent offer eventually. We decided that if we didn’t get X amount then it wasn’t worth doing.
“The other players… to sell, you have to have an offer. We didn’t receive any. The decision was if we can’t get a legitimate offer for these guys, we’re better off keeping the band together.
“This summer, we sold a couple of players and we made money but we would have liked to have sold them to a Premier League club for even more money. The Championship market for selling players has really diminished unless you’re selling to a club with parachute payments.”
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With QPR unable to bank a hefty fee since Eze joined Crystal Palace for £20m in August 2020, they are sailing close to breaching financial fair play (FFP) rules. This means they have little spending power to improve the squad. Under the rules, Championship clubs are allowed losses up to £39m in a three-year cycle.
In the latest set of accounts in March, QPR lost £24m. This amounts to around £474,000 a week. It showed almost £90m was still owed in various loans and player transfer instalments, as well as an outstanding settlement over FFP breaches.
However, now the Eze sale has rolled out of the three-year cycle, it will be replaced by whatever the club loses this year. Their last set of accounts showed that, apart from Eze, they have only generated a profit from player sales greater than £10m twice in the last decade.
Eze, who has won two England caps since leaving QPR, has a 20 per cent sell-on clause if he leaves Palace (Photo: MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Whittingham said: “It’s put them in a situation where the team needs surgery in every possible position but there’s no FFP headroom to do it with.”
One first-team source said there was a feeling the club had missed out on the chance to cash in on Chair and Willock. They said Chair, a Morocco international, is a class act in a winning team but looks too individual when results are going against them.
Centre-back Dickie was sold to Bristol City this summer for less than what QPR paid Oxford United for him in 2020 despite his stock rising.
To bring costs down, the club have tried to trim everyone’s wages to below £10,000 a week. They are also hoping Eze leaves Palace for a hefty fee as QPR inserted a 20 per cent sell-on clause.
Chairman Bhatia is married to Vanisha Mittal, daughter of Lakshmi, whose family is worth £16billion according to the most recent Sunday Times Rich List. The Mittal family owns 10 per cent of the club and is represented on the board by Bhatia, but Malaysian businessman Ruben Gnanalingam remains the majority shareholder with 51 per cent.
Regardless of their combined financial might, FFP regulations continue to restrict QPR in the transfer market.
Another stumbling block for QPR is the size of their stadium in west London. Loftus Road has been their home for more than 100 years but holds fewer than 20,000 people.
Alternative sites have been looked at for more than a decade but after exhausting the search, plans are afoot to redevelop the main stand.
It was against this gloomy financial backdrop that the club turned to Ainsworth, who was credited with getting a lot out of a little at Wycombe.
He put his faith in experienced players who joined this summer for small fees or on free transfers to instil a sense of resilience. This included Asmir Begovic, Jack Colback, Morgan Fox and Steve Cook. Fox, who joined from Stoke City, is out injured.
Hoos says: “They have been good signings. When the going gets tough, people like Cook, Begovic, they have a big influence in the dressing room and can help the younger players.”
A good chunk of the money the club did spend, though, was on Brighton & Hove Albion midfielder Taylor Richards — who has played just two league minutes this season. He had failed to complete a full 90 minutes on loan last season.
One first-team source said they feared the older players would struggle to stay fit for the duration of a 46-game Championship season.
After that opening day drubbing away to Watford, QPR won their next match away to Cardiff in an improved display but have recorded just one more victory since then.
There have been grumblings from the club’s fans over the direct playing style. Despite their six-game winless run, Hoos insists the club is behind Ainsworth.
He says: “One of the reasons we hired Gareth was that he can adapt, innovate and try new things. He did something different for Blackburn, which didn’t work out. But he’ll go back, address that, and he’s done some different things in training the last couple of weeks. I would expect to see us spring forward.”
He defended Ainsworth’s style of play when that was put to him by The Athletic. “I’m not sure we always give up possession, the last five games that hasn’t been the case. I thought it had been fairly even. People got that from last year but he switched that after the first few games of this season, it’s a lot closer than people think (the two teams in possession) but because that perception is at the back of people’s minds that’s always what they fasten on to.
“There’s been an effort to change that. What drives me nuts is when managers keep saying, ‘We’ve got to do this better’, and do the same thing over and over and expect to get different results.”
While the club’s search for a new ground ended in frustration, they do at least boast a new £20m training ground in Heston. This includes seven pitches for the first team and academy.
QPR fans raised £6.8m to fund the training ground via a bond scheme. It is hoped the site will help attract and bring through the best upcoming talent.
The club said the state-of-the-art rehabilitation facilities and the appointment of director of performance Ben Williams, from the INEOS Grenadiers cycling team, over the summer had helped with injuries and getting players back on the pitch more quickly.
Another reason for optimism is the progress of exciting 20-year-old forward Sinclair Armstrong, who made his debut for the Republic of Ireland in September.
On Saturday, QPR travel to fellow strugglers Huddersfield Town. A fourth straight defeat would leave them in deep trouble in what is becoming another season to forget.
Fast forward a year and the outlook has shifted dramatically. After narrowly avoiding the drop last season when their results nosedived, the club are mired in another relegation scrap.
Since that victory over Wigan, they have won just once at Loftus Road and have discarded two managers, with club legend Gareth Ainsworth in danger of becoming the third.
There are concerns off the pitch too. Their latest set of accounts, from March, showed the club was losing around £2million ($2.4m) a month, and sporting director Les Ferdinand left his position in June and has not been replaced.
This is the sorry tale of a club stuck in an ominous downward spiral.
QPR’s campaign kicked off catastrophically as they lost 4-0 to Watford with all the goals scored in the first half. This followed a calamitous final pre-season match where they were humiliated 5-0 away to League One side Oxford United.
Following a brief uplift, results and performances have quickly gone downhill. Their last outing saw them thrashed 4-0 at home to Blackburn Rovers, who were in 20th when the game kicked off. On the same day, club chairman Amit Bhatia was playing golf at the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship in Scotland.
Kevin Gallen, who scored 97 goals for the club, says: “That felt like a turning point. It was a low. The club needs to sort this out. It can’t go on.”
It was a view shared by Clive Whittingham, from fan blog Loft for Words.
He says: “The team isn’t going to stay in this league as it is. It doesn’t score any goals. The last few games have been awful. At Leeds, the game before Blackburn, we looked like a pub team. It’s really sad.”
A first-team source, who, like others spoken to for this piece, has been granted anonymity because he did not have permission to comment, says: “We’ve got ourselves into a situation where we’re looking for a bit of a miracle to stay in the league.”
It was hoped February’s appointment of Ainsworth as manager, the charismatic former player who had great success in charge of Wycombe Wanderers, would galvanise the club.
gareth-ainsworth
Ainsworth led Wycombe to the Championship in 2020 (Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)
His predecessor, Neil Critchley, had won one match in 12 games after replacing Beale when he jumped ship for Scottish side Rangers in November last year.
Beale had come close to joining Premier League side Wolverhampton Wanderers but insisted he wanted to stay at QPR as “integrity is a big thing for me, and loyalty”. The following game, away to Birmingham City, the fans unfurled a banner saying, “Loyalty will always be remembered”. A month later, he was in the Rangers hot seat.
Ainsworth, who developed a reputation for creating great spirit and togetherness during his 11-year spell at Wycombe, took over with QPR in 17th.
One of his first acts was to bring in a guest speaker to the training ground to teach the players and staff a ‘haka’, a traditional dance from Maori culture, to improve morale.
QPR won just three matches from 13 under Ainsworth last season. They finished 20th, one point ahead of Cardiff City in 21st and six points ahead of 22nd-placed Reading, who had a six-point deduction for breaching the EFL’s financial rules.
Whittingham says: “We were lucky not to get relegated last season. It was a combination of Reading getting the points deducted and the luckiest win I’ve ever seen in my life away to Burnley. We had 19 per cent possession. One of our midfielders, Tim Iroegbunam, attempted one pass in 67 minutes with a completion rate of zero per cent.”
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A big part of QPR’s problems has centred on their recruitment, namely their inability to cash in on prized assets.
Gallen, who now works as a full-time scout for Crystal Palace, says: “Recruitment in a football club is the most important thing. QPR’s recruitment over the years hasn’t been good. That part drastically needs to improve.
“QPR need to start producing more young players and develop them. The club haven’t produced quality younger players over the last eight to 10 years — even Eberechi Eze came from Millwall when they let him go.”
A first-team source puts it even more bluntly. “I fear for them. The recruitment has been appalling, they look lost.”
Whittingham describes the club’s recruitment as “not coherent”, with different players signed by certain managers or the recruitment department, leaving a jumbled assortment.
“We’ve got players because Gareth wants them here, some because Beale wanted them, some because Les Ferdinand wanted them, others because the recruitment department spotted them,” he explains. “You end up with weird things like Kenneth Paal, who the recruitment guys picked out from the Dutch league, pumping channel balls for a Gareth Ainsworth team. It’s not joined up or coherent. The manager is a really odd match for a lot of players they’ve got.”
Les Ferdinand
Ferdinand left his job as director of football in June (Photo: Stu Forster via Getty Images)
Last week Ferdinand expressed his regret at deviating from the club’s model.
In an interview with Kammy and Ben’s Proper Football Podcast, he said: “When I came through the door at QPR we talked about how we needed to bring players in, develop them and then sell. We did that with Eze. And we knew that was the model.
“The next season, we had Chris Willock, Ilias Chair, Seny Dieng, Rob Dickie, who we could have sold for good money. But we were in the top six. So the owners went, ‘We can’t sell our best players, we’re in the top six’. I said, ‘Well, hang on a minute, the remit is we need to raise money, we need to sell players’. Your players are going to be at their most valuable, unfortunately, when they’re in the top six. If I could change anything it would be having the plan and sticking to the plan rather than changing the plan.”
Ferdinand’s role remains vacant, a decision that has been met with surprise by the fans.
Chief executive Lee Hoos is now responsible for the day-to-day running of the club.
Whittingham says: “I don’t think there’s a club in the country that needs a director of football more than QPR because our owners are benevolent. They pay for everything, they’re just forking out money at over £2m a month — they make loads of mistakes but they do pay for their mistakes, we have to remember that. It’s this awkward situation: we can’t live with them and can’t live without them.”
Gallen agrees, saying Ferdinand’s departure had left a vacuum. A month after Ferdinand quit, co-chairman Tony Fernandes ended his 12 years of involvement at the club.
“I find it quite amazing you go into the transfer window without a director of football,” says Gallen. “One of the big jobs is to head up recruitment and get the right players in. We need to get someone in as soon as possible so we can plan for January — we need reinforcements.”
Ferdinand divided opinion. A former fan favourite, he came under intense scrutiny last year.
Whittingham says: “You can’t spend eight years saying you’re creating a development club and then have to bring in Chris Martin (a 34-year-old journeyman striker) to rescue your season because there’s no one at the club who can replace Lyndon Dykes.”
Hoos played down the importance of the sporting director role and hit back at claims the club’s recruitment was muddled.
“I’ve been working in football for 25 years — Les is the first director of football I’ve worked with and it was great but I’m very used to not working with a director of football,” Hoos tells The Athletic. “In terms of negotiations, I can negotiate a deal just as well as a director of football.
“As long as I’ve got a head of recruitment (Andy Belk) and manager that both agree — and that, by the way, is the only way we sign a player — that it’s the right way forward. There isn’t any kind of incoherent or inconsistent approach.”
He said the club had not shifted from their model but simply not received any firm offers for their best players. “I’m not going to talk about specific players but there’s only one that I’m aware of — we didn’t even get a formal offer — that something was coming about where there could have been a decent offer eventually. We decided that if we didn’t get X amount then it wasn’t worth doing.
“The other players… to sell, you have to have an offer. We didn’t receive any. The decision was if we can’t get a legitimate offer for these guys, we’re better off keeping the band together.
“This summer, we sold a couple of players and we made money but we would have liked to have sold them to a Premier League club for even more money. The Championship market for selling players has really diminished unless you’re selling to a club with parachute payments.”
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With QPR unable to bank a hefty fee since Eze joined Crystal Palace for £20m in August 2020, they are sailing close to breaching financial fair play (FFP) rules. This means they have little spending power to improve the squad. Under the rules, Championship clubs are allowed losses up to £39m in a three-year cycle.
In the latest set of accounts in March, QPR lost £24m. This amounts to around £474,000 a week. It showed almost £90m was still owed in various loans and player transfer instalments, as well as an outstanding settlement over FFP breaches.
However, now the Eze sale has rolled out of the three-year cycle, it will be replaced by whatever the club loses this year. Their last set of accounts showed that, apart from Eze, they have only generated a profit from player sales greater than £10m twice in the last decade.
Eze, who has won two England caps since leaving QPR, has a 20 per cent sell-on clause if he leaves Palace (Photo: MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Whittingham said: “It’s put them in a situation where the team needs surgery in every possible position but there’s no FFP headroom to do it with.”
One first-team source said there was a feeling the club had missed out on the chance to cash in on Chair and Willock. They said Chair, a Morocco international, is a class act in a winning team but looks too individual when results are going against them.
Centre-back Dickie was sold to Bristol City this summer for less than what QPR paid Oxford United for him in 2020 despite his stock rising.
To bring costs down, the club have tried to trim everyone’s wages to below £10,000 a week. They are also hoping Eze leaves Palace for a hefty fee as QPR inserted a 20 per cent sell-on clause.
Chairman Bhatia is married to Vanisha Mittal, daughter of Lakshmi, whose family is worth £16billion according to the most recent Sunday Times Rich List. The Mittal family owns 10 per cent of the club and is represented on the board by Bhatia, but Malaysian businessman Ruben Gnanalingam remains the majority shareholder with 51 per cent.
Regardless of their combined financial might, FFP regulations continue to restrict QPR in the transfer market.
Another stumbling block for QPR is the size of their stadium in west London. Loftus Road has been their home for more than 100 years but holds fewer than 20,000 people.
Alternative sites have been looked at for more than a decade but after exhausting the search, plans are afoot to redevelop the main stand.
It was against this gloomy financial backdrop that the club turned to Ainsworth, who was credited with getting a lot out of a little at Wycombe.
He put his faith in experienced players who joined this summer for small fees or on free transfers to instil a sense of resilience. This included Asmir Begovic, Jack Colback, Morgan Fox and Steve Cook. Fox, who joined from Stoke City, is out injured.
Hoos says: “They have been good signings. When the going gets tough, people like Cook, Begovic, they have a big influence in the dressing room and can help the younger players.”
A good chunk of the money the club did spend, though, was on Brighton & Hove Albion midfielder Taylor Richards — who has played just two league minutes this season. He had failed to complete a full 90 minutes on loan last season.
One first-team source said they feared the older players would struggle to stay fit for the duration of a 46-game Championship season.
After that opening day drubbing away to Watford, QPR won their next match away to Cardiff in an improved display but have recorded just one more victory since then.
There have been grumblings from the club’s fans over the direct playing style. Despite their six-game winless run, Hoos insists the club is behind Ainsworth.
He says: “One of the reasons we hired Gareth was that he can adapt, innovate and try new things. He did something different for Blackburn, which didn’t work out. But he’ll go back, address that, and he’s done some different things in training the last couple of weeks. I would expect to see us spring forward.”
He defended Ainsworth’s style of play when that was put to him by The Athletic. “I’m not sure we always give up possession, the last five games that hasn’t been the case. I thought it had been fairly even. People got that from last year but he switched that after the first few games of this season, it’s a lot closer than people think (the two teams in possession) but because that perception is at the back of people’s minds that’s always what they fasten on to.
“There’s been an effort to change that. What drives me nuts is when managers keep saying, ‘We’ve got to do this better’, and do the same thing over and over and expect to get different results.”
While the club’s search for a new ground ended in frustration, they do at least boast a new £20m training ground in Heston. This includes seven pitches for the first team and academy.
QPR fans raised £6.8m to fund the training ground via a bond scheme. It is hoped the site will help attract and bring through the best upcoming talent.
The club said the state-of-the-art rehabilitation facilities and the appointment of director of performance Ben Williams, from the INEOS Grenadiers cycling team, over the summer had helped with injuries and getting players back on the pitch more quickly.
Another reason for optimism is the progress of exciting 20-year-old forward Sinclair Armstrong, who made his debut for the Republic of Ireland in September.
On Saturday, QPR travel to fellow strugglers Huddersfield Town. A fourth straight defeat would leave them in deep trouble in what is becoming another season to forget.
