Queens Park Rangers, or why the Rs need a kick up the Rs.
Only a points deduction elsewhere kept QPR in the Championship last season. Fans might be forgiven wondering whether relegation then might have been the kinder option.
You look for the good news, but there just doesn’t seem to be any. Queens Park Rangers have won two games this season, the last of which came at Middlesbrough on the 2nd September. They’ve scored nine goals in 14 games in all competitions. Their top scorer is Kenneth Paal, on three. He’s a left-back. Their second highest goalscorer is Jack Colback. He’s scored two. He’s a defensive midfielder.
Of the other four goals they’ve scored this season, only two have come from attacking players, and the last of those came on the 19th September, when Lyndon Dykes scored a stoppage-time equaliser to rescue a point against Swansea City. Otherwise, no attacking player has scored for QPR at all this season since Sinclair Armstrong scored their first league goal of the season at Cardiff on the 12th August, in their second league game of the season.
Their last defeat came 2-1 at West Bromwich Albion on Tuesday night, and it was a familiar story. It’s 190 miles from Shepherds Bush in London to Huddersfield, but if travelling supporters had taken the two-week international break to recharge their batteries after a gruelling start to the season, it didn’t take long for them to become disavowed of the notion that much had changed for the better.
They were two down inside the opening fifteen minutes, and this iteration of Queens Park Rangers are not a team who can afford to be handing out two-goal leads without a care in the world at the moment. It’s not the sort of thing whose entire suite of attacking options have managed just two goals between them all season can afford. They pulled one back, but the 2-1 win gave new Albion manager Darren Moore his first win in charge of that club.
Now eight games without a win, QPR remain in 22nd place in the Championship table, propped up only by the cold comfort that Rotherham United and Sheffield Wednesday have been even worse than they have so far this season. Previous long-time owner Tony Fernandes left the club in July, but continues to haunt all of our thoughts with his latest escapades. Rangers finished last season in 20th place in the Championship table. Had Reading not been deducted six points last season for financial chicanery, they’d have been relegated. This time around, they’re already four points adrift of safety.
Perhaps, Rangers supporters may consider as they survey the wreckage of yet another defeat, the kindest thing to do would have been to relegate them at the end of last season. Just get it over and done with. Close shaves with relegation are—rightly—celebrated by supporters as much as winning promotion, but that survival is only worth anything if lessons are learned from it. Instead, Rangers this season seem determined to follow the same path as last season, only without the wins which took them briefly to the top of the table before coming to a shuddering halt exactly a year ago.
The origins of where Queens Park Rangers find themselves today were a very sudden, very drastic change in the club’s fortunes built on foundations riddled with a far longer-term rot, but on the 25th October 2022, exactly a year ago as this is being written, they were sitting pretty under new manager Michael Beale, who’d been appointed the previous June. QPR were top of the Championship following a 2-1 win against Wigan Athletic. With 16 games played, they were sitting pretty.
The club’s longer-term financial issues, brought about by rank bad management more than a decade ago, were still with them. The latest set of accounts in March tell the financial story of the 2021/22 season. During this, QPR lost £24.7m, or in the region of £474,000 a week. The accounts showed that at the start of last season almost £90m was still owed in various loans and player transfer instalments, as well as an outstanding settlement over FFP breaches going back years.
There were small tremors at first. Following the Wigan win came a 2-0 defeat at Birmingham City and a 2-0 defeat at Norwich. The Birmingham defeat was enough to knock them, not just off the top of the table, but out of the automatic promotion places altogether. Two straight home defeats followed, against West Bromwich Albion and Huddersfield Town, before they wrapped up for the World Cup winter break with another 2-0 loss, this time at Coventry. By this time, they’d dropped to 7th place in the table. The Championship can be an unforgiving place.
There was no pressure on Beale by this time. A month earlier, while the sun was shining and the Rs were top of the table, he’d turned down an offer to manage in the Premier League with Wolverhampton Wanderers. He subsequently told the press: “Integrity is a real big thing for me and loyalty. You don’t give it to receive it back, but if those are the things you live by then at times when you are put in a position you have to be strong by them.”
Just over two weeks later, QPR supporters found out just how much those fine words were worth when Beale upped sticks and left to return to Rangers, where he’d been the assistant to Steven Gerrard prior to the pair of them leaving for Aston Villa. Whether Beale acted with integrity is up for debate. Whether he acted with loyalty essentially boils down to who you think he was acting with it towards. After six months in the job at Loftus Road, a team already on a downward turn were left managerless.
His replacement came from the same production line. Neil Critchley had taken over as the assistant to Steven Gerrard at Villa Park when Beale went to Loftus Road, leaving his position at Blackpool to, as the Blackpool chairman Simon Sadler had previously explained, "pit himself against some of the best coaches in the world.” Three weeks earlier, Gerrard and Critchley had been sacked by Villa after a 3-0 shellacking at Fulham left them suspended just above the Premier League relegation places.
Critchley marked his first game in charge with a 1-0 win at Preston North End. This turned out to be the high point of his brief spell with the club, and by some margin. By the end of February, Critchley was gone. He only lasted twelve games, and the Norwich match was his only win. His win ratio of 8.3% is the lowest of any permanent manager in the history of the club, and his time there also included getting knocked out of the FA Cup at the first hurdle by League One Fleetwood Town.
By the time of his departure, his team were in 17th place in the table and eight points above the relegation places, which was probably a big enough margin to keep them up but might not be. It was a crazy situation for a club which had been top of the table just four months earlier to find themselves in, all the more so when you recall that no-one had even played any club football for one of those months. Critchley’s QPR legacy might well be as the worst manager in the 140 year history of the club.
His replacement, some might argue, had been in waiting a long time. Gareth Ainsworth, the manager most likely to start playing air guitar if Smoke On The Water were to start playing over a club PA system were it to start playing, had been the manager of Wycombe Wanderers for almost ten and a half years, during which time he’d taken the club as far as the Championship in 2020, where they were competitive for a season, although they couldn’t avoid relegation back after one season.
If there was a ‘natural fit’ for this troubled club, then Ainsworth seemed to fit the bill. He’d made just over 150 appearances for them as a player between 2003 and 2010 and had also had two very brief spells as their caretaker-manager towards the end of his playing career at Loftus Road, in October 2008 and April 2009. He didn’t quite fit the profile of being a ‘club legend’. Those positions are more understandably held by the likes of Les Ferdinand, Alec Stock, Terry Venables, Stan Bowles or Gerry Francis.
But he was familiar with the club and had built up a considerable amount of experience during his lengthy time with Wycombe. With a few weeks to have a look over the squad ahead of the start of this season, it felt sensible to write off Critchley as a bad job and give Ainsworth the time to build what he wanted to build. By the end of last season they’d finished 20th in the table and he was talking of the “big changes” that needed to be made.
Ainsworth built his first QPR squad over the course of the summer on a predictably tight budget, but the biggest change of all came with the departure of Tony Fernandes, who divested his shareholding in the club by July. Rangers are sailing close to the wind over FFP, and it’s not difficult to see why. Their losses over the 2021/22 season were three times what they made from broadcasting, and they don’t have the luxury of parachute payments, either.
Meanwhile, Loftus Road is starting to look old and a little tatty, and with too small a capacity—just 18,439, nowadays—for the modern era. The club has been half-looking for a new home for a while but without any progress. But how would they even begin to contemplate building a new stadium when they’re in this condition? There is talk of redeveloping the main stand, but there’s no timeline for this to happen. It’s all a long way removed from these ambitious plans.
The good news is that the club finally opened its new training ground at Heston during the summer. The bad news, for those hoping to get news soon on a new ground or the redevelopment of Loftus Road, is that it took the club more than eleven years to get the training ground completed. The path towards getting anything built in London can be tortuously slow, at times.
And this season has been… bad. They’ve scored the second least goals in the Championship so far and have conceded the joint-most, and all while playing Ainsworthball, a style of football that could be described as a little, well… ‘agricultural’. It can hardly be said that QPR supporters are impatient. They’ve been in the Championship for 17 of the last 20 seasons. They had to wait eleven years for a new training ground. Loftus Road was English football’s most modern stadium forty years ago. Other than being converted to all-seater as a result of The Taylor Report (and having their plastic pitch ripped out), it’s barely changed since.
Relegation is far from certain. After all, it is—for now—still October. But the results aren’t flowing and the team aren’t scoring enough while conceding too many. And there have been few signs of improvement under Gareth Ainsworth. Queens Park Rangers have played 42 league games over the last twelve months. They’ve won six, drawn ten and lost twenty-six. By any standards you wish to apply that’s relegation form, and with the bright start to last season already feeling a little like a collective fever dream, there’s no sign of anything happening this time around that will rescue them. Perhaps had QPR suffered that shock of relegation by now they’d have found a way to breathe some life back into themselves. As things stand, this season has carried on the worst tendencies of the last and if there is good news around the corner, that corner still feels some way off.