The Long Read: Queens Park Rangers & the longest tail
In February 2022 Queens Park Rangers were dreaming of the Premier League. Now they're among the favourites to be relegated into League One.
If the start of a new season is a time for unbridled optimism for football supporters, it can also be a point at which scales start to fall from the eyes. Left to our own devices and with weeks on end, our imaginations can fill with hopes and dreams for the season to come which border upon the delusional, but that first day of the season, usually a bright, sunny afternoon given to provoking optimism can sometimes end as a sharp reminder of realities that haven’t gone away, no matter how much we might want them to have done.
No other clubs endured a sharper start to their new season than Queens Park Rangers. It wasn’t completely unexpected that they’d struggle. They had started their game at Watford as one of the pre-season favourites to be relegated from the Championship, after all. But by half-time at Vicarage Road on that opening day, QPR were 4-0 down and staring down the barrel of a very long gun indeed.
The 23rd February 2022 certainly felt like longer ago than just 18 months. At the end of that day, QPR were celebrating an unlikely win. With eight minutes to play at Loftus Road against Blackpool they fell 1-0 down, a goal which finally seemed to torpedo their chances of automatic promotion places into the Premier League, only for a Luke Amos own goal with a couple of minutes to play and a Sam Field goal deep into stoppage-time to turn the result on its head, lifting to Rangers to third place in the table, two points behind Bournemouth, albeit having played three games more.
Under the best of circumstances, ‘albeit’ would have been doing some pretty heavy lifting there, but few were fully prepared for what came next. The Blackpool game was their 33rd of the season. By the end of the season, they’d picked up just ten more points as form fell off a cliff. Manager Mark Warburton, it was confirmed in April, would not be staying with the club beyond the end of the season. QPR finished the season in 11th place in the table, and it took a 1-0 win at Swansea on the last day of the season to secure a top half finish. The uncertainty over Warburton’s future has been credited as one of the bigger drivers of this decline.
Michael Beale was chosen as Warburton’s replacement. It was his first managerial position, having been widely credited as the brains behind Steven Gerrard’s previous success in Scotland with Rangers (Glasgow), and all seemed well. By the middle of October they were top of the Championship and set fair, only for the very sudden sound of a record scratching to bring everything to a juddering halt. On the 28th November, after less than half a season at Loftus Road, was poached by Rangers (Glasgow), leaving the club well and truly in a most unexpected lurch.
Beale’s early success at Loftus Road had not gone unnoticed, and in October Wolves had almost successfully persuaded him to the Premier League, only for the club to persuade him to stay. “Integrity is a big thing for me, and loyalty,” Beale said at the time. “I’ve been all-in here and I’ve asked other people to be all-in. So I can’t be the first person to run away from the ship.” Six weeks later, he was at Rangers, his previous comments of the sort of shallow, self-serving hypocrisy that football supporters hate more than perhaps anything else. They’re always loyal until they aren’t any more, aren’t they?
There is another version of this sequence of events. It’s pure speculation, as Beale has never really said as much publicly, but is there a possibility that he saw something behind the scenes at the club which hinted at what was to come? His replacement Neil Critchley began with a 1-0 win at Preston North End, but that was definitely as good as things got for Critchley at Loftus Road. It was his only win—though he did draw five of his next seven games—and by the time he was relieved of his duties in February with one win from his twelve games in charge they were 17th in the table and still sliding.
And into the middle of all this were dumped the company accounts to the end of the 2021/22 season. They made for grim reading. The club lost £24m in one year, not that far short of half a million pounds a week, with almost £90m still owed in various loans and player transfer instalments, as well as an outstanding settlement over previous Financial Fair Play breaches. An increased playing staff accounted for a 10% increase in wage costs. And all these losses came despite the club increasing their turnover by 7% on the previous year.
The club had long admired Gareth Ainsworth and the work he had done with Wycombe Wanderers, and on this occasion they managed to tempt him away from the club at which he’d spent more than a decade and which he’d taken from League Two as high as the Championship. But Ainsworth inherited a mess, and Rangers' form didn’t improve under him. They won just three further games under him last season and finished the season two places and six points above the relegation places, with two of those three wins coming in the last three, including one at already-promoted Burnley. Had Reading not been docked six points over their ongoing inability to run themselves as a business, they would have been relegated on goal difference.
The summer brought further changes when long-time co-owner Tony Fernandes sold his shareholding club and resigned from the board of directors. His time with the club had been at best mixed, but the departure of any one individual with whom the club is so closely associated as Fernandes was with QPR is always likely to add to a feeling of instability.
The club decided to keep faith with Ainsworth, but such astronomical losses meant that FFP was a significant issue, so there was little money to spend on new players. Twelve were released, and the club went for experience in the form of journeyman goalkeeper Asmir Begovic, midfielder Jack Colback and defender Steve Cook, while the previous loan of midfielder Taylor Richards from Brighton was made permanent and Lyndon Dykes signed a new contract. The highly-rated Ilias Chair hasn’t left the club yet.
All of which leads us to Saturday 5th August and the first weekend of the EFL Championship season. Watford have had a difficult time of things themselves recently, with unhappiness growing at their post-Premier League stall and an ongoing managerial revolving door which is no longer yielding results. But it only took 33 seconds for them to carve through the centre of the QPR defence like a hot knife through butter for Tom Dele-Bashiru to score and by half-time it was 4-0, as Watford made the most of the vast tracts of land between the defence and midfield to cement a surprisingly comfortable half-time lead. At least by the full-time whistle, QPR supporters could reflect, they’d drawn the second half.
Watford had 70% possession and thirteen shots on target. Asmir Begovic might have conceded with his first shot as their new goalkeeper but he did a reasonably good job of keeping the score down to four, considering that the home side had thirteen shots on target. For their part, QPR managed just one shot on target in 90 minutes and the most animated that anyone seemed to get all afternoon was in the stands, where fans who’d made the journey up weren’t backwards in coming forwards when it came to letting the players know exactly what they thought of what passed for their ‘performance’.
All of this set up a trip to Cardiff CIty for their second match. Cardiff had sufficient issues of their own for this match to be considered an early season relegation six-pointer, but even though QPR had issues of their own… they won the match. Eleven minutes from half-time Sinclair Armstrong, on his 24th appearance for the club, scored from close range. Twenty minutes into the second half, as though the cork had been removed from a bottle containing a genie, he did it again. Cardiff came back into the game and pulled a goal back, but when the final whistle blew there was cause for celebration in the away end for the thousand or so travelling supporters who’d made that journey at a most unexpected three points. And while Cardiff will likely be among the more limited opposition that they have to play in the league this season, a win’s a win, all the more so when you’ve only won four league matches in the last ten months.
But the Championship finances are cray cray, yes? Practically everybody is spending too much money and QPR’s wage bill for last season was more or less middling for this division. So what makes their position worse than anyone else in a division in which financial incontinence is pretty much accepted as a fact of life? The answer to that question is long and unnecessarily complicated, but it may just be boiled down to the fact that they’ve spent longer in this division than most, this century.
Over the last twenty years, Queens Park Rangers have spent 1 year in the third tier (and that was twenty years ago this year), 3 in the Premier League and 16 in the Championship. It certainly does seem to be the case that being in this division more than any other for a long time really might be bad for a club’s health. Of course, there are extenuating factors, the most obvious of which was the “Four Year Plan” years of Flavio Briatore, who sought to turn QPR into a ‘boutique’ club with a flash of Formula One glamour. But Briatore had to resign after being banned indefinitely by the FIA over the Renault Formula One crash controversy of 2008 left him in breach of ownership rules in England.
Promotion to the Premier League came in 2011, but even then the smell coming from the owners of the club was particularly distinct. An FA investigation following promotion concerning the club’s acquisition of Alejandro Faurlín threatened a points deduction and was even described as having put their promotion into jeopardy. The investigation revealed the club to be found to be at fault in two of seven charges brought against them and received a fine of £875,000, stopping just short of a points deduction. Tony Fernandes became the club's new chairman on 18th August 2011 after buying Bernie Ecclestone'smajority shareholding in the club. Bernie Ecclestone’s time as the owner of an active Premier League football club lasted a grand total of five days into the 2011/12 season, taking in only a 4-0 home defeat by Bolton Wanderers on the opening day.
But it didn’t end there. It took six years for the fallout from this period in the club’s history to become fully evident. After two years in the Premier League they were relegated back to the Championship in 2013, only to get promoted back at the first attempt via the play-offs. That in turn only led to one season of Premier League football, but the costs of it all turned out to be extremely heavy indeed. In June 2018, the club agreed a settlement of almost £42m in relation to all of this, to be repaid over the next ten years. This included £3m of legal fees for the EFL, a £17m fine, and the directors of the club having to capitalise £22m of loans put into the club.
If you’re not a Premier League club then having to pay £42m, even over ten years, is a tall order. And Queens Park Rangers haven’t played Premier League football in almost a decade. As mentioned above, it still shows on the company accounts in 2023, an extremely long tail for breaches relating to almost a decade ago, even though they came under the chairman who only left the club this summer. It may seem astonishing that the club still have this hanging over them , but when you’re in the Championship, a division which it is almost expected that you will spend more or less every penny you bring in (and more) on new players and in which the television money amounts to less than £10m a year, having this amount to still pay clearly continues to act as something of an albatross] around the club’s neck.
The solution is obvious, but fiendish. Promotion to the Premier League and staying there would have a transformative effect on the club’s finances. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s difficult enough to take one of three promotion places in a division of 24, all the more so when you’re having to cough up a little over half your TV money paying back a fine over something you did a decade ago and which you didn’t even see any huge short-term gain from. And way in which QPR have played for much of the last twelve months has offered much of a sign that matters are going to improve.
But this is a time of the year for optimism. Even four goals peppered throughout the very first competitive game of the season can’t completely dampen that spirit, and the Cardiff match, a win away from home featuring two goals from a young forward offering a little hope that perhaps things will be better this time around. And last night they were at Loftus Road for the first time this season, beaten narrowly by Norwich City in the First Round South of the EFL Cup. Ah, well. It was probably little more than a distraction anyway. Back in the league, winning at Cardiff may turn out to be a small upward blip. But it says something for the condition that Queens Park Rangers have found themselves in recent years that a small upward blip can be better than nothing. It’s been a very long couple of decades for this particular club.
Picture: Wiki Commons under a 2.0 license.