After QPR survived relegation on the final day of 2011/12, Mark Hughes promised that the club would never again be in that same situation with him in charge. In a way, Hughes was right: he was sacked after 12 winless Premier League matches that opened the following season.
The three years that followed that famous defeat at Manchester City, QPR’s survival overshadowed by the magnitude of the winning goal, surely rank amongst the most chaotic of any English club over the last 30 years. It began with the purchase of supposedly marquee signings from high-end clubs – Manchester United, Chelsea, Tottenham, Inter, Real Madrid. It continued with cliques forming between high earners and the rest and Harry Redknapp’s inability to keep them up.
It peaked with Bobby Zamora’s late winner at Wembley that sent QPR back to the top flight, an afternoon of joy that quickly gave way to the bleak reality that the club had overstretched itself to achieve promotion and were ill-prepared to consolidate in the Premier League. Twelve months later, QPR had finished bottom again and were facing the prospect of a £42 million fine for breaking Financial Fair Play [FFP] regulations.
If a club becomes a reflection of their owner, QPR were it. When taking over in 2011, Tony Fernandes distanced himself from ambitions of winning the Premier League and Champions League, instead focussing on a desire to “make fans proud of style and integrity” and “bringing kids through”. Somewhere along the way, those goals had got lost in the deafening noise.
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But if we are often quick to chastise wealthy owners for their arrogance, naivety or both, it is far more rare for someone to change their ways wholesale. After four consecutive bottom-half finishes in the Championship, QPR are a club on the up again. Fernandes appears to have taken his medicine.
“I think the overall scale of the turnaround isn’t appreciated enough,” Clive Whittingham, editor of the QPR website Loft For Words tells i. “The wage bill in the 2013-14 season was just shy of £80m which at the time was a Championship record. We shattered FFP, resulting in the biggest fine ever levied in world sport.
“The budgets we’re competing with at the top end of this division dwarf ours. Mark Warburton immediately had to offload 16 players. A year later he had to lose Eberechi Eze, Bright Osayi-Samuel, Ryan Manning, Jordan Hugill and Nakhi Wells, who were his best players, all over again. The wage bill at the last set of accounts was less than £20m, which means that in less than ten years we have halved our wage bill, and then halved it again, and not only consolidated our place in the Championship – difficult to do in itself – but also, lately, got better.”
Warburton has been in charge since May 2019, making him the longest-serving QPR manager since Ian Holloway’s first spell that began more than two decades ago. To an extent managerial long-termism is the cause and the effect; you stay in your job because the club is doing well and the club does well because you stay in your job. But Warburton’s work in improving QPR should not be overlooked. From 19th to 13th to ninth to, currently, fourth in the Championship.
Warburton has benefitted from an improved off-field structure that has helped to establish – and retain – an identity at Loftus Road. Lee Hoos, appointed as CEO after the second relegation, did an excellent job at Burnley with the same remit. That followed the arrival of Les Ferdinand as director of football, a man with memories of QPR when they punched above their weight through a commitment to the same values as are being extolled now.
The strategy is simple in theory, even if it takes time, effort and patience in practice. QPR must offer a counterbalance to the chaos years by remaining committed to sustainability. They are not averse to transfer spending, but the recruitment model centres on markets away from the top flight and seeks resale value. It is now led by Andy Belk, who had been with the club in some capacity since 2008.
Rob Dickie, Lyndon Dykes, Macauley Bonne and Andre Dozzell, QPR’s four most expensive signings in the last five years, cost a combined £6.5m from League One and the Scottish Premiership. The aim is not necessarily to focus purely on youth. QPR have the ninth oldest average starting XI in the Championship this season and last week Warburton picked a team with an average age of 29.1. Lee Wallace, Charlie Austin, Albert Adomah, Andre Gray and Stefan Johansen are all 30 or older and first-team regulars.
But experience is complemented by youth. Chris Willock and Ilias Chair are two of the best young players in the division and investment has been aided by the sale of academy graduate Eberechi Eze. The aim is to offer London’s most talented kids a realistic pathway to the first team. A new training ground will only increase the attraction. If another player has to follow Eze or Luke Freeman, sold to reinvest, that should be viewed as a compliment rather than an admission of failure or lack of ambition. The old way didn’t work, after all.
Most importantly of all, QPR has reconnected with its supporters. There is a misaccusation that football fans only want their team to be relentless in their ambition, striving – and spending – for a place amongst the elite whatever the cost. But that’s simply not true in many cases. Sensible, realistic supporters would rather have a club they can like as well as love. They would prefer one that lives within its means rather than gamble its future on promotion. They would rather see academy graduates progress rather than their pathways blocked by those transient signings who pass through in the comparative blink of an eye.
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You could argue, with a dose of readily available cynicism, that QPR’s change in ethos has been forced by the limitations imposed by past mistakes. If sustainability was a choice, it was also a necessity. If QPR are promoted, either this, next or in any other season, would they be able to avoid becoming transfer market magpies again? The club say yes; only their actions would provide proof.
But, at least for now, QPR are a club rebuilt with sustainable foundations and a vision of a future that does not depend upon the filing of accounts or eggs piled in a basket marked promotion. There is a ticking time bomb in the Championship, a division where clubs typically spend more on wages than they could ever hope to make in revenue. After their years of economic mayhem, there is great value in quietly, gradually but continuously working to be the best version of yourself.
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