This is yet another bash at trying to analyse the club's strategy and why it failed. I previously tried to do this by asking this question last year:
'Is the club's strategy really one they have chosen?'
http://www.fansnetwork.co.uk/football/queensparkrangers/fb_mb.php?m=v&t=69740
However, following Clive's recent article on John Spencer I came across this 2001 article by David Conn, which made me think about the question in another way:
Conn says the following:
'The extravagant deals which Berlin then did, flush with the flotation money, look, in hindsight, endearingly homespun compared to the exotic talent on which other clubs were spending their own nouveaux riches. Two of the big signings, Gavin Peacock and John Spencer, were pushed out by the Euro-influx at Chelsea which began with Ruud Gullit and Gianluca Vialli.'
QPR show how to lose £27m in four years
http://www.boardroomblues.co.uk/ind280901.htm
How could the deals done have been both 'extravagant' and 'endearingly homespun'? This set me thinking about a question that has been in the back of my mind whenever 'high-spending' QPR are discussed.
The question is this...has the club actually spent too much or too little? At one level the answer seems obvious (certainly the outside world thinks so), as we have amassed ever larger debts. Yet to compete it seems you have to spend a lot of money to attract the top quality players, and QPR despite the money it did spend, didn't have enough money to attract those top quality players. The newly successful clubs (Manchester City and Chelsea) have spent vastly more money than QPR. So it seems to me both things are true. The club both spent too much and too little. But why?
How did QPR attempt to get round the problem of not having enough money to attract the top quality players? By buying other players from big teams, such as Arsenal, Real Madrid and Manchester United. This seemed to make sense, because surely if a player had played for a big club, or England, or had a Champions League medal, they must be a good player, right? The problem with this strategy is that *it is almost impossible to buy a good player from a big club*. These clubs are not under financial pressure, so he only players that these clubs will sell (unless to other big clubs for huge fees) are the troublesome or burnt-out players that they want to dump on other clubs. That's why Gary Neville was completely wrong to say in 2012 that Mark Hughes was 'going to flush the toilet' at QPR, when what Hughes was actually doing was collecting the flushings of other clubs.
The consequence of all this is that we ended up with a Frankenstein 'big team B' club, with players too small to beat the big teams and too big to beat the small teams. |  |
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