The annual Fans Forum took place at Loftus Road on Monday night, with co-owners Amit Bhatia and Ruben Gnanalingam a welcome and overdue addition to the panel.
In the opening remarks to these minutes over the years I’ve often focused on the happy timing of the Fan's Forum.
When last we met, Mick Beale was heading for the top of the league and enjoying his most favourite thing of all – a room full of people hanging on all of his chat. Lee Hoos described him as a "gem of a manager” working within the restrictions the club faces and achieving despite that. Of course Beale walked out, the team collapsed and should have been relegated. As for restrictions, Hoos said tonight Beale’s budget had been in the top half of Championship clubs.
Beale wasn’t alone in enjoying a casual night shooting the breeze over the free beer tokens only for things to fall apart soon afterwards. Even Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink had to field a question about how he’d look to prepare and recruit for the Premier League the following summer, should a promotion materialise. A week later we lost 6-0 at home to Newcastle.
This year I suspected may be different. Firstly because, for once, the guys who own and fund the club, ultimately make the decisions that define its direction of travel, and currently prop it up to the tune of £2m a month – without which Hoos told the room we’d be "insolvent immediately” – were here to take questions.
Follow QPR online through social media and you’d think Amit Bhatia and Ruben Gnanalingam would be in for a tough night for not "showing ambition” and "backing the manager”. It’s a different crowd in the room, dare I say it’s a different crowd who actually go to the games, and there’s a good deal more understanding around FFP, P&S, three-year rolling reporting periods and the like in that demographic. But, still, we’re in a tight spot this season because we deviated from the develop and sell plan and went for it with a £25m loss and big contracts for the likes of Charlie Austin and Stefan Johansen in 2021/22. I was pretty sure, even if the "sign a fucking striker” crowd wouldn’t be here taking the mic, there would at least be some harsh questions about how, despite all their talk of sustainability and never making the same mistakes again, they have painted themselves, and therefore us, into a corner again.
It's a corner we’ll be lucky to get out of. For all of Gareth Ainsworth’s positivity and improvement on the fucktastrophe he inherited, QPR have lost five of their seven matches this year, and all three at home. Again, timing is key in all of these things: lose to Swansea tomorrow and Birmingham on Friday and my guess is you’d be looking at a very different fans forum if it were staged even a week from now. But, then, would it? The mood in the room, the tone and content of the questions, and at time the level of sycophancy was more suited to a club sailing in calm waters, with a team in the top half of the table and heading in the right direction.
If you are upset, angry, pissed off and/or disillusioned with QPR, and you were watching this on the stream, I suspect there may have been one or two moments to make you scream at your screen. The social media response to the announcement of these events is often "same old faces, same old questions” but, with free entry and 50% of the tickets open to people who email asking for one, it’s more this is simply the crowd of people who want to spend their Monday night at a QPR fans forum. Still, I doubt the content of this one will do much to dissuade the notion.
Bhatia, himself, seemed surprised in his closing remarks: "For a fan the last several years have been disappointing. The gentleman at the back had two questions but, really, he wanted to make positive comments. The gentleman in the corner said much the same thing. The guy here said thankyou for putting on the event. You guys could have used this event to really be quite upset and share a lot of frustration. Instead you’ve used it to thank and say positive things and encourage everybody around here. It’s so telling of what we have here. The largest attendances last season were when the club was desperate. That’s the club that we have. We were worried about season ticket sales in a tough time, and we had record renewal rates because that’s when the fans know the club need them the most. Coming back to listen and field and talk to yourselves about the issues, but frankly to be honest about where we stand from an FFP and revenue perspective, is enormously useful.”
Gnanalingam added: "I’m surprised at the attendance for the first two games this season. Everyone knows it’s going to be a tough year from a P&S perspective and everybody is trying to come out and help us. The fans have really stepped up in a big way. We’re grateful and thank you. We are trying to be as transparent as we can wherever we can, but sometimes being transparent can hurt us. We want to be as transparent as we can, if it feels like we’re not then at that time it’s for the betterment of the club overall.”
Rangers have now won one of 18 games at Loftus Road, the worst run of home results in the history of the club. Try and keep that in mind as we drift through the various talking points…
- The perceived lack of attendance at games by the owners was put to Amit Bhatia (AB) straight off. AB: "The facts are different to that. I have three children who are 14, 13 and ten and my involvement at QPR is 17 years, so this is as an important part of my life as anything else. It’s my local club, I live 12 minutes away from here, and I love coming to every game I can possibly attend. Nothing gives me more joy and there is nowhere I have better memories. I come to every single match I can when I’m in the country. I travel a lot, but when I’m in town I come to every match that I can. Sometimes I sit upstairs but sometimes, because I have a young family, I sit downstairs in a box. Now that I’ve heard this I plan to wear a big, white mink coat and a large hat to make sure you can see me.”
- A great question from Neil Reynolds asked Ruben Gnanalingam (RG) whether the owners’ continued funding of the club, currently covering and writing off losses of £2m a month as per the last set of accounts, was down to pure enthusiasm and fanaticism, or whether there were ulterior motives at play such as a marketing vehicle for other businesses or tax write off advantages. RG: "We’re nuts. I want to leave the club in a better place than where I found it, that’s one of my key goals. I have lots of unfinished business I want to achieve here. Like Amit, my three kids are fans, and I want to make sure I have something successful that they can be proud of. Sometimes in the past I have invested in clubs where it has been just just an investment but this is something we love as a family. Why we don’t walk away is because I don’t want to let anybody down. We want to leave the club in a good place. It’s a long journey forward and we want to be part of that as long as we can and make sure the club is sustainable long term. If you’re asking whether it’s helped my other businesses I think it’s actually done the opposite because people have started to question my business acumen.”
AB added: "There are economies of the world, such as the United States, where people offset sports losses against their tax. That is not the case in the UK. It’s a fair question to ask but it’s not the case here. As for other businesses, I have never had another business thus far which has used the club to advertise or in any way try to promote. QPR is done for the love of the club and a real desire, as fans, to try and bring success to this football club because we understand and know what it means to the fans and the community. We are a tribe at this club. It’s ok to be different. You fall madly and deeply in love with this football club and that’s the motivation and the goal. The club is 125 years old, I know we’ve won one of 18 at home but in the long history of the club if we can leave it better off than we found it that is the desire and goal – nothing else, not personal gain, not tax advantages, not advertising other businesses.”
- A recent Bloomberg article saying the owners were actively looking for other investors, or a buyer, for the club was raised. AB: "The commitment is absolutely there. Our desire is to try and return QPR to its glory days, that’s the passion and motivation. As long as we are welcome here and people think we’re doing our best to try and move forwards I’ve never heard once from any of my partners that the intention is to move on and exit. Short answer, we’re here for the long term. In most situations you have to sit back and realise how we bring more success. If the answer is to bring somebody on board, who has the same values we have, and strategically helps move the club forward in a certain way, or commercially helps the club move forward in a certain way that we haven’t been able to help the club to do, then we would be silly not to give the club the opportunity to do that. It’s not about exiting or taking money off the table. It’s about bringing somebody in, if we found such a person who shares our views, who could strategically enhance the club or commercially enhance it. If somebody can do that then we should have those discussions and see if it adds value to the football club. It’s not about the person with deepest pockets because that’s not how football works any more – if Elon Musk wanted to come into QPR tomorrow he can’t put $100m into the club because it’s not how FFP and P&S works. You have to govern by certain rules and guidelines. But, if somebody thinks they can come in and unlock value at QPR doing certain things commercially or other ways we would absolutely have those discussions.”
- Asked what a plan would look like if the owners stopped funding the club Lee Hoos (LH) said: "It looks primarily like my resignation”. LH: "The club is not a going concern without the board. If there came a time - and there has never been any indication whatsoever - they would not put money into the club, we would be insolvent. Point blank. That’s the way it is.
"This is the only club that I’ve worked at or know of where you don’t get chasers about late payments – everything is done on time, proactive, above board. It’s extremely well run from a financial stand point and making sure money is where it needs to be.”
- For the first time there were some details about where Tony Fernandes’ minority stake of shares in the club had gone following his long-on-the-cards departure earlier this summer. AB: "Rich Reilly is one of the directors and co-owners of QPR now, he joined the board last year and next time will sit up here and do the panel all by himself. Tony’s shares were bought by Rich, myself and Ruben.” There were a lot of mentions of American Reilly, who for somebody rich enough to by upping his stake in our club has almost no internet presence at all. He's been at every match this season and was in the room tonight.
- Pressed by Steve Sayce on his so-called unfinished business RG added: "I want to make the club sustainable, that’s my unfinished business. The club needs to sell players every single year just to break even. With FFP you don’t have to break even you can lose £13m, but I don’t think we want to leave the club in a place where every season you have to pump in £13m just to pay the bills. I want to bring it to a point where it can fund itself. Something like the training ground really helps because we don’t have to pay somebody rent for the training ground any more – the £25m it cost to build doesn’t count towards FFP, but not having to pay rent anymore does. If we can have better facilities and sponsorship opportunities here then that all makes the club more sustainable. We want the academy to be more productive and fruitful so we can start selling players on a continuous basis which again helps with sustainability. My unfinished business is to make the club more sustainable going forwards.”
- Steve had also remembered Amit saying there would be a period of reflection from the owners after the catastrophe of last season, and he wondered what had come from that. AB: "We had a strong and prolonged period of reflection. I hope when we’re all older we’ll be able to look back on last season and have a bit of a chuckle about how crazy it was, but the truth was when we were living through it it was as stressful a season as you can imagine. The hardest season I’ve been a part of at the club. It required, and requires still now, everybody to look introspectively and understand why it happened, what caused it, how we can be better as a result and learn from the mistakes, and be very reflective about what happened. We have gone back and looked at every function this club performs: the job the board does, the executives, the performance people, the medics… There is not a vertical currently at this club that is not under review.
"P&S is the difference between your revenue and your cost. There are four revenue streams in any football club: number one is the money from TV, everybody in the league gets the same; number two is your sponsorships, going into this season every bit of sponsorship that can possibly be sold and commercial realised will happen because we’ve looked at what we need to do better to get that revenue stream going; third is around stadium capacity and matchday revenue, we’re limited by the size of our stadium but we’ve made positive progress with the council which has come from going back and rethinking; and the last and most important way we can make revenue is player trading where we have, again, gone back and reminded ourselves that as a club we have to generate talent and be able to sell that talent to make this club sustainable. Then you look at costs and be it catering, player salaries, maintenance, security, we’ve re-evaluated the whole thing. We’ve taken time as custodians of this football club to take that kick in the stomach last season and ask and understand why it happened and how we make it better. I’m proud of the work we did over the last few months to truly reflect, understand the problems and I’m not saying we’ve solved all of those but there is a huge determination to try to make those things better. In a business if things don’t go well you don’t accept it you say ‘what’s going wrong we have to fix this’. That requires humility of admitting mistakes, and a period of reflection. Everybody involved in this club took it personally. Not just the players and management, everybody in the club took it personally last season and there is determination not to let that happen again.”
- A question was raised on how different it would look for QPR to be under the ‘salary cap management protocol’ of League One, as opposed to the profit and sustainability rules of the Championship. In the divisions below us owners can essentially spend as they please as long as they convert the debt to equity, which is how Tune has been funding QPR for sometime, which led to some weary conclusions that such is the scale of the rebuild required in our squad it might actually have been beneficial to go down and do that in that climate. LH: "P&S is only applicable to the Championship, you can lose £39m over three years. Our FFP fine has nothing to do with the current rules. League One and Two have their own rules, the salary cap management protocol, which gives you a lot more ability to spend more money. You can spend in excess as long as you put equity in to cover it.”
AB was quick to jump in with: "There is no financial justification to us thinking the club should ever be relegated, let’s make that clear and simple. It does not matter what happens from a financial perspective that somebody may have created through an algorithm or using AI, it’s not better for the club, it’s not better for the community and it’s not better for QPR. It’s not ever in question.”
There was, in fact, precious little discussion, debate or questioning around this summer’s transfer activity and FFP/P&S situation, which I’d actually expected to be one of the hotter topics. Either an acceptance of the situation in the room, or a weariness from the panel of talking about it perhaps. In the end, unprovoked, LH chipped in with: "The league give you a perception of where you are each year relative on payroll to everybody else and also revenue generation. Two seasons ago we were the ninth highest payers of player payroll, but we were also ninth in revenue generation. We slipped a little bit last year to eleventh highest payroll and eleventh in revenue generation… Our payroll has dropped significantly compared to the last two years which is a necessity to deal with the P&S implications of not having sold any players for two years.”
- Time for the Fans Forum staple of stadium redevelopment or move, and worth remembering the position for sometime is that Loftus Road is a wholly unsuitable millstone, a huge part of our FFP problems, not worth even trying to develop, on a 4.5 acre site not even half as big as required, that you’d never get planning permission for these days, and a move elsewhere is the only option other than certain death.
RG: "We’ve explored many sites in the area and it’s difficult to find a good one nearby. We’d have to go far away and the thing we’ve been told people don’t want is a ‘soulless bowl’. The idea of moving to Linford Christie Stadium is getting very, very remote. The idea of trying to do something on this site is becoming the best idea for us. We’ve been working with the council, very closely, to see what ways we can try to achieve something here. They’ve been very supportive over the last two years and we will continue great discussions with them. Hopefully when we’re all ready we can reveal more about how we want to redevelop or further enhance the current site.”
I love a good, insightful follow up from the floor. Much later in the evening than the above comments, a gentleman said he felt they were basically being "economical with the truth”, and the council had showed very little interest in helping us at Linford Christie (a "dead duck”) or anywhere else. "My impression is they couldn’t give two hoots about us” – well played sir.
RG: "It’s not true. We’re not focused on looking for another site, and we’re not asking them to help us look for another site. We’re trying to see what we can do with this site to make it better. It’s not about adding more seats because we’re not filling it anyway. It’s about adding value to what we have and making this venue more usable beyond 25 days a season. For a a five acre site in central London, 25 days in one year is criminal. That’s where we can have a lot more revenue. That’s what we want them to help with, driving more revenue here, and they have been very helpful. I’m not being economical with the truth from that perspective. We’ve not been asking them to help us find another site. In terms of making this site more beneficial to the club that’s where they have been helpful.”
LH: "We’ve had a problem in the past where on three occasions too much information got out at inappropriate times and we won’t be making that same mistake again.”
- The pitch not being ready for the opening day, and the works not starting earlier in May when a number of community and charity games were played on it before the diggers moved in for the Desso hybrid surface’s ten-year refurbishment was raised. LH: "It has a ten-year lifespan, if I could squeeze 11 or 12 out of it I would but we had a drought last year that absolutely hammered the pitch. It wasn’t like we woke up in April and thought ‘hey let’s restitch the Desso next month’. That decision was made around this time last year and by November we had to have a plan for equipment. At that point you have to factor in how long you might be playing, including the play-offs. Now, we didn’t make the play-offs and it’s all fine and well to joke about but I’m accountable and have to plan for it so we put the dates in and said it had to be after that. We requested an away game first, the league couldn’t provide it. I didn’t get into why because it never works to get into arguments with the league. Looking back we possibly, could have maybe got away with it because of the summer we had. But we couldn’t take that chance of having a prolonged drought period again. We got 99 problems but the pitch ain’t one. Hit me.”
- A replacement for Les. AB: "We have been looking for a senior football hire, whatever the title is we’ll see. It’s a process being led by Richard Reilly and supported by the rest of the board. We feel it’s a skillset we’ll benefit from and have to bring. The process has been underway now for a long time. We’ve interviewed a lot of interesting candidates. It’s an incredibly important appointment. We have to appoint the right person and not rush – now the window is closed it affords us some time. We’re not in a rush, we’d rather get the appointment correct. It’s been a long and robust process and as soon as there’s something to announce we’ll do so.”
RG: "Data will always be a part of the decision making process. Recruitment is a collective process. Candidates are brought up by the recruitment team and verified by the manager and DOF, then we make the decision together. Beyond the rough data what is crucial going forwards, and we will spend a lot more time focusing on, is the character we bring in. Gareth has made a lot of improvement from a character perspective and that’s something you don’t have data to show you. We’ll be focusing a lot more on what we do there.”
- SURPRISE WITNESSES, EACH MORE SURPRISING THEN THE LAST. With the two co-owners of the club, the manager, and the CEO on stage, we then moved onto ten minutes of talking about pies with stadium and venues MD at catering contractor Elior, Craig Stewart (CS). God, I fucking love this club sometimes. I feel like Mel Brooks on The One Show - this is nuts, you should know this.
CS: "The most popular question was around pricing. Post pandemic and moving through last season we as a club and a catering partner decided the cost would be minimised, and that has been our strategy this year as well. When you look at our sector we have been absolutely hammered with inflation – it’s been up and around 18-20% and we committed to the club we wouldn’t raise prices during last season as we went through that. When we got to the summer we had to make tough decisions. The increase in staff and labour costs are over 10%. There is an extreme shortage of C02 so just to pour your beer there are severe implications in the background. We have minimised price increases as much as we can. We looked at the data and facts and did what we felt was fair and reasonable across the board.
"We’ve got more than 13 choices of hot foods in the stadium…” (‘more than 13’ is also commonly known as 14 – ed) "…but the majority choice for people is either chips or pies. People see on social media lots of different things on offer at other clubs but we’re not set up infrastructure wise here to facilitate huge volume. We’re trying to prioritise getting things out as fast as we can. We have got kiosks around the stadium where we have different varieties, but your traditional pie will always outsell pizza, curry, loaded fries, whatever it is. The facts and data is the pie is the top selling item.” You R’s.
"We also get a lot of questions about staffing. As a football club we’re open 25 days a year here. We can only offer staff 25 days a year and that’s allowing for home cup fixtures. The average shift is 5-6 hours so ultimately we can only offer people 125 hours a year. We pay a living wage because it’s the right thing to do and we want to be competitive to the high street. We also offer shifts elsewhere within our business. But attracting and retaining staff is very, very difficult. Our biggest challenge is Westfield where people are guaranteed a shift every Saturday and Sunday in the demographic who would come and work here. We’re struggling to retain staff and as part of that we’re continuously having to train new people.
"Saturday’s game against Sunderland we just delivered our busiest ever matchday, albeit aided by a huge away support who registered record beer sales for that part of the ground. We have invested in a huge ePOS system to help people get served quicker and become a cashless venue which is improving queue times. We appreciate we’re on a journey, the venue has limitations, people want options, but the data tells us serve good beer quickly and 9/10 times and people will go home happy.”
- Another wonderful fans forum topic, unless you’ve just lost 3-0 at home to Sunderland and you’re trying to drown out the booing then the public address system doesn’t work and we can’t hear Karl Ready being inducted into the Forever R’s. LH: "It’s not the speakers, it’s the wiring and to re-wire it we’ve been quoted six figures. We did have an idea about setting up an alternative wireless speaker system which I thought would be easier than it is. One of the players’ dads actually does this and we’re talking to him about it. We’ve got a big fan base, if anybody knows of a system we can set up here that doesn’t require a massive amount of infrastructure revamp get in touch.”
- Go get the training ground. LH: "We have a few deals in the pipeline already. The Australian national team will be training there. We have a big rental with Paddy Power coming up this Friday. It’s showing great, great promise in terms of generating revenue. That’s in addition to it being a fantastic facility for the players – Steve Cook said it was top notch, one of the best he’s been to, and it helps sway players to come here. It’s all come together very nicely.”
- There was a question from the floor, which I suspect could stir a bit of a hornet’s nest so I’ll just report it verbatim, about the largely white demographic of our support not mirroring the ethnic makeup of the area we play in. AB: "We’ve paid money to consultants to tell us these things and that’s exactly what they came back with: who is our fanbase, do they represent us today, and will they represent us tomorrow? It’s an astute observation. It’s taken us longer than it should have but it has been identified. We have to do much more to engage with the community. The QPR In The Community Trust is something we’re all proud of, but is the attendance at home games representative of the local area? I don’t think it is. Or, put another way, could we be doing a better job? Hopefully there is a plan in place to address your concerns.” LH added when he arrived our average season ticket age was 49 and it’s now down to 43.6, and that senior management team meetings have been focused on making the demographic inside the stadium look more like the community immediately outside it.
- It actually took more than half an hour for Gareth Ainsworth (GA) to receive a question at all but when it came it was about the development squad and more prospects from there ready to make a first team bow. GA: "The development squad was a key area we spoke about when I came in. We’ve seen the fruits of people like Seny, Illy and now Sinclair coming through. Rayan Kolli is playing games and becoming an asset for the club. Without doubt there is some real fruit in the development squad. Some of the work our coaches have done is overlooked – Rayan Kolli has been here since he was nine so his U9s coach has played a part in that. Alex Carroll has done a fantastic job with the youngsters and we have fantastic protocols in place. The Heston Training Ground puts them within touching distance of the first team which is a vision the club had. There are one or two in the development squad who will feature this season. We won’t go crazy because it’s a tough league but with everything going on financially I am very open to giving experience to these youngsters at the right time.
"I’ve made sure I’ve been at 90% of the development games so the boys can see me there. We get invited into the dressing room at half time which apparently hasn’t happened previously. If I’m not there Dobbo will be. They’re replicating what we’re doing at first team level, there are four or five internationals in that set up who will be good players. I’m looking forward to Rayan Kolli’s first goal and his celebration. Charlie Kelman has had a tough time recently, he’s coming back in he’s always one of the best finishers on the training ground.”
- With three places left in QPR’s 25-man squad further signings were raised as a possibility. GA: "It’s the right player, right price, right time. There’s potential for us to still, maybe make signings in the free agent market. I don’t really want to say which area it will be in. I know people say we lack goals but we’ve shared goals around well up top and it’s about how we produce more for the likes of Lyndon and Sinclair. It’s a team thing. We’ve balanced the squad quite well this season. You’ll have your own opinions on where we’re short but we have a few multi-positional players who can help us. Don’t write off somebody else joining us but it’s got to be a spectacular deal and somebody good enough to join the squad. I’m happy with where we are and some of our best signings this year will be the sports scientists and medics.” He later said both Sinclair and Lyndon would reach double figures for goals this year.
- GA was asked specifically about rumours that certain players had not been having him at all when he arrived and had undermined his efforts to turn the ailing 22/23 campaign around. He swats this aside, but do watch out for him admitting that even if was true, which it’s not, but if it was, which it’s not, he wouldn’t tell us about it anyway. GA: "The same rumours that Les left because of disagreements about signings? The boys are a great bunch of boys. The conspiracy theories are rife at this place. Everybody loves a rumour. The boys have been nothing but receptive since I’ve come in. If anyone tried to undermine me I wouldn’t air it in public, but there’s been none of that at all. I came into a group that was quite lost, with hurt egos and needed some leadership. The likes of Begovic, Cook, Colback coming in offers that now, you can see it, and we can feel it. But there was no case of anybody undermining. There might have been a few comments when I wasn’t there but there was no mutiny. The culture that’s developing at the training ground now I’d be amazingly surprised if anything like that happened now, we’d always bring it together like men and talk.”
- SURPRISE WITNESSES, EACH MORE SURPRISING THEN THE LAST. GA’s comments about the players not being fit enough to do 90 minutes straight away being a deliberate ploy to avoid muscle injuries have raised plenty of eyebrows, and we’ve been critical here on LFW, and so new head of performance Ben Williams (BW) was summoned to the stage in a fashionable open-beck shacket. Hi Ben. BW: "Fitness is multi-dimensional. We look at player’s health, fitness and robustness. Are they healthy enough to absorb the load and intensity we’re giving them from a cellular point of view? There is the robustness: are their muscles and tendons strong enough for us to put a lot of load through them? And then after that you gain fitness. Pre-season is six weeks and aerobic adaptation – getting fitter – takes eight-to-12, so if anybody tells you they could have got them to their peak fitness in six weeks they’re defying the laws of science.
"One of the challenges posed to me was avoiding the injuries we had last season. My focus was the causation of those injuries and that was a rapid increase in load and inappropriate load – being trained too hard, too soon, or not being ready for the games they were put into. Part of the question is correct, it was planned because I didn’t believe under science and with the group we had we could accelerate somebody to peak fitness in six weeks and not get them injured. We took the decision, as a multi-discipline performance group, and in consultation with Gareth, that we would make players robust first so they didn’t get injured and then build their fitness over the first four-to-six games. August availability was 91% which is this highest this club has ever had. The fitness is also coming and we’re competitive in terms of distance and metres run.
"I come from an innovation background, spent a lot of time with Red Bull, this is my seventh sport and I’ve developed an understanding of performance not from a singular lens but zoomed out what does human performance actually mean? Are we ethically looking after athletes? Are we trying to make their careers long? We don’t get top stand on podiums and in front of 20,000 people after scoring a goal. The pressures and physicality those people go through to get to that point is something we collectively cannot achieve, but we can try to understand what that individual goes through and whether they’re robust or not, psychologically and physically. It’s also understanding the sporting demand – you have the athlete, and you have the demand of the sport. Somewhere between their ability and what’s required on a Saturday is a gap. True performance is understanding that gap, profiling that and then developing an individual plan for every athlete so they can close it as quickly as possible. My background is closing the performance gap.
"I like to move sports and keep my mind fresh. When I heard about the role, the vision of the board, where the club was going and what they’re trying to achieve I was interested. I had a culture fit with Gareth. It turns out we’re quite similar in philosophy; I don’t have the same skinny jeans and long hair but we think quite similarly. I was really happy to take the role and bring 20 years of experience in closing the performance gap to QPR. I want to drive that philosophy all the way down through our academy, women and community teams so everybody gets the same philosophy of closing the performance gap. I would like to think we’re going to dismantle science and bring a meaningful, usable version of it to everybody. Somewhere in the underpinning science of performance there is a delivery strategy for all and that’s what I hope to achieve here.”
So, nerrrr.
BW: "The GPS allows us to see lots and lots of metrics and our job is to decipher what’s important and what’s not. As well as that around the stadiums now and recently installed here is Second Spectrum which means we get not only our data but the opposition data which we couldn’t see before. In general, we’re not being hugely outrun by any teams we’ve seen this season. Visually it may look like we’ve been outrun but tactics play a big part in that and we haven’t seen in any of our data points to be hugely outran. We’ve got some of the fastest and most physical players in the league.”
- Very good question from the floor. In interview with LFW last season then DOF Les Ferdinand said the club had lost 13 players to category one academies for pathetic return of £750k thanks to the sport’s egregious, malignant EPPP rules that were forced on lower division clubs by the Premier League under threat of having their table scrap provisions removed. Will the new training ground allow us to push to have a category one academy of our own? RG: "I don’t think it makes a massive difference to us right now to go to that level. There are a lot of costs involved to jump to Cat One. We have the same game programme anyway. We haven’t lost players to Cat One academies, we’ve lost players to bigger badges. Players who want to go and play for Spurs is why we lost players, not because they wanted to move to Cat One. If we moved to Cat One we might get slightly bigger compensation for them but I think the additional cost we have to spend might be prohibitive and we have to be careful about what we want to spend money on because the amount you spend on that counts towards P&S as well. With the games programme we get being in London we don’t have to get to Cat One right now. Once we’ve moved the dome across the road from where it is – there’s not need to rush that it’s fine where it is – then it will be much easier to move to Cat One and make the investments required.”
- Taylor Richards. Women and children into the lifeboats first please. The guy asking the question erroneously referred to him as Kieren Richardson, and whether he meant the now 38-year-old former Man Utd waster who was last seen at Cardiff in 2016, or the Dancing on Ice star known for his role as Ste Hayes in Hollyoaks, isn’t really relevant because they’d both have been a better signing than the one we’ve ended up making. LH: "The deal was structured in this way because the manager at the time wanted to make it a permanent move and I didn’t because the fee would have gone on our P&S calculation straight away. By pushing it back a year as a loan with an obligation to buy the P&S didn’t show up in last year’s calculation. You have to be creative and move numbers around all the time. The structure of the deal was done to aid our P&S calculation, which it did. Different managers see things in different ways from a recruitment stand point. We all know Taylor has a lot of potential. He’s got the talent. We want to try and get what we can out of him.”
GA: "Taylor is getting on fine. He had a really tough year last year. He hasn’t played a great deal at this level, he played for Doncaster in League One. He’s been chucked from club to club which is tough on a player. He got an injury at the start of last season, four different managers come in, we were in a real battle and he’s not that kind of battling player you needed for that – he was signed more for the silky skills going forwards. I have seen that in him. We have had one or two little issues pre-season but nothing major. He’s getting up to full fitness. I need him to be fitter, he knows this, to play him in the positions I want to play him. We’re working hard on him. He’s a good kid, he’s been through a lot in a young life – he’s only 22.”
- The refereeing performance in the Sunderland game, and the ongoing treatment of Sinclair Armstrong by officials got an airing. It’s usually all for the birds this stuff, we need to be no excuses culture and too often we’re the opposite, but Gareth did raise an interesting point about referees coming in with pre-conceived ideas about his muscle-bound young striker. GA: "I was disappointed in the refereeing consistency on Saturday. He got one that went for him and then after that you had Sunderland players rolling around like they’d been hit by Mike Tyson. I feel for Sinclair because it will stunt his career. The other issue for me is referees are now being told to watch the prior three games for research, and I’m totally against that. It is inviting prejudice. They should be good enough to referee it on the day without pre-conceived ideas about how big and strong Sinclair is. We are working with him in training. I’ve got two fantastic strikers in Sinclair and Lyndon who I feel get victimised. I’m hoping these decisions come around because there was one at Southampton where Sinclair runs clean through, the guy dives over the touchline and the referee blows up – a game changing moment.
"We try not to get in the referee’s face. There are FA charges being handed down left right and centre for that. We are really disappointed with the referee on Saturday that, regardless of the red card, eight Sunderland players ran to the referee and got in his face. We don’t want to be telling tales, we just want consistency.”
- Recruitment. Quite a thoughtful point from the floor asking the panel to reflect on how we’ve run our recruitment, and perhaps been slow to adapt data analytics that have worked for clubs like Brentford and Brighton who have gone from being a long way behind us to tiny dots off in the distance. LH: "Like every other club in the league, apart from those two, we do use analytics and data, but it’s the commercially available data. Those two have owners who have data deeper than any other club in the country can access because of their businesses which are about gambling and beating the bookies. They’ve got stats we could never even dream of and have spent tens of millions of pounds building up databases. They have businesses they run from which they can not only use the money but all the information from it as well. It gives them a massive jump on everybody, even Man City don’t have what they have. They’ve been extremely clever and good at what they’ve done. For us we’re not going to catch up, we just have to use the commercial data and BW has some ideas about additional data which I’m not going to get into because everybody is looking for that extra 1% on their competitor. By working with what we hope is a slightly different way with data we’re hoping we can do that but we won’t be able to develop the huge databases they have and the bank of PHDs they have crunching data every day for their gambling businesses.”
- Gareth was asked, not unfairly, to quantify and give some examples to illustrate the culture change which is supposedly sweeping our squad. GA: "There was a lack of leaders and characters in the building and when things are going well you don’t notice that because everybody is on the crest of the wave. When things go bad you see your characters. I wouldn’t point fingers at anybody last year, but it can become insular, people go into a shell, people play for themselves and become selfish – unintentionally sometimes, there’s a protection mechanism that comes in. There was a little bit of that last year. Things going well, everything great, young players coming in, loan players, manager… then indecision around the manager, the club went into a degree of chaos, and that’s when your characters could have steadied the ship. It went into a little bit of ‘am I going with him, is he coming back for me, am I still here, what’s happening here, who’s the manager, what we doing?’ Your leaders, which I’ve tried to sign, settle the players down. On Saturday I came into the dressing room and Steve Cook was holding the team talk, talking about Tuesday, forget today, 11v11 we win the game, they were lucky… I was wondering what I could say because he’d picked the boys up. When it comes from your peers it’s so powerful. That’s what was missing last season.”
- Ebere Eze making his England debut. What sort of bunse we talking? LH: "It would be a breach of a confidentiality clause in the deal. What we need, what I’m supporting Eze in, is starting a game. I’ll leave it at that.”
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