And for my next trick – Fans Forum Tuesday, 1st Oct 2024 12:31 by Clive Whittingham The annual QPR Fans Forum took place at Loftus Road on Monday evening with CEO Christian Nourry using the opportunity to make several crowd-pleasing announcements. The main talking point prior to Monday’s fans forum was much more about who wasn’t there than who was. The club has been less forthcoming in its communications with supporters since Christian Nourry took over as CEO, and the tactic of keeping Marti Cifuentes at arm’s length from websites like this one extended into him being the first manager since, I think, Mark Hughes not to appear at this event and take questions. This despite his ongoing popularity among the support base. Nourry started the evening by saying he was “trying to understand as much as possible your pain points, what we can do to improve your fan experience in terms of hospitality, food and beverage…” and that “there will be other occasions like this over the course of the season where you will get to engage with football minded personnel from that side of the business but I took the decision to make tonight about understanding the business from a fan perspective and what we can do to improve that.” We’ll look forward to those but in the meantime an hour into this one that looked and felt like a strange call. There was a smaller crowd in the room than normal and it took 58 minutes for Cifuentes to warrant a mention at all as the usual series of dry questions about ticketing and cost of beer were slogged through, with the vast majority pre-submitted and little input from those in the room. You thought Saturday’s loss at Blackburn was dull. Then, when it finally came to discussing the football, out came the fireworks. Three pieces of, ostensibly, excellent news in quick succession: a new contract for Cifuentes and his assistant Xavi Calm putting to bed for now any lingering rumours about his future; confirmation Karamoko Dembele will be signing permanently at the end of the season; and a contract extension for Jake Clarke-Salter as well. These clearly weren’t all signed on Monday morning, they’d saved up for the occasion and you can make your own mind up on where that fits Nourry’s assertion he'll tell you everything he can as soon as he can. Nevertheless, it certainly enlivened the room, and was a clever way of injecting a bit of life not only into proceedings here but also the mood ahead of Tuesday’s home game with Hull which might perhaps have been a little down after the weekend at Ewood Park and sluggish start to the season. What else was discussed? How did Nourry do? Where was Cifuentes? Well, now, who cares? You’re not going to remember that bit are you? The announcements were the fans forum, the fans forum was the announcements. Look at the reaction on social media – not a lot of chat about beer prices on there this morning. That’s how you work a room. An absolute masterclass. How long are these deals for? Well, of course, you’re not allowed to know. People with contracts now have different contracts. We’ll get to the latest explanation for that, and I’m going to flip the evening around in these minutes and do the football stuff first because it’s where 95% of the meat of the evening was. If you want to hear about pies that’ll be lower down in part two. On the field- Short, medium and long term goals for the club. CN: “The big thing we talk about internally at the moment is attempting to find stability. Having a consistency of strategy that puts us in a place where we’ve made a bunch of bold decisions from a football perspective about how we want to move forwards and commit to those ideas. Focus on things we think will help us develop the best possible players. For the first time in the club’s recent history every player from an eight-year-old to Steve Cook will have their own individualised technical and physical performance plans. This allows them to have time outside their normal weekly training schedule with the team where they can develop their super strengths and minimise their weaknesses. We’re trying to find as many outside the box ways to increase revenue wherever we can. We accept we’ve made strategy changes in the last couple of months and we want to commit to those. Medium to long term we want to be seen as one of the better run clubs in this division. Ultimately the goal of ownership is for the club to be self-sustaining. In order for that to be the case we need to do two things realistically. The first is a sustainable player trading model that drives more revenue to further invest in signing players and have the best possible team - that means buying younger players who can develop with us and we’ll have to be patient with. The second piece is if there is ever an opportunity to improve Loftus Road as a stadium the potential for revenue we could get from add ons we can build and other businesses we can build around QPR would do that as well. Those are the two things we’re focusing on to make this a truly sustainable football club.” - As we’ve been saying on LFW for months, the director of football role went out of the door with Les Ferdinand and has been combined with the CEO role. It’s Nourry writing the theme tune and singing the theme tune as a “sports minded CEO” with “a quality team of people around me – a strong academy director in Alex Carroll, a head of recruitment (Andy Belk) who has perhaps more responsibility here than you would see in other football clubs at this level.” CN: “We decided to go through a process in October when the club was in a difficult situation in the league to try and get out of a cycle of two things. The first is having a big churn of coaches at first team level. The second is getting to a situation where the football club is disrupted as little as possible when unfortunately one coach leaves and another arrives. We took the opportunity to establish a style of football that we want to develop and coach throughout the club that also helps us make an informed decision over the head coach, be it first team, women’s team, U21s. You will see principles of play at U16 that we’re attempting to put together for U21 and first team. There are obvious limitations to that and practical things to bear in mind… We do want to get to a stage where as many of our academy players as possible understand the technical details of the football we’re trying to play so they have the best possible chance of going from the academy to a success in the first team.” - Keeping player contract lengths secret. CN: “It’s not meant to be anything other than giving us the best possible competitive advantage. There are five other teams in this league now who do the same – Sheff Utd, Portsmouth, Millwall, Luton and ourselves. I want to make it as difficult as possible for someone to take our best talent, playing side or coaching. Often the response I get is if a club wants to know how long a player’s contract is they’ll simply ask the agent in question. That is increasingly removed from the reality of where the football market is in 2024. Most of the time it is in the agent’s interest to maximise the sale price of a footballer. That way they can go to the club once the deal is agreed and say if you’re paying x that makes him an important player in your squad and helps them leverage personal terms. This notion that agents want to move their players for the cheapest possible price is not my experience of the summer window nor the reality of the football market.” Look, both regular readers know this is a bugbear of mine, and why, so there’s no need for me to go seven rounds on it again except to say if you are going to tell a room full of people that five other clubs do the same don’t expect none of them to go home and check if that’s true – here’s Sheff Utd announcing a three-year deal for Kieffer Moore on their official website last month, or a new four-year deal for Sydie Peck if you prefer, or Portsmouth confirming a one-year deal for Andre Dozzell. - On a semi-related point, losing the likes of Manning, Osayi-Samuel, Willock, Dickie and others for free or low fees because of their contract situations was raised. CN: “It’s unfortunate we had situations like we had in the summer with Chrissy Willock who’s a player who clearly has talent but ultimately the football club wasn’t able to financially benefit from his departure. That’s not something we want to see as much as possible. Players and agents are complicated, it’s not always possible to create a situation where with 24 months left we’re able to make a decision that’s in the best financial interests of the club. We do believe the decision not to disclose contract lengths helps us and gives us an advantage when we’re looking to sell our players. It’s front of mind.” - It was at this point that the first of several video interludes were played, starting with the news that Jake Clarke-Salter, now 27, has signed a new long-term deal with the club which obviously went down very well in the room. CN: “I think he demonstrated in the second half of last season that he’s a top talent in this league. It speaks a lot to the belief he has in the project we’re building and crucially that he believes he can build more, and further, and achieve higher things by developing his game with Marti and the rest of the team. On a human level Jake has immense integrity, he’s a wonderful human being, a super professional and I’m delighted to be able to continue to work with him.”
- The club has changed the way it using data and analysing it on the football side of the business. CN: “We’re working with third parties to make that data do more for us. One thing we’ve tried to do is build projections of the potential suitability of a player to this league based on data from the league in which they’ve come from. It’s by no means perfect but we’re working on it.” - The women’s team. CN: “I know this team has had many iterations over the years, and many ground shares as well. It was very important to me to bring this team into the fold and make them feel like part of the football club and ecosystem. It’s incredibly motivating to see them three nights a week at Heston and the drive and determination they have to making the most of access to those top facilities which was not the case beforehand. I want this club to inspire as many different groups of young people as possible. I want to see a generation of young girls and boys inspired by these players and that being their motivation to support QPR. This team now has not only access to Heston but work with staff from the men’s first team in performance, Jon De Souza our head of methodology is spending a lot of time with them, and really as many resources as we can give them.” The women’s team will play a big league game against Norwich at Loftus Road on November 17, free for all season ticket holders. - Rayan Kolli has dropped out of the first team picture despite heavy involvement in pre-season, an impressive performance against Spurs in particular, and a great assist on day one against West Brom. Family members have been fairly outspoken on social media, rumours abound that he rejected a loan move and/or won’t sign a new contract, and/or that he’s simply been told Koki Saito is a better player than him. All in all, not helpful at all to a player of his age and at his stage of career. CN: “The reality is in 24/25 we have more options in our first team squad. Hopefully some of these new players will demonstrate over time we have an increasing number of exciting options who can help us win as many points as possible – it will be difficult and we will have to be patient with a number of them adapting to this league. Very simply put we’ve got great competition for places so Rayan like every other member of the development squad knows acutely what he needs to do to improve his chances of being selected.”
- The Academy. CN: “What someone in my position would normally say is we want x number of academy players in our first team. That’s a gross oversimplification of how difficult it is to get players into the first team. The best way we’re going to achieve that is through alignment. You can have an academy at a different club that produces incredible talent but doesn’t have a coach at first team level who wants to give them the opportunity to play. What we’re looking at for the next 24 months is how successful we are at achieving the change in coaching methodology. How successful we are at improving the quality of our youth recruitment – clear with positional profiles and characteristics we’re looking for in each position and having that aligned across the club. And ensuring the pathways are there to give the young players minutes and opportunities. We’re not setting arbitrary targets, we’re more interested in are we following the processes we’re putting in place… we want to provide first team opportunities much sooner than historically this football club has had, at that 17-18-19 year old level. We’re very fortunate to have a first team coach whose philosophy is if you’re 15 or 45 it doesn’t matter, if you earnt the right to the shirt this week you’ll have it.” - In addition to that, there was some interesting insight into the current rules and regs around youth recruitment. CN: “The existing FA visa rules mean you cannot be signed by us if you are not British and younger than 18. Even then it’s unlikely they would qualify for enough visa points to have the 10+ points to get you to an exemptions panel for a decision. That means we would be signing a very young player to take up one of our four ESC slots that each Championship team has – the ability to sign a player with less than ten points (you accumulate these through how many minutes you’ve played in a high-ranking league, international caps etc.). So that’s difficult to find GBE players we can sign at 17-18, and we only have four slots so if we do find one we have to be very sure about them. There are a number of players who do qualify for a GBE who are in academies of the biggest clubs in Europe. A player who’s done a season in the UEFA Youth League at somewhere like Ajax has more chance of getting a GBE.” - Surprise witnesses, each more surprising then that last. Karamoko Dembele was next up on screen confirming that he has signed permanently with the club after initially making a loan move from Brest (giggity) in the summer. CN: “Wherever we can provide information that doesn’t hurt our competitive advantage and ultimately doesn’t breach confidential agreements we have with players and clubs we will do so as quickly as possible. As soon as we can, as soon as we have the ability to make something public we will do. I can now reveal we had an obligation to sign Kaddy permanently in the summer which became active after a certain number of games which has now been met.” Karamoko Dembele is currently on six starts and two sub appearances.
- And then the big one on the evening was the news that Marti Cifuentes and Xavi Calm have both signed new “multi-year contracts” at the club. CN: “What Marti, Xavi and the players achieved in the first six months of this year was remarkable. We worked very hard this summer to try and improve the squad in a way that allows us to play the style of football that’s important to them as well as important to the football club while still being adjusted to the reality of the Championship. We felt like this was the right moment to renew the relationship to continue to build together. This is going to take time. This is not going to be linear progression. We are going to have upsets, disappointments and setbacks. But I couldn’t be happier to continue to work with Marti and Xavi to try and put this club in the best possible position that it can be.” - This didn’t come up in the forum but LFW was able to clarify with CN afterwards that head of performance Ben Williams remains with the club in some capacity. Williams impressed many with his appearance at the forum last year, and after the club enjoyed a highly unusual almost completely injury free 2023/24 there was some disquiet when NBA’s Brooklyn Nets announced his hire in the summer. CN told us Williams will continue to oversee the performance department at QPR, along with several other roles including the Nets, and they are also promoting a full time person in that role internally. - There will be no permanent deal for the development squad’s infamous “Triallist B” who has been scoring at a Paolo Wanchope-like rate for Paul Furlong’s side of late. In fact he’s now on a similar trial at Bournemouth. CN: “The triallist you’re referring to was a centre forward who’s been training with us and the club has elected not to move forwards with that situation.” Off the field- Additional investment/investors. CN: “Our shareholders have made it clear that where there could be additional investment from an external party into the football club who they feel lines up with their ambitions, values and can add strategic insight they don’t have then they’re open to listening to that. Strategic capital is an interesting thing for the football club and we’re open to those conversations.” - Ticketing came up several times, with Ticketmaster taking its usual and richly deserved kicking for the state of its online ticketing platform and the re-sale facility. On moving from Twickets to Ticketmaster for re-sales CN said: “We decided to move fully to Ticketmaster because it enables you to spend the credit on cup games and home games and if not you can withdraw it at the end of the season. Maybe there are certain things we need to look at with the Ticketmaster relationship for it to be more interactive. It sounds like something we should do better and we’ll look into.” CN admitted the “journey”, user experience and functionality of the ticketing platform is not good. They’re “seeking to work closely with Ticketmaster” on improving the experience for desktop and mobile users. CN did point out that almost all of the clubs in the top two divisions use Ticketmaster and the company had been excellent in getting things back online ahead of the Spurs friendly during the global IT outage. A point was raised from the floor about adding functionality so you can pick which bit of an away end you want to be in, helping those that want to stand at the back and those who definitely don’t, and CN said it was a great idea he’d look into. - Chris Hewitt raised the decision to stop giving away fans the Lower School End and how much that was costing the club. Another 1,000 Millwall fans at £38 a throw, he pointed out, was the best part of £40k and not an insignificant amount of money for a club constantly pleading poverty over FFP. CN: “We took a detailed decision this summer to make School Lower available to home fans except in the cup where we have to give a bigger allocation. With the greatest respect that figure is not accurate on how much revenue we get from that part of the ground match by match. Secondly, we felt by offering one of the cheapest season tickets in the division in that part of the ground we would eventually see an uptick that would balance the loss in revenue. We’ve sold 150 season tickets in that area to date. The away teams in this division only seek the lower tier allocation on 11 occasions of the 23 games so the notion we’ll be losing money every week by doing this I would dispute. We’ve relaunched flexi-tickets and group ticketing schemes to try and encourage new fans to experience QPR for the first time in that part of the ground. We’re also doing community outreach to bring in potential supporters who live around our new training ground in Heston to try and make them feel more part of the club. To summarise I think we’re about £11k down like-for like in that area compared to this time last season but as of this morning we’ve sold 750 more tickets in that area for tomorrow night so we remain confident that not only are we maximising QPR support in the ground which will help the boys… but also we think from a revenue perspective it’s something over the course of the campaign we’ll make work.”
- Catering questions focused on the price of drinks in the Legends Bar and around the ground, the dreadful selection of beers, the money that loses the club to the local pubs. CN: “I understand fans’ frustrations. It’s been no secret over the last three years the economic situation in London has been hard on everyone. When you work with third party suppliers they are in a situation where they need to raise costs in line with inflation. The rising costs we’ve seen have been in line with grocery inflation. We do want to improve as soon as possible because it’s got to a level where I don’t think it’s fair on our match going supporters.” Part of a video was played at this point from Craig Stewart at the club’s catering partner who said, before the feed collapsed, they’d restricted price increases to just one a season (Mr Ambassador, you’re really spoiling us) and they were absorbing costs of products and labour where possible but inevitably had to pass some of this on to the consumer. A promise of more premium food offerings than just Pukka Pies was made, and we’re going to get “premium lagers” around the ground shortly. CN followed this up by saying Estrella is coming, which was genuinely the biggest and best announcement that came form the first hour of Monday night until all the contract renewals started. The club will also drop the cost of pints to £5 for the first 30 minutes of the ground being open to try and encourage fans into the stadium early and spend money here rather than elsewhere. So, they are trying, within the confines of what they’ve got and the economy we currently live in. - New stadium klaxon. CN: “We are concentrating our efforts to figure out if there is a way to further improve the stadium we’re lucky to have right here. I’ve found Hammersmith and Fulham really open to the ideas we have and we’re building that relationship. The club has learned the hard way in the past the problem with talking too much about what we want to do before everybody is completely aligned, council and club, so I want to make sure I respect the council. We are looking at it, we want to make progress with it, but anything we do here is going to have to be in total lockstep with the local government.”
- A very specific question was asked about Oaklands Rise, a now completed residential development the club/owners were involved with at Old Oak Common - what happened to it, the club’s involvement, and the money from it. CN: “This was an opportunity the club felt it had to get involved in a development which could potentially further down the line create space for a new stadium build. We had a number of shareholders co-invest in the scheme. The build was delayed by Covid and completed in 2021. It became clear on completion it would not be possible to move forwards with a stadium on the site which is being used largely for housing and at that point the shareholders divested from the scheme.” - Super happy FFP times. A question on whether the historic FFP fine had now been paid off – settled in 2018 the original agreement, I believe, was to pay it in instalments over ten years. CN: “The football club came to a confidential settlement to pay a substantial fine over a longer period of time. The details of how much has been paid, how much is still to pay, will remain confidential between the league and the club and it wouldn’t be smart of me to start talking about agreements we have with the league.” CN then reiterated the existing FFP rules - £39m allowable losses over an ongoing rolling three-year period – but that these rules are increasingly the subject of conversation and debate at Premier League and EFL levels. CN: “The current P&S rules mean you’ve got 50% of the clubs in the Championship this season having to be very, very careful… We sacrificed our competitive advantage in the 2023 transfer window to make sure we stayed in line with the P&S regulations… There is a degree of ‘you guys played by the rules but now we want to change the rules because we’re in a tight spot’. Ultimately, we won’t know how the table is set until we get clarity from the Premier League and EFL. As it stands the existing rules stay in place.” Our accountancy columnist Simon Dorset writes: "Rather pointless blanking of the FFP question considering it is detailed in the accounts. The non-current liabilities in the 2023 accounts show: Greater than 1 year, FFP Settlement £8,500 (k) So after this season's payment of £1.7m the club will have paid half of the fine." - St Andy Evans did a bit of a presentation on the Community Trust which he says launched 15 years ago with 12 full time staff and a turnover around £600k, and has grown to 50 full time staff with 75 seasonal workers delivering 300 sessions a week across seven London boroughs. AE: “We’re trusted. We’re trusted by the young people we work with. Trusted by local stakeholders and partners. It enables us to make a real difference to the young people we’re working with. The goals are based on what the local need is.” The Trust is working directly with the NHS to reach young people with “low level mental health” issues post pandemic. - QPR+ streaming. CN: “I appreciate the price rise since 2020 has been steep but all clubs in the EFL with an iFollow service follow the EFL pricing and this is the minimum the EFL allows us to price this product at.” - Cost of coaches to away games. CN: “Coach travel for the club is a loss leader. We’re losing money every year. I don’t have an issue with that because I think we have some of the best away support in the league, but it should be noted that we lose money providing that support.” - The issue of how the club maximises its revenues while not sacrificing its reputation or image on sponsorships and partnerships with dodgy cryptobros was raised. CN: “It’s a hot button issue across Europe in terms of clubs aligning with brands who have not been properly due dillegenced. It’s tough for clubs, you want every brand you work with to share the values of the football club. We can be proud that we’re a club with very strong values, other clubs might have more manoeuvrability in those areas but I wouldn’t change that for the world. We’ve started using third parties to support us with due diligence over brands. We’ve used as many internal mechanisms as we can. The club actually passed on what would have been the biggest sponsorship it had had for the entirety of its time in the Championship based on ethical concerns in relation to the brand partner. So it is front of mind, we need to be robust with it, and find new ways to partner with the right businesses.” CN said commercial revenues are consistently between 8th and 12th in the division. Sponsorships are up 26% on last season. Neil, the club’s business development manager, presented an idea they’ve had to rent out the boxes as sort of WeWork/hot desk environments. - Sky Overlords. CN: “We’re the only team in the country that has had all its home games at 12.30 so far. I’m frustrated and feel that pain. Owing to the new Sky deal we just have to get on with it. Nobody has any influence – not QPR, not Bristol City, not Leeds. The teams that get more people watching them on Sky tend to get more games. The only situation where the club can have any input in the change to a match date or time is if we feel certain safety concerns around the fixture have not been thought through. Otherwise, sadly, no influence. We are building a strong relationship with stakeholders at the EFL, notably Trevor Birch, but as far as scheduling goes we’re not going to be in a position where we have any influence.” Although, of course, the Sky deal wasn’t forced upon the clubs against their will – the EFL negotiated and agreed the deal with Sky. They knew full well what they were getting into. Yet to be publicly announced but disclosed in conversations afterwards – Sky don’t anticipate revealing their TV picks for January onwards until December. So, having made a big song and dance about how they were giving supporters much more notice in the first half of the season it seems the new deal will give you barely a month through the back half. Subhuman scum.
- On the proposed government regulator it’s believed what that will look like under this Labour government versus what it would have looked like under the previous Conservative government will be different and the clubs are waiting to hear what changes will be made. CN described it as potentially “the most consequential change to English football since the start of the Premier League”. CN: “We have structural problems in the Championship. We have two leagues within our league with the way parachute payments currently operate and the ability for teams that have come down from the Premier League… to spend greatly outweighs that of a team that’s been in the league for a longer period of time. At the same time Luton, Ipswich, Coventry show if you can put the right group of people together on the football side it is a disparity you can overcome. However, over the last ten years the majority of teams going up are the ones who have recently come down and I don’t see that dynamic changing unless something like a regulator exists. Ultimately the Premier League wants to support teams that have come up/gone down with that transition and the EFL doesn’t have jurisdiction over how the Premier League spends its money. There is a conversation to be had. We are in a dangerous moment with P&S limiting the amount we can spend, I think that’s an important thing to do because we have seen too many clubs with 100+ year histories disappear. What we can’t do though is stamp out how a football club makes money/revenue. We need an environment that encourages football clubs to come up with as many diverse ways of achieving revenue.” CN added the club would take its position on a regulator based on consultation with the supporters and what they feel about it. - Marketing the club to new supporters, particularly younger demographics and the local area. CN: “The average age of a match going fan has come down about 4.5 years in the last seven years. That’s to do with family stand, sensory room, activity areas, the fan zone… There are challenges with the Gen Z/Gen Alpha football fan. Their interaction with football might be going with a parent, but increasingly it’s through video games, playing EA Ultimate Team, finding a player who’s really fast, finding out which team he plays for, and deciding to support that team be they in Australia or the Premier League. We need to be better at getting our message out there. The Premier League has become the world’s game, it’s an international product, the cost of a ticket is really very considerable for a young person. In central London you can buy the cheapest ticket to a football match in the top two divisions here at QPR. We need to hammer that home to a greater extent. There is an U25 ticket this year, there’s been fantastic pick up in rail seating, we are looking to tie younger people into the football club by curating a different experience for them. Online we need to be smarter in the areas in which we play. Where we can use London, including seeing a game at QPR as part of your trip, we have an opportunity. The final piece we need to do better at, and we’re strengthening our relationship with Imperial, is we’ve got so many students around here who maybe support Man Utd or are international and don’t have a football experience to go to. It’s front of mind, it is something we’re tackling, but we have a way to go.” - The EFL is getting increasingly interested in and involved with the make up of club’s supporters’ consultation committees. This was something introduced to the club by Lee Hoos when he first arrived as CEO and consists of a broad cross section of the support selected from different stands, age groups, supporters websites etc. The EFL wants to formalise this, make sure they’re democratically elected and so on, so expect changes to the make up of ours by the end of the year. CN also intends to start a new venture where a random 100 season ticket holders at a time are invited to come and meet with him for 90 minutes, either at Loftus Road or Heston, to discuss issues so there is as wide a range of views. If you enjoy LoftforWords, please consider supporting the site through a subscription to our Patreon or tip us via our PayPal account loftforwords@yahoo.co.uk. The Twitter @loftforwords Pictures - Ian Randall Photography Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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