After a dire 22/23 season and amidst mounting criticism, director of football Les Ferdinand has belatedly departed QPR more than a month into a crucial summer — how did we get here, and what’s next for the club he leaves behind?
Almost a decade ago, staring down the barrel of a ten-hour coach-class Atlantic crossing to a work event I didn’t want to go to, in a plane I didn’t want to be on, surrounded by people I did not want to be surrounded by, I sat down, unfurled the tray table, mopped up whatever the fuck that was caked across the tray table, cracked open the lap top, and wrote this. The baby next to me screamed throughout.
It was, metaphorically, a final love letter to my life partner having reached Tether End on the stopping train of an ongoing abusive relationship. I love you, I’ll always love you, but this cannot continue. It’s not me, it’s you. I cannot dedicate this time, resource, money, emotion… life, to anybody/person/thing behaving in this manner. You cannot just expect me to come back for more time after time, credit card in hand, driven by soppy, mawkish trite about dead dads pedalled by Nick Hornby types who, when push came to shove, and the league title was on the line at Anfield in the final game of the season, stopped at home, watched it on TV and then wrote a book about it. And a play. And a film.
Football had been accelerating at dizzying speed towards an unfair fight between the haves and the have nots, for sometime. Jack Walker, local businessman made good, used his steel money to change Blackburn Rovers from middle-of-the-road northern outfit in derelict ground to Premier League champions in redeveloped all-seater stadium. Chris Sutton, the first £5m player. The first £30k-a-week contract just round the corner. Obscene, they said. Where will it end? Well, there are players in Premier League academies on £30k a week now and everybody involved in it, including the player themselves, knows their chances of actually playing for that club are about the same as mine. Solicitor firms on retainer to mop up all the driving offences and times they got their willy out when they probably shouldn’t have — most of the time nobody dies, and money makes everything goes away. Jack Walker, his wealth, his investment in Blackburn, would struggle to move the needle now at a mid-range Championship level. QPR’s owners currently lose more propping up our club for a couple of seasons than he spent on the whole Blackburn enterprise, and we spend our Saturdays watching Rob Dickie pump the ball into the main stand.
With Roman Abramovic came another unwelcome turn of the wheel. Ever more money, ever more spend, ever more grotesque TV deals. Players that did cost you £5m, then £10m, then £20m, now cost £50m. Same player, same ability, just a different price tag. One of his first signings was ex-Middlesbrough loanee Geremi for £7m: doubling the price of jobbing defensive midfielders overnight. QPR sold Les Ferdinand for £6m in 1996, a club record. If you’d sold him five years later it would have been twice that, five years further still £30m, if you sold him today you wouldn’t settle for anything less than £80m. Same player, though.
A local businessman — say, Jim Gregory - used to be able to take over their club and drive it to success. Then you needed to be a multi-millionaire. Then you needed to be a billionaire. And now you need to be a literal fucking country — the Premier League turning into a ridiculous shoot-out between murderous Middle Eastern dictatorships. Social media feeds chock full of "fans” based thousands of miles away who consume their "content” online, and "support” "their club” through the medium of incessantly Tweeting demands for multiple signings, less solidarity with Pride campaigns, and much, much, much more Mason Greenwood. And the people that go to the away games? The people that go to the away games don’t matter.
Of the ‘have nots’ that are succeeding in this climate, not a single one of them is doing it by sticking Harry Redknapp in charge and letting him do as he pleases. That model of appointing the tried and tested "man manager” and letting him sign who he wants has been dead for years. Rightly so. Sometimes it’s Marcelo Bielsa, and then all bets are off. And you can still rely on the brilliant Neil Warnock to roll up for his Fifteenth Annual Farewell Tour each March and save some idiot scum from themselves in the short term. Mostly, though, the path now leads to Dubai to sit on the sofa with Keysie and Gray and talk about how much better it was in the old days, and how they were unfairly persecuted because they didn’t have a foreign name and a goalkeeper who could pass. But they absolutely coined it in. Favourite players, favourite agents. You can have a new contract if you switch to my son as your representative. You can come off the bench on Saturday if I get a chunk of the appearance fee.
QPR always have been, and always will be, one of the ‘have nots’, but for a while there they were behaving like they weren’t. Two takeovers, first by Flavio Briatore/Bernie Ecclestone, and then by Tony Fernandes and Tune, flushed cash through the building. Well a QPR with money is like a mule with a spinning wheel... No one knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it. They hired big-name managers and gave them everything they wanted. Fernandes and co thought they were hiring experts in their field to help them make sound decisions in a sport they knew little about. Mark Hughes came first and brought Mike Rigg and Kia Joorabchian with him, and that was bad/expensive enough. Then they doubled down and down again with Harry Redknapp.
In a sport where four or five defeats in a row means the sack, managers left to their own devices are going to make decisions that help them right this second, and financially. They will happily throw good money after bad at short term options they think will help them this Saturday — the long term development and financial health of the team and the club is not their concern, because they almost certainly won’t be here to benefit from it. Give the youth team striker 20 games to bed in and find his feet, or spaff £20m on somebody who’s already done that? Harry Redknapp used to dismiss the idea that even formations and tactics made that much difference — "football’s about good players, if you’ve got good players you win”. Keep faith with your new signing who’s struggling, or just demand some more money for another new signing to replace him? In one transfer window Mark Hughes replaced Paddy Kenny with Rob Green, and then Rob Green with Julio Cesar, taking QPR’s spend on goalkeeper wages from somewhere around £20k a week to somewhere approaching £200k. For that QPR conceded six fewer goals and were relegated anyway.
Back in the Championship they behaved like one of the ‘haves’ again. They ignored the league’s FFP rules, and set about financially doping their way straight back to the Premier League. Around £80m was spent on wages, in 12 months, by a club with an 18,000 capacity stadium — at the time it was a Championship record. At one point Redknapp was allowed to bring in Oguchi Onyewu and Javier Chevanton, more than 100 senior international caps between them, to sit on the bench. So disinterested was the manager, and most of his players, that they nearly fucked the whole thing up anyway, flopping through the second half of the season and achieving two narrow victories in the play-offs which easily could have gone the other way — and in the case of the final would go the other way 99 times out of 100. Back in the big time, they just made the same mistakes all over again. Money after money after money after money. Player after player after player after player. Redknapp was allowed to spend the entire summer saying he was switching to a back three, making signings like Rio Ferdinand and Mauricio Isla to facilitate that, selling Danny Simpson off cheap to a Leicester team he then won a Premier League title with, only to ditch the whole thing after a bad result in game two at Spurs and then spend six months moaning he didn’t have a recognised right back in the squad. He signed Steven Caulker, who on a recent Under The Cosh podcast said Redknapp had been fully aware he was a degenerate gambler and alcoholic when they’d been together at Spurs - £8m, don’t worry about it ‘Arry. The January Les Ferdinand arrived, initially as technical director, Redknapp started it by loaning Mauro Zarate from West Ham, and finished it by trying to find a loophole in the rules that said we could send Mauro Zarate back to West Ham and loan somebody else instead.
Heading back to the Championship again, this was not a club that could continue in this way. They’d already played the Newcastle card of ignoring the rules of the league and just spending their way back, had a huge fine and protracted legal battle waiting for them over that, and it wasn’t working anyway. As Everton have found, if you just chase the same big names and proven players as the big clubs, all you end up doing is paying fortunes for the ones not good/sane enough for the big clubs to touch — Joey Barton. It may have got them promoted out of the Championship once, just, but it wasn’t sustainable. Even if it was working, the FFP rules meant it was no longer even legal. The club desperately needed a long-term strategy, money spent on infrastructure not wanker footballers and their agents, better youth development, a more sustainable transfer policy with players sold for big sums we can reinvest. For that it needed a director of football to sit between the benevolent but incompetent ownership and the manager. Every one of the success stories from the ‘have nots’ operates like this.
That, it turned out, would be Les Ferdinand. Whether they were blowing smoke up my arse or not I don’t know but I was told he’d actually printed that earlier article out and taken it to one of his early meetings with Fernandes and the board.
Next week QPR move into their shiny new training ground. Investment in infrastructure at last. A tremendous asset and great success story the club should be rightly proud of — an absolute world apart from the rented secondary school-standard facility we were using at Harlington for so many years when Les Ferdinand was appointed. Nevertheless, when you look at most other aspects of the club — the first team, the transfers, the results, the academy, the finances, our FFP situation — you would have to say at this point that he has ultimately failed, and that by the end of the season just gone his position had become untenable.
As I said repeatedly during the second half of last season, it is a damning indictment on Les Ferdinand and the people he’s worked with at QPR that after eight years of them we were forced into bringing in 34-year-old Chris Martin off contract from a team next to us on the league ladder because there wasn’t one single body in the building capable of standing up front and heading a few balls for ten games while Lyndon Dykes was poorly — Dykes, himself, of course not exactly some irreplaceable, barnstorming Championship powerhouse. That Martin was released by Bristol City early because, despite not making a loan signing last year, they had enough Tommy Conway and Alex Scott types coming through their own academy to fill out their team anyway just makes it all so much worse.
QPR’s academy has been hobbled by the insidious EPPP regulations, forced upon clubs like us by the Premier League under the threat of losing even the meagre scraps we get from their top table already, which allow category one clubs to basically walk into your car park and pick up any boys they find wandering around there waiting for their mum. An exasperated Ferdinand told LFW in February the club had lost 13 lads out of its youth system to category one clubs, at a financial gain of just £750k — Liverpool’s Harvey Elliott is among their number. But then the club has also made poor calls on prospects who did want to stay, like Chris Mepham. Lee Hoos chucked the throwaway comment that we are still the fifth most productive category two academy in the country into his recent business interview on the official site, although there was no clarification on how he reached that figure, what it was based on or over what period of time. Paul Hall was equally bullish about our record for graduating players when he spoke to LFW in March 2022 but, again, to reach the numbers he was talking about you have to include things like Deshane Dalling’s ten minute sub appearance in one cup game — he’s now with Lewes. QPR Analytics tells me there were 6,067 minutes given by QPR to players aged 21 or under last season — 15th in the Championship.
There was an FA Youth Cup victory over Spurs last season, and hopeful noises around Rayan Kolli and Teddy Lawrence. But the Chris Martin thing speaks for itself, at loud volume. Gareth Ainsworth didn’t even think there was anyone worth giving ten minutes to in the bleak end of season dead rubber against Martin’s former club, who started the game with six academy graduates and no loans while QPR fielded two 34-year olds. Les admitted himself to us: "Three years ago after losing Eze we were the club people wanted to send their players to. We lost that, we’ve lost that a little bit, and we need to gain it back.”
His critics, of which there have been many throughout his tenure, will say he failed totally, and throughout.
QPR were a Premier League club when he arrived, albeit one clearly about to be relegated. It then went into the Championship with parachute payments, and kept hold of the likes of Matt Phillips and Charlie Austin through the first transfer window, but never got close to even a play-off place in that period where, as we know, you have to get back up quickly or settle in for a long period of house cleaning.
We have continued to spend money on players, and large quantities of that have been wasted. Our parachute money, and what we did receive for the likes of Austin and Phillips, was often spent on distinctly mediocre fare like James Perch and Paul Konchesky, gambles that did not pay off like Conor Washington, or things that were obviously fucking stupid from the start like a massive great long contract for wasters like Jay Emmanuel-Thomas to spend hosting seedy parties in Soho.
A development conveyer belt that did seem to be firing up with first Alex Smithies, then Luke Freeman and finally golden goose Ebere Eze, has stalled. QPR are now selling players who were recruited to be part of that, like Rob Dickie, at a loss, or losing them for nothing having mismanaged contract situations. The retention of players, even more so than the recruitment, has been poor, with sellable assets like Dickie, Jack Robinson, Bright Osayi-Samuel, Ryan Manning and soon Chris Willock all walking away for a fraction of their potential worth. Several times — most notably with Mass Luongo and Jake Bidwell — we offered such a ridiculously generous contract in the first place that we weren’t able to afford to renew it when it came around again even when we wanted to. While working out FFP headroom for signing new players, we’ve often left ourselves in positions where there isn’t enough to be able to make acceptable offers to those we’ve already got. Manning and Osayi-Samuel had both bumped up against a £10k-a-week ceiling we had at that time and we wouldn’t break the bank for them, only 18 months later to smash that completely to pieces to get Austin and Johansen through the door with disastrous consequences. The club has an excuse for all of them — Manning was a mercenary, Bright’s dad was a dickhead, Robinson ended up leaving for less money because he thought he was going to Fulham and then they got promoted and didn’t want him — but it’s happened too often for me not to believe we’ve been at least partially at fault, at least some of the time.
And through this all, the Shepherd’s Bush faithful has had to watch as clubs facing all the same EPPP, FPP and stadium restrictions that we do have gone past us and accelerated off into the distance — some of them within literal walking distance of our ground. Clubs we used to compete with on a level, like Palace and Fulham, clubs who were once miles behind and pre-season friendly fodder for us, like Brentford, Brighton and Luton.
Ferdinand’s supporters, and I’ve certainly copped plenty over the years for sticking up for him and the work he’s done here, will say look at what he inherited and what he’s got to work with.
The idea the team we were relegated with last time was capable of bouncing straight back if only it hadn’t been given to Chris Ramsey, if only we’d signed better players than JET and Ben Gladwin, if only we’d stuck with Neil Warnock second time around and not gone with Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, is not one I subscribe to — though Ramsey, and Hasselbaink, clearly were mistakes. That team was broken. It was complete crap. Massively expensive, full of mercenary wankers and players who blatantly didn’t want to be here. Leroy Fer may have cost £8m, played in the Premier League, scored the occasional goal — he also wasn’t very good. Robert Green may have been a former England international, and heroic at times in our previous promotion in 2014, but his form cratered that year — I remember watching us slog away for 80 minutes trying to equalise at home to Hull only for him, within 60 seconds of Seb Polter finally doing so, to punch the ball into his own net off a bemused opponent. Charlie Austin was engineering a contract run down and January move to Southampton. Matt Phillips was in full-on "if I pulled out as often as him I wouldn’t have to sit in the family stand” mode. Steven Caulker was drunker than I was at most of the games. And more importantly still - with one FFP breach already under our belts, the club haemorrhaging money hand over fist, and it only "working” in the sense that it had achieved a promotion into a league where we lost every match and came straight back in more debt — it simply wasn’t legally or financially possible to continue on with what we were doing. Even the four games Warnock was briefly in caretaker charge for, he set the team up without strikers at all and ground through dire games with Preston, Boro, Leeds and Reading scoring two goals.
The club needed to halve its wage bill from £80m to £40m, and then halve it again to £20m. That’s really difficult to do without crashing through another division or two, and under Les’ watch QPR did that while maintaining their Championship status.
The proximity of Brentford in particular makes the comparisons with teams that have gone past us into the distance really stark, and hard to bear. If Luton/Brighton/Brentford can do that, why can’t we? Why are we being left behind? It’s very easy to pick another club as an example to suit your narrative — we all do that. But a couple of seasons ago you’d have been chucking Barnsley onto that list when Valerian Ismael got them going, and now they’re in League One. There are other examples of former Premier League clubs who faced similar situations to ours and sank without trace — Bradford into League Two where they remain mired. There are examples of clubs that continued to spend unsustainably, continued to ignore the rules chasing a Premier League promotion by believing it to only be another six signings and £10m outlay away, and have ended up destitute, broken, under transfer embargoes, and again heading down the leagues further still — Sheff Wed, Derby, Reading. There are other examples of clubs that chucked all their parachute payments at trying to get back, didn’t make it, and are now in a right state — Stoke, West Brom.
We had wrestled ourselves to a point a couple of years ago where I felt confident we were about to be moving forwards again. The sales of Smithies, Freeman and then Eze along with the hacking back of the wage bill created budget space for us to reinvest in sellable assets for the team and push on up the league. There was a wave of optimism around the place for the 2021/22 season, losses were down to £4m in the latest set of accounts, and right up to the end of January we looked a play-off certainty. We shot our shot, missed, and under FFP’s three-year reporting cycle basically have to take some medicine for another couple of years now and wait for the expenditure of that season to roll out of our reporting calculation. Bristol City, who we’ve praised highly already in this piece, have just had a similar situation and a few years of low Championship finishes and poor teams having over stretched themselves and not gone up. That’s just how it is in the FFP era, in this division, for a club without parachute payments, and with our revenues as limited as they are by the stadium. Les, as he would often say in interview, would like nothing more than to go out and do this, that or the other with the team, but the rules of the league say we can’t.
If you want to be critical you could say Ebere Eze was a fluke. A generational talent who fell into our lap. If you want to be supportive you could say that it was Les, Chris Ramsey, Paul Hall and others who got the best out of a player that almost every other club in the city had failed with, making the club a life-saving £20m into the bargain — Eze thinks it’s the latter, and regularly name checks the trio. You could say we spent the money on PotNoodle. Or you could acknowledge that the development conveyer belt we were meant to be operating was severely hampered by a completely unforeseen global pandemic, lockdown, and subsequent total collapse in the Championship transfer market of which the vast majority of the other sellable assets we have got fall into. We found ourselves nursing a pre-Covid strategy in a post-Covid world, and again if you want to be critical then accuse them of failing to adapt to that but adapt to what? With the rules as they are, and our income stream as it is, what plan is there for QPR other than to try and develop players to sell for big money?
The academy is indeed well staffed — a former first team manager, an international football manager, an academy manager all there just for a start, that can’t be one bloke doing one job no? — and now not producing. Mark Warburton lost his job here at least in part for reaching that conclusion himself and saying as much. The relationship between that side of the business and Warburton’s first team and coaches disintegrated to the point they weren’t speaking, and for all his reputation as a player developer Warburton simply wouldn’t entertain any of QPR’s young players or their coaches by the end of his time here. The youth coaches believed Joe Gubbins was good enough, Warbs said he didn’t know how to play the back three system because the youth coaches refused to use it. Warbs lost the battle and two games out from the end of last season Les gave an interview to TalkSport at a bloody golf day that all but confirmed the manager would be on his way, leaving us with those weird final two matches of the season where the club were basically forced into announcing it would indeed by the manager’s last games. When Les falls out with you, he really falls out with you. Given how things have gone since, Warburton looks like he was right, and got sacked for telling the truth. But Warbs’ precious first team players ended the season in dreadful form, crashing out of the play-offs. Naming five subs away at Bristol City, and again at Swansea on the last day, was just petty. Backing expensive wasters like Andre Gray when Les wanted him sent back to Watford in January, but refusing to entertain the idea of just sticking Aaron Drewe on the bench every now and again to play the game, backfired and was poor in any case. People like Conor Masterson, who did have half a chance and showed promise, were very unlucky to be caught in that political crossfire. Warbs can be difficult to deal with too, and it wasn’t the first job he’d left acrimoniously.
And over Les’ tenure, the academy has produced, certainly more than it was doing: Joe Lumley, Seny Dieng, Darnell Furlong, Ebere Eze, Ilias Chair, Osman Kakay, Ryan Manning. You can sit there and say that one’s not very good, that one only joined late in his teens, that one’s actually from somebody else’s academy, and basically get really stringent about it and say that unless Steve Gallen ruffled their hair as an eight-year-old it doesn’t count. But prior to Les coming back to the club, basically since Kevin Gallen and Danny Dichio emerged together around 1994, the club had brought Richard Langley, Marcus Bean and Ray Jones through its academy in a quarter of a century.
And this nuance is the thing I’m driving at here. It’s emotionally charged this one. It’s personal. There’s history. It’s the zeitgeist of a fanbase dealing with the team being shit, which is gloomy, and that lens is important. But it’s still nuanced. Charlie Austin was first out of the blocks on Friday with a Tweet welcoming the news, presumably embittered about the manner in which his two-year deal was cut short last summer in a Zoom meeting when he was apparently asked if he intended to retire. Austin isn’t the only well-liked QPR name to criticise the way Les dealt with their contract situation and departure — Nedum Onuoha and Ale Faurlin both said they were deeply unhappy with how Ferdinand had handled their situations, and then there was Yoann Barbet left to do a farewell lap of the pitch in front of 50 people because the club had refused to either discuss what potential contracts would look like for those coming off their deals, or confirm to them they’d be released. One player had to stick his furniture in storage awaiting a conversation, as per Dave McIntyre. But then is it Les’ fault that Charlie Austin came back for last season in such lousy form and physical condition?
People’s Les narratives have now festered and entrenched over eight years. There have been accusations, particularly on Twitter, that some of the criticism came from a position of underlying prejudice. It’s quite common for people in football to hire and employ people they know, trust, like and have worked with before, most managers come with at least their own assistant and a coach or two, and yet Les got beaten over the head with "Les’ mates” when referring to Chris Ramsey, Paul Hall and co, and more recently "the PE teachers”. There’s plausible deniability for people to get away with that, Mark Bowen and the goons Mark Hughes brought with him got called the Taffia for a while after all. But there were also posts on our message board prior to the Burnley home game last season accusing Ferdinand of deliberately creating a situation whereby the underqualified Hall could be crowbarred into the manager’s job full time to "further Les’ agenda around lack of opportunity for black coaches”. These posts made literally at the same time Neil Critchley was at Loftus Road signing a contract to become QPR’s fifth (now sixth) white manager in a row. There was certainly plenty to criticise Les Ferdinand for, without digging at his non-controversial opinion that black managers and coaches struggle to get jobs at the top end of our sport.
Whichever side you land, the way things ended last season with Mark Warburton meant this season had to go well. When Mick Beale hit the ground running, we thought we might have cracked it. If you want to be supportive, you say he made exactly the sort of progressive, forward-thinking appointment we crave and the bloke walked out on him. If you don’t, you can say he got rid of a manager who, for all of the struggles of early 2022, posted three league positions (13th, 9th, 11th) that were basically exactly where we should have been for our spend, and then got taken in by a bloke who can’t lie straight in bed and was always going to be off first chance he had. In the end, the way it turned out, it made Ferdinand’s position untenable, whichever side of the debate you’re on.
I would say the QPR hierarchy clearly thought so too, because now he’s gone. Gareth Ainsworth was certainly not a Les choice or appointment, and with the season disintegrating alarmingly dismissing Critchley (who was) and bringing in his polar opposite in every possible way did feel rather like the owners taking the keys back from Les and Lee Hoos at that point fearing a dreadful crash. But, then, this is a resignation, not a sacking, and we’ve burned off more than a month of a crucial close season rebuild already. It doesn’t immediately suggest the club know what went wrong, who was responsible for it or what we should do next.
Ferdinand was, in my view, often too sensitive to fan criticism and bothered about what people might say about his decisions. In our February interview he referenced being "lynched” if he’d sold Chris Willock for a hypothetical figure of £6m (which has never been on the table from anywhere) but in his job you’ve got to make that call regardless and £6m for Chris Willock would have been outstanding business in hindsight. The decision to go relatively big in the transfer market in the summer of 2021, and go around publicly saying nobody would be sold and clubs shouldn’t bother trying, now looks like an enormous gamble that’s not paid off and is going to screw us for a few years. Les says he thinks the fans would have wanted us to ‘have a go at it’ that summer, listening to a few gobshites telling you to "show some ambition” is not a strategy.
Having not been responsible for Gareth Ainsworth’s appointment, but then criticised for it when the results got even worse still, he’s now facing a summer of signing off on Gareth Ainsworth signings, which he doesn’t agree with and are diametrically opposed to the style of football he wants here, and then being criticised for those as well. So, he’s decided to walk. If the club had (as I hoped) come out of the gates with some decisive action and changes immediately after the Bristol City game I’d have been more hopeful, because change was clearly needed amidst an ongoing drift and palpable malaise around the club. Many of the answers Les gave to us in February, while I was grateful for his time, didn’t ring true. He was starting to sound beaten, making excuses, and not expressing any sort of clear vision for where we were going and how we would get there. There's been a lot more punditry work and lucrative after dinner speaking in the Far East of late - opportunities Ferdinand used to steadfastly reject when he started, to focus on the job in hand here. But to get more than a month into the summer and then have the DOF resign, and resign apparently over a dispute about transfer policy which he should be in charge of (not the manager), is pretty alarming to me.
We’ve presently got football decisions being made by Amit Bhatia and Lee Hoos — the latter, when he arrived, used to make a big thing out of being the business guy who left the football up to the people who knew about football. Ainsworth and Richard Dobson ran the entire operation at Wycombe, perhaps we’re just going to go for that and let them do as they please. I would say simply that has been disastrous when done here before under this ownership (Hughes, Redknapp), and has that pair shown enough to this point for you to want us to take the checks and balances off and let them crack on? As I’ve said previously, that just absolutely screams of Ainsworth being sacked in October/November amidst a hail of criticism about the way the team is playing, to be replaced by a mob-placating pendulum swing in the opposite direction and we end up with Marti Cifuentes/Ajax Youth Bot 3.2 trying to explain four-box-two to Josh Scowen.
And here has been my problem with Ferdinand, and his role, throughout the eight years. I believe, as I did at the start, that this club is one in dire need of a director of football and the model that comes with it. In theory that’s what we’ve had, but not in practice. As I see it, what the model should be, and what this club needs, is the director of football is basically in charge of everything. He hires and fires the manager, he has final say on the signings, he dictates the style of play, he builds the club and its vision, drives its ethos. Managers will come and go, as they do, but they're appointed along the same ideals and ideas each time, essentially as a head coach, so you don't need to keep ripping your squad and transfer target list apart each time. It’s his show, and he’s here over a long period of time were clear targets and KPIs to be hit along that way.
QPR have not been operating like that with Les Ferdinand as director of football. At times it's felt like we got one just because other teams had one, and fans like me were asking for one. We’d go a little way down the line, like letting him appoint Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and sending Neil Warnock on his way, but then the owners would swoop in at the first sign of trouble and fan unrest and foist a nostalgic, populist appointment like Ian Holloway onto them, who they did not want, and then ask them to manage and control his increasingly madcap decisions and behaviours. Steve McClaren was "an itch Tony Fernandes needed to scratch” and so, again, Les and Lee are left to run the club day to day, now with another manager they didn’t want. McClaren came in, tore up all their planned summer recruitment saying he didn’t want any of their players, started the season woefully short and with cataclysmically awful results, then demanded they go out and get him four expensive loans to prop his team up. Warbs, Beale and Critchley were more Les driven appointments, and you can see there that at least there is continuity of thought and style there — one of the big criticisms I always level at QPR is they not only change manager too often to no apparent improvement, but they change manager from one guy to completely the opposite. We’ve just done that once again, over the top of the director of football.
It's not just with manager hires and fires, it’s with signings too. You could rightly point at disasters like Conor Washington and say you wouldn’t want Ferdinand running a bath, but if you have a director of football then the signings have to come through that model in my opinion. Still, too often, we’re allowing recruitment to be dictated by the manager, and in some cases that manager wasn’t their appointment either. McClaren not only demanded the four loans, he also refused to use Manning or Osayi-Samuel, burning off a year of their deals at the point we should have been looking to renew them. QPR should have renewed them anyway. They knew what they had, certainly in BOS, and were fuming McClaren wouldn’t pick him — in a proper DOF model the manager’s opinion on that shouldn’t matter, you back yourself and renew the deal. Previously, under Ian Holloway, we had Ian Butterworth pushing Sean Goss, and then later Gary Penrice involved — back to signing players from agent recommendations. Luke Freeman and BOS were the big successes, but there was a litany of failures there too. Mark Warburton was allowed Dom Ball, Lee Wallace, Liam Kelly, Moses Odubajo... He was allowed to sign Andre Gray, and then keep him for the second half of the season when his behaviour had Les minded to send him back. Again, under the director of football model, that should be the director of football’s call, not the manager’s. By letting the manager have what he wants you end up with the situation we were in last summer where you’ve been keeping faith with Wallace and Odubajo because the manager knows and likes them, but now you’ve got no full back on either side of the pitch and no money to do anything about it. The Austin re-signing, initially on loan which was a success and then permanently which was not, was driven from above — Les et al had wanted Glenn Murray. You might think Austin was a much better bet, I’m saying if Murray is who the DOF wants then that’s who you have to get regardless of what you might think.
Les has now fallen on his sword after a season collapsed because, once more, a manager was given what he wanted last summer, signed loads of players he knew and had worked with before, and then when he departed they mentally fucked off with him. Exactly what the DOF system is there to protect against. Leon Balogun, as I said at the time, was the most egregious of these. An injury prone 34-year-old who the manager has worked with before, brought in to play ahead of younger players you own and are meant to be developing to sell. Under the model stuff like that should be a flat no, for all the reasons that subsequently played out through 22/23.
Dave McIntyre at West London Sport, who’s been very supportive of Les against mounting criticism, says Ferdinand didn’t want to be chief scout, wanted to hire one but then the manager ignored the reports. Ferdinand has built out the recruitment and analytics department, under Andy Belk, which I think is a positive. But then at the same time, you’re signing Balogun, Martin, Adomah — and which bloody algorithm churns up those names?
We have persistently flipped and flopped. We spent a while picking up Seb Polter, Tjaronn Chery, Idrissa Sylla, Ariel Borysiuk, Pawel Wszolek and Yeni Ngbakoto from European backwaters (some good, some very poor indeed), then ended up handing them to Ian Holloway whose style was never going to be suited to any of them. Olly was publicly critical of Sylla in particular. Off we go, therefore, in a completely different direction, scouting the lower leagues and reserve teams, for players like Matt Smith, Alex Baptiste, Luke Freeman, Bright Osayi-Samuel, Paul Smyth. And, again, some very good, some very poor, but a complete flip in style, which then flipped again under McClaren, and again again under Mark Warburton — Matt Smith recently told Undr the Cosh he had seven meetings with Warbs in his first seven days at the club about when he might be moving on. It’s not meant to be like this under a director of football model. The whole thing is about achieving consistency of vision across the team, the managerial appointments, the recruitment, the retention. When Graham Potter arrived at Brighton did you suddenly see them signing four or five Swansea players?
To some (me) this is evidence of a Les who knew what he wanted, and wanted what was best, but was hamstrung by a chaotic and demonstrably incompetent boardroom. To others, it’s evidence of Les fiddling while Rome burns. Ponsing about in a tracksuit on the training pitch, or playing too much golf. If you can’t step in and go ‘no, this is my remit and we don’t do that’, then why are you here?
And now he’s not. Just as well really. This club really do like to eat their young, and hearing a QPR away support signing "fuck off Les Ferdinand” with such gusto at West Brom last season was a particular low point. As ever, we think one more sacking, one more appointment, one more signing, and we’ll have cracked it. We won’t, and haven’t. This latest blood sacrifice will placate the masses only as long as it takes us to lose another couple of matches and then the ‘Les Lee Amit — get out of my club’ clown memes will simply be replaced by those of Gareth Ainsworth as Frank Gallagher, as we set about monstering the legacy and reputation of another previously well-regarded former hero.
My solution is as it was on that plane nearly a decade ago. The solution that so many of these clubs we bitch and moan about going past us have used to great effect. I think the problem hasn’t been the model, or even that the bloke within it was inexperienced and not ultimately up to the job, but that we’re only using it and him to a certain extent. There’s still a little bit of what Ruben wants, a little bit of what Tony wants, a little bit of what Amit wants, a bit of Les, a bit of Lee, a bit of the manager. There’s too many chefs here, and it’s spoiling the product. On the fans forum bingo card was the question about what Les actually does and what his job entailed, and that’s because there were still so many decisions being made by so many other people, and the thinking was subsequently not anywhere near as joined up as it needed to be. It meant that when there was a success, like Luke Freeman, or Kenneth Paal, people were able to lay claim to it, like Gary Penrice, or Mick Beale. You even had the ridiculous set up this year where Beale spent the whole summer saying he'd nursed Paal as a baby, and then when the manager left the club wheeled out the head of recruitment to say actually we’d been watching him all along.
There’s talk the job is Steve Gallen’s if he wants it, coming back to the club from Charlton. I do worry about QPR’s obsession with people who’ve got a club connection over and above who might be the best man for the job, but Steve has worked to budgets and boardroom situations at The Valley that make ours look like a church picnic and has built a good reputation for player recruitment in particular. If you wanted to be flippant about it I guess you would rather have the bloke that got a seven figure sum for Macauley Bonne rather than the chump who paid it (yes, yes, I am still willing to die on the hill that it wasn’t that bad a signing on paper). Whoever it is though, we need to be all the way in with them. Not most of the way in but oh, no, wait, I’m bringing Ian Holloway/Steve McClaren/Gareth Ainsworth/Charlie Austin in. And it needs to be somebody, not us abandoning the idea, eliminating the position and just going for Wycombe 2.0 with Gareth and Dobbo.
What manager wants manager gets doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in modern day football. And it certainly doesn’t work at QPR.
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