It’s about ownership — Preview Sunday, 9th Apr 2023 23:16 by Clive Whittingham Two clubs troubled by problems of a different nature, with the same underlying cause, clash on Easter Monday as QPR travel to West Brom. West Brom (15-11-13 LWWDDL 10th) v QPR (11-9-20 LWLLLL 21st)Lancashire and District Senior League >>> Monday April 10, 2023 >>> Kick Off 15.00 >>> Weather — Storms >>> The Hawthorns, West Bromwich There will be protests at The Hawthorns tomorrow afternoon. Fans of West Bromwich Albion, currently tenth in the Championship, are so alarmed by the developing situation at their club they intend to make their feelings known with a bit of agg before the game, and a mass delayed entrance to the match. First world problems, eh? If the Blackpool fans had stayed away from the first 12 minutes of our game there they’d have been coming in 3-0 up, and passing QPR fans already on their way out. The Baggies’ faithful are right, for reasons I’ll come onto, but there’s also a very large slice of ‘be careful what you wish for’ here. The club’s current owner, Guochuan Lai, who is bleeding the club dry, driving it into the ground, and not even really attempting to hide that any more, was initially hailed as some sort of saviour from whatever purgatory it was that West Brom fans felt they were going through before. The club, that has been in the Premier League for 13 of the last 20 seasons, having played top flight football for just three of the previous 20, finished tenth in the Championship last season which was the lowest it has been on the league ladder since a 21st placing in this league way, way back in 2000/01. It was owned, for 12 years prior to Lai’s reign, by Jeremy Peace, against whom fans also protested in 2014 at which point they’d been in the Premier League for four years straight, with another four years to come. That protest was sparked by the heinous crime of appointing Alan Irvine as the new manager. The team would finish that campaign fourteenth in the Premier League and in the quarter final of the League Cup. A quote selected at random from the article I’ve just linked, attributed to 43-year-old Mel Bullas of Dudley: “He’s got to start spending big money, why can’t we spend £25 million each summer?” The fact is, West Brom were one of the best run clubs in the country. During our mostly shambolic three-year Premier League stay we’d go there and pick up the league’s best programme, a weighty tome done as a labour of love by some nutter, that would include a column from the burgeoning director of football there, Dan Ashworth, who would explain in granular detail what decisions they were taking and why. Ashworth, who’s since had a hand in transforming Brighton, England and now Newcastle. They punched above their weight while operating within their means, debt free, worry free, and, sure, occasionally under threat of relegation from the Premier League, but bouncing straight back within a maximum of two seasons on each of the four occasions that happened. What, exactly, do you expect? Remember when Charlton fans started saying Alan Curbishley had taken them “as far as he can” because they kept fading in the latter third of top flight campaigns? How did that turn out for them? Lai, at a time when Chinese billionaires were being encouraged to go out and sweep up foreign football clubs and chuck money at them as part of a grand sport washing project, was seen as the key to the Baggies starting to be a “serious player” in the “best league in the world” — by which we of course mean you can start paying £40m for Gylfi Sigurdsson without first checking his hard drive. The modern football obsession with signings, in ever greater quantity, at every greater cost, is all consuming. If you’re not signing, you’re not doing it right. Always be signing. West Brom, four seasons into an eight-year Premier League stay, were apparently not signing enough. How telling that those 2014 protests basically died a death because on the Friday before the club spent some money on the colossal might of Joleon Lescott. A terrible signing. But a signing. And that’s all that mattered — we hated the chairman on Thursday, but now he’s signed Joleon Lescott, so we’re fine. What they now face is far more existential. As the money has dried up, and the general Chinese attitude to hoarding foreign football clubs has changed, the Baggies are left with an entirely absent owner, who’s in too deep to sell, but no longer wants to fund. Should Wolves be relegated, their bitter near neighbours would quickly be in the same predicament for the same reason. In fact, it’s even worse than Lai no longer wanting to fund, he’s actually taking money out to prop up his other Covid-stricken businesses. West Brom paid a £5m loan to Lai’s day job, which he promised to repay but has missed four deadlines to do so and the club’s new auditors have written off in their first report on the situation. From a debt-free, well-run club living within its means, with Dan Ashworth holding court on how to run football clubs, this lot are now in the shit up to their neck. They have taken out a £20m loan from a US off-the-shelf company with interest payable at 14%. The latest set of accounts also shows a £3m loan with an annual interest charge approaching 80%. When we talk about FFP and protecting clubs, would a far more effective protection not be to allow owners to spend what they like but ban them from building the club into debt? The £5m loan to the owner’s business is long gone. Their parachute payments cease next season. Lai is essentially using the club as a cash point to take out the last of his overdraft, propping himself, and it, up with loans from the sort of companies that advertise in the breaks on This Morning. West Brom need to be promoted this season, but are severely hamstrung in that endeavour by their nonsensical decision to not only appoint Steve Bruce as manager in the first place, but then keep him through a start to the campaign that saw them win two of the first 14 to sit bottom of the table in October. Those of us charged with writing season previews talked of a “Bruce tax” on this team, and downgraded it accordingly, but none of us thought the fat mess would actually relegate them. Having finally bitten the bullet and replaced him with Carlos Corberan the Baggies won nine of their next ten games, including the corresponding fixture at Loftus Road, just to show how horrendously this team was performing under a manager that signed 34-year-old Eric Pieters because he lived on the same street, and 24-year-old striker Brandon Thomas-Asante because his son-in-law played in the same League Two team. Ashworth long gone, Ron Gourlay is the CEO here, who you may remember from such success stories as everything that’s happened at Reading over the last few years — another club where Chinese ownership went bad. Without a promotion the auditors say their only hope of avoiding a financial meltdown is a large amount of player sales for serious money, but West Brom had the oldest team in the Championship at the start of last season and spent last summer bringing Jed Wallace and John Swift in on the sort of wages they’ve only heard about in books. Sellable assets here are few and far between. QPR have no such worries at this point. They haemorrhage money, at a rate of £2m a month at the last official count, but have committed owners who write that cheque and periodically convert the debt it creates to equity. If they stopped doing that, we’d rack up the same debt West Brom are currently wrestling with inside 12 months, and would quickly financially implode without a takeover by somebody or something capable of funding a £24m loss each season. Our owners are the only thing standing between us and this going full AFC Wimbledon, with Chessington becoming a league fixture rather than a world of adventures. These losses, and our current situation, are a result of their mistakes and decision making over ten years, but they pay for that diligently. To buy it from them you’d be immediately on the hook for not only the sizeable chunk of money they’re yet to convert to equity, but also £13m of a £20m training ground development, £10m of a £17m FFP fine, and that £24m a year we’re currently losing putting this team on the field. You’re talking at least £50m just to get the keys. When people chant “sack the board” you’ve got to appreciate these facts first. In that respect, they’re the opposite of Lai, and yet when it comes to running a football club they’re very alike. Ours are benevolent, and we’re reliant on them; theirs is parasitic, and it’s killing them. But neither group — West Brom’s ownership, and ours — knows what it’s doing, really. They’re both involved in a business they know nothing about, and by allowing things like paying £124 out in wages for every £100 that comes through the door in revenue (as QPR did last season) they’re showing the acumen that has led them to success in airlines, hotels and ports has been checked at the door — they’d never allow that in any of their other businesses. Chris Wright did exactly the same thing here. They’re also largely absent. Lai is no longer seen at West Brom games, and you’re more likely to see a QPR player miss the first defender with a corner kick than catch any of the owners of the club in the directors’ box at the game. Another wide open space in the South Africa Road stand on Saturday, arguably just when they’re needed here to present a united front and face some music the most. It’s run from afar, remotely, on Zoom calls, group emails, WhatsApp chats and so on. Majority shareholder Ruben Gnanalingam’s QPR intake is mainly through the QPR Plus product, with Nick London and Andy Sinton explaining to him just how bad what he’s watching really is. I’d love to know how many away games our owners have been to in the last let’s say three seasons — I suspect the answer is Fulham. When you look at the football clubs that are succeeding in this country at the moment, they divide into two camps… There are those who are simply too rich to fail. Man City are owned by the UAE, Newcastle by Saudi Arabia, Man Utd perhaps soon by Qatar, and £100m transfer fees and £500k a week wages are just the norm there — fans love signings, fans love winning, don’t turn your Grindr on during the pre-season tour and nobody gets beheaded. Chelsea - who by all sane judgements have had a cataclysmically dreadful season, in which every possible wrong move has been made, £300m of transfer fees has been pissed up a wall, with the chairman a laughing stock, and Fat Frank waddling back in there in a twist too far-fetched for Eastenders - have only torpedoed themselves as far down as eleventh. They’re level on points with Fulham, who by the same majority opinion have had a season bordering on the miraculous. Lower down you're seeing a similar thing at Wrexham - financially doped up to the gills in the Conference, top on 100 points already, presented as some sort of fairy tale by a media that thinks the rest of us give as much of a shit "what's going on at Spurs?" as they do. Unless some murderous, oppressive regime takes a fancy to us as their hobby between public stonings, we’re never going to be in this group. We had a bit of a chance, ten years ago, and botched it. There are then those clubs who punch back at all of this, bloody the noses of the elite, and outperform every metric. These are led currently by Brighton and Brentford, who sit astride Liverpool in the league and both ahead of Chelsea. What these clubs have is a clued-in, switched-on, hands-on, shrewd-as-fuck owner. Matthew Benham and Tony Bloom are across everything, driving the whole ethos of the place, with a firm hand on the tiller and a watchful eye on the profit and loss. Brighton, from a position in the bottom division playing their home games at Gillingham, have been driven up through all four leagues and into a new stadium by a succession of committed, hands-on, present, supremely competent owners, board members, directors and executives. No surprise to see Dan Ashworth’s name cropping up here again. This is what we should aspire to. As you look down the leagues, the club that are consistently able to play in leagues higher than their resources allow, and beat teams they should never possibly be able to compete with, frequently have these switched-on, clued-in owners driving the strategy - Andy Holt at Accrington, Dale Vince at Forest Green (two non-league clubs in League One) for example, or Jason Stockwood and Andrew Pettit who have changed Grimsby Town from a basket case to a model club in two years. Simply moving from John Fenty's ownership to theirs at Blundell Park shows the difference a good owner and bad owner can make. Sadly, over the last decade and more we’ve had owners with all the gear, and none of the idea. There’s been a lot of lazy reminiscing on the message board recently about Flavio Briatore — “he got us up, he didn’t take any shit, he wouldn’t have stood for this, he got us promoted whatever you say”. The bloke was a cunt. And an incompetent one at that. The success he had, belatedly, after burning through millions of quid, only happened because he backed off and got lucky with Neil Warnock who knew what he was doing. QPR, since the Briatore takeover, has been entirely reliant on people who do not know what they are doing accidentally appointing somebody who does. Briatore kept on the dangerously incompetent Gianni Paladini. He burned through Luigi De Canio, Iain Dowie, Paolo Sousa, Jim Magilton, Paul Hart, Mick Harford. This pattern has continued with Tony Fernandes and Tune, who were persuaded to put their faith in Mark Hughes, Kia Joorabchian (more recently involved at Reading, oh look there's Ron Gourlay again) and Mike Rigg, then Harry Redknapp, and then Les Ferdinand. All the time searching for somebody who knows what they are doing, because you don’t. Often driven by fan opinion or social media into making a populist move like bringing Ian Holloway back, or making Amit Bhatia the nominal chairman, or now giving the job to Gareth Ainsworth, because you’ve no actual idea what you’re doing and this will quieten the criticism down a bit. Eventually, because you can’t lose them all, even at QPR, you stumble across Neil Warnock, or to a lesser extent Mark Warburton. The knives are out now for Lee Hoos, and particularly Les Ferdinand, and I get that. Certainly, for me, Ferdinand’s position is increasingly untenable. I have stuck up for him and endured all of the “in the pocket of the club” bullshit for doing so over the last eight years because I felt that even if he made mistakes (spending our parachute money on Paul Konchesky, Jay Emmanuel-Thomas, James Perch etc) he understood the problems at the club and was working towards a sustainable, better model for the place. You need a director of football here, because of everything that we saw happen under Hughes and Redknapp when there wasn’t one. When Les spoke, I agreed with what he said. But so much of what has gone on here in the last 18 months, culminating in the footballing disaster we’re seeing unfold, is exactly what he came here to clean up, and exactly what he said would never happen again. Big contracts for populist 30-something signings with no sell on value. Huge batches of loan players phoning it in. A big collection of 20-somethings just collecting money with no hope or desire of ever playing for the first team. A manager again talking about his conversations with agents, bringing in players he knows, who all then immediately down tools when he leaves. An academy with more staff than Bart’s Hospital, producing absolutely nothing with any remote prospect of ever playing for the first team. As per the last accounts, 197 people employed at this club, 40 more than Millwall, and for what return? Not only having to go and bring Chris Martin out of effective retirement, but then within six weeks making him the captain of the club. Players representing the club by heading out and about hitting the town on a Saturday night after home defeats. All of this, all of this, is similar to what he inherited here, what he came here to clean up, and what we’re suffering again. He has failed. But if you think firing Les Ferdinand is a cure-all, if you think a different chief executive will do a whole lot better than Lee Hoos, then at best you’re rolling the dice. Chances are, recent history tells us, you’ll hate and blame whoever replaces both of them 18 months from now for whatever nonsense we’re churning out at that point. QPR sacked Mark Warburton, appointed Mick Beale, appointed Neil Critchley, appointed Gareth Ainsworth — the corpse barely twitched. There hasn’t been a single new manager here, for years now, who even experienced so-called new manager bounce. If Ainsworth had even managed to summon three wins through feel-good alone, we’d be safe. When this is happening, over and over, as it has throughout this ownership, and the one before, the manager isn’t your problem. If Ferdinand does go you then have to go through those 197 people line by line and ask each in turn what they did during the war. Mark Warburton was sacked at the end of last season, in part, for not entertaining some people on that list, who are earning great money, or their ideas on who should and shouldn’t be in his first team squad, and he was fucking right. Who, though, is doing that line-by-line review? It’ll be this ownership who, as said, don't know what they're doing and have therefore frantically scrambled around looking for somebody who does to do it for them, spiralling into the oblivion we now find ourselves in through the mistakes (or worse) of Hughes, Joorabchian, Rigg, Redknapp and Ferdinand. The whole thing basically hinges on them accidentally stumbling across a brilliant Dan Ashworth/Neil Warnock type character this time. People say to me in the Crown all the time “Les has got to go” like they said Hasselbaink had to go, Holloway had to go, McClaren had to go. I say every time, ‘you’re right, but it won’t make much difference’. If you sack the manager all the time and the results don’t improve then the manager is not your problem. If this team, after being top in October, gets relegated then you’ve probably got to do that dice roll on the DOF, on the CEO who’s just posted a £24m loss having sworn blind those days were over, and given the shambolic set up of the team at the moment potentially on the manager once again as well. But do you have faith in this ownership throwing two sixes this time given their record? And yet, they’re so deep in, we’re so dependent on them, they’ve been so brilliant about paying for their mistakes and not putting the club into debt, that we cannot do without them either. It doesn’t get better any time soon with them here, but it gets worse to the point of extinction the moment they pull the plug. They are the problem, and the solution; the lifeblood, and the poison. It's a footballing can’t live with, can’t live without. We’re killed by their incompetence and kept alive by their benevolence. Links >>> Financial peril looms — Interview >>> The 1982 semi-final — History >>> Donahue in charge — Referee >>> Official Website >>> Independent West Brom forum — Message Board >>> Boing — Blog >>> Express and Star — Local Paper >>> Birmingham Mail — Local Paper Below the foldTeam News: Although it’s difficult to tell given his speed across the ground, Leon Balogun was limping about again towards the end of Friday’s debacle against Preston so not sure we’ll be seeing him again tomorrow. Plus, you know, it’s Old Firm weekend, so I’m amazed we even saw him Friday to be honest with you. Tyler Roberts, Jake Clarke-Salter… nah. The Ethan Laird sit-down sweepstake paid out on 67 minutes on Friday, whether that means we get to bet again tomorrow or have to wait until next week I’m not sure but given the only alternatives seem to be Buster Merryfield, Osman Kakay and his fucked knee, or poor little Aaron Drewe I’m not sure I want to find out. Tim Iroegbunam and Sinclair Armstrong have disappeared. Why? I cannot say. Where? You cannot know. How they will get there? They haven't decided yet. There was somebody claiming to be Taylor Richards among our unused subs on Friday, but you can do wonderful things with make-up and prosthetics these days. West Brom suffered the same fate as us at Rotherham in their last game — a 3-1 defeat with two goals from former player Jordan Hugill. They’re onto a third goalkeeper of the season with youth team graduate Josh Griffths replacing injured Alex Palmer who in turn came in for the horrendously accident-prone David Button. Nobody who ever watched Matt Phillips play for QPR — “if I pulled out as often as him, I wouldn’t have to sit in the family stand” — Simmo, 2015 — will be surprised to learn he hasn’t been seen since January 14. Natural replacement Grady Diangana hasn’t played since February 25. Elsewhere: It is now only Reading’s six point deduction that separates QPR from the relegation zone, and if they’d scored again against Birmingham on Friday even that wouldn’t have kept the wolf from the door. Given the way QPR are playing it feels like we’re relying on Paul Ince is a Wanker failing to mastermind another win — not beyond the realms of possibility — and that starts with them away at Preston this Monday. Wigan are eight points back and dead last, they play Swanselona at home. Blackpool are next, seven points behind us, and they’re now heading onto a third manager of the season themselves after Mick McCarthy was dismissed in the wake of the Good Friday home defeat to Cardiff. Blackpool have lost eight and drawn two of the 12 games played under McCarthy — though, naturally, still found it within themselves to pump is 6-1. Since that night they’ve lost all three games, scoring three goals, and conceding 10 times. Luton away up next for them. Cardiff’s win at the seaside has elevated them above us ahead of a home game with Sunderland, and how apt would it be for our ownership to be relegated by Neil Warnock’s recovery at Huddersfield — three wins in a row from nowhere, and now Blackburn at home in the early TV game tomorrow. Rotherham, looking and feeling like they’re out of it, are at Norwich. Middlesbrough, now with two defeats in a row, have dropped off the pace for second to such an extent that Burnley are now officially promoted, Sheffield Red Stripe are basically there in second, and it’s Luton flying high in third. So interesting that the mid-season departure of a supposedly inspirational manager doesn’t have to derail the whole thing isn’t it? The top two meet in the late evening game, Lutown are hosting Blackpool, Boro go to Bristol City at 17.30, fifth-placed Millwall are at Hull. Friday’s result did close up the chase for the last play-off spot. Blackburn lost at home to Borussia Norwich, so they’re separated by just one point now with Rovers at Huddersfield and City at home to Rotherham. Awaiting slips there are, suddenly, Preston now within two points of the six prior to the home game with Reading. Coventry, three points, back, host Watford, who are on the Mykonos taxi-way. Birmingham v Stoke, if you’re short of something to do. Referee: Manchester official Matt Donohue in charge of this one, last seen for our 0-0 draw against Stoke when all was well back in the summer. Details. FormWest Brom: From the highs of Carlos Corberan’s initial nine wins from ten games, there has been a regression driven by a retreat back to the mean and injuries to key players — the Baggies have won only four of their last 12 games and were beaten 3-1 by Rotherham on Friday. Goals have dried up a little bit too — just four scored in the last six. They’ve only scored more than one goal in a game twice in the last 13. The good news kind of stops there though. There aren’t many more difficult grounds to visit then The Hawthorns in this league at the moment — the Baggies are unbeaten here in 12 games since Corberan took over, winning ten and conceding just one goal. They have kept clean sheets in each of their last four home games, and 11 of their last 12 games here. Only Burnley (13) have conceded fewer home goals than West Brom’s 15, and only Burnley (0) and Boro (3) have lost fewer than their four home games. Daryl Dike is the top scorer here with seven. QPR: A collapse like no other. We keep citing the Millwall relegation of 95/96 when they were top of the league in November and went down on the last day, but even they won four of their last 30 games. QPR are going to have to win two of the remaining six just to match their record, and there is absolutely no sign of them doing that. It’s now four defeats in a row and no goals in three games. Not going to be a lot of goals scored when the total on shots on target over the the last 18 games reads 1, 2, 2, 2, 4, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 3, 1. Rangers have lost nine of their last ten. They’ve won one of their last 18. They have won just two of their last 25, a period in which they’ve had three different managers. They have won just 15, and lost 32, of their last 62, under four different managers. They have scored one goal or fewer in 24 of the most recent 25 and haven’t scored more than two in a match in 27 attempts. They’ve kept one clean sheet in 17 and have conceded 28 in 12. They have conceded the first goal in 18 of 25 and recovered just a single point from a losing position in that run (2-2 Reading A). Over the whole season Rangers have recovered just six points from losing positions, having retrieved 21, 13 and 20 during Mark Warburton’s three campaigns as gaffer. Away from home the R’s have lost their last four, haven’t won in nine, and have won only one of 14 losing nine. No team in the league has shipped as many as our 18 from set pieces. Rob Dickie has started just four of the 11 wins we have managed. And the food’s shit too. Prediction: We’re once again indebted to The Art of Football for agreeing to sponsor our Prediction League and provide prizes. You can get involved by lodging your prediction here or sample the merch from our sponsor’s QPR collection here. Sadly correct again at the weekend, here’s what Cheesy has for us this time … “We are doomed. Our goal difference is giving a point to all the other teams around us. I can't see us getting out of this. “People are now calling for Ainsworth to go. In my view he shouldn't have got the job in the first place. If he wasn't right for the job on the numerous occasions he has been interviewed in the past, why was he right for the job this time? I tend to agree that it was to calm the fan base down. It is time for Les to go. All this talk of building plans for the future and an identity goes up in smoke with every managerial change. A coach should coach and not be the main voice in buying players that are over the hill or injury prone.” Cheesy’s Prediction: West Brom 4-0 QPR. No scorer. LFW’s Prediction: West Brom 2-0 QPR. No scorer. 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. Pictures — Ian Randall Photography The Twitter @loftforwords Ian Randall Photography Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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