Just in the nick of time and saying all the right things, has QPR’s salvation arrived in a red Air Asia baseball cap?
I had initially penned an open letter to our new owner, running through some of the things I'd like to see from our club under his guidance. Then I sat – open mouthed and hard of cock – as he calmly ran through them all one by one in today’s lunchtime press conference at Loftus Road. Words come easy, actions are somewhat more challenging, but it wasn't a bad start. He couldn't have said anything that reached out to me, and I suspect most of you, more had I written his script for him. Backing for Warnock, squad strengthening but not stupid amounts of spending, investment in the youth academy at long last, working with the Mittals, Paladini seemingly on his bike, giving the fans something to be proud of and working together for the future of the club – my God it was all there.
There are no airs and graces about Fernandes. Not to put too fine a point on it if you passed him in the street you'd be forgiven asking him if he had a business card for his mini-cab firm. There's a guy that drives Northern Line trains on the High Barnet branch who bears a striking resemblance to this airline mogul with a £200m fortune. But that shouldn’t be a surprise - this is a guy who will work as an air steward on his planes, and talk to passengers in the departure lounge at the airport whether the flight is delayed or not. His upbringing, the places he's lived, his behaviour and the way he talks make him seem like me or you – just an ordinary guy who worked hard to get where he is today. It's all a long way from the tinted lenses and airhead super models that Flavio Briatore breezed into Loftus Road sporting, promising to pay no attention whatsoever to people who "turned up once a week and pay £20."
Famous last words but he strikes me initially as a guy that we will not always agree with, but we will not come to resent in the same way we did Ecclestone and Briatore.
Questions do remain, primarily about where the money is coming from. Bhatia and Mittal we know all about but Fernandes is the chairman and the majority stakeholder, and his personal wealth doesn't seem to even be adequate to buy the 66% of the club he says he has never mind go on to invest in the team. Kamarudin Meranun, Fernandes’ long standing business partner who bought into Air Asia with him, will join the QPR board and is likely to be providing some funds too. Further clarity will hopefully come in time, talk of Far Eastern consortiums can make British fans twitchy given the recent Channel 4 Dispatches exposé.
Concerns about two of the main objects of the fans' ire in recent times – Flavio Briatore and Gianni Paladini – seem to be all but allayed. There was some fear, with Fernandes’ stake and the Mittal holding only adding up to 99%, that Briatore may be clinging on like a bad stench but Bhatia has since insisted that all trace of Flavio and Ecclestone has now gone from the club.
Speaking of bad smells, there is confusion about Paladini's continued involvement at QPR. He has become renowned for his ability to ride through all situations and come out the other side still sapping money from our club in the form of an annual salary and unsecured personal loans. Even when things have clearly and obviously been his fault others have taken the fall for him and we've been stuck with him – sitting and waiting for the next disaster to befall us as a result. But perhaps his Teflon ways have caught up with him.
When Amit Bhatia's close friend Ishan Saksena took the fall for the Faurlin transfer hearing last season the fans were outraged. Throughout the FA report the blame is laid squarely at the feet of Paladini and Saksena wasn't even around when the player was signed and yet off he went while Paladini stayed steadfastly in place. By allowing a friend of Bhatia to take the fall has Paladini finally signed his own resignation letter by accident? Even if that wasn't the case, with Phil Beard and a CV that includes turning the Dome from laughing stock into internationally recognised concert venue and the London Olympic bid, now on board as CEO where is there a role for him? The Evening Standard reports that Fernandes sacked him immediately after taking over. Bhatia was more cautious, telling West London Sport he remains “for now” but clearly not for long.
LFW's long written, never published assessment of Paladini's time in W12 may be about to have the dust blown off.
While this all seems like some wonderful Carlsberg-advert type dream the reality is Fernandes is walking into a club in quite serious trouble here. I’m sure the new owners will know, and have to accept, that the first 12 months are going to be seriously expensive for them.
For a start QPR's squad is not fit for purpose and is going to require some expensive surgery. We have too many players, and more to the point we have too many players who are not good enough. At a conservative estimate we need three to five good quality additions to our squad within the next fortnight to stand a fighting chance of staying in the Premiership. Such players will be hard to come by at a fair price and West Ham have already laughed off a £4m approach for Scott Parker, who has apparently made it known he wouldn't be keen on a move to QPR anyway. This will further inflate the squad, and the wage bill, and when the 25 man squads are named at the end of August it's going to leave us with a whole raft of players unable to feature in any game but still earning big money.
People like Rowan Vine, Lee Cook, Martin Rowlands, Gary Borrowdale and Leon Clarke are all already certain to miss out and all earn excellent wages. Should we make the required additions then people like Rob Hulse, Petter Vaagan Moen, Peter Ramage, Troy Hewitt, Patrick Agyemang and Hogan Ephraim and others become vulnerable with the 'home grown player' rule to consider as well. Suddenly we're looking at enough players for a reasonable Championship side, earning good Championship wages, sitting on their backsides at our club taking their money and offering literally nothing in return. Thankfully many of these players are out of contract next summer but in the meantime they'll either need paying or paying up and neither will be cheap.
In reality, to stay in the Premiership, QPR are going to have to carry a squad of the thick end of 40 players, 15 of whom can play no part while earning good money, on gates of 18,000 and take that hit.
The subject of ticket prices was raised at the press conference and given what I would call a political answer from Amit Bhatia. I said at the time of his resignation that I felt him saying he was leaving because of a disagreement over the ticket prices was more of a PR stunt than anything, designed to apply more pressure to the board to aid his own takeover ambitions. With ticket prices already announced and sold perhaps the best we can hope for is that all games are sold at the same price the Bolton game was, rather than the anticipated huge mark up for the bigger matches, and offers are put on for the other games.
Please don't mistake this for me having a go. For me Amit Bhatia seems to have actually caught the QPR bug that we all know so well. When left in charge with Ishan Saksena the cost of season tickets was reduced so we have no reason to doubt him.
The main question though has to be why? Why would you buy QPR? To Bernie and Flavio the idea of taking on a destitute Championship club for a pittance and building it into a Premiership side they could sell for profit perhaps makes some sense. But now QPR is a club over-valued by its owners, in need of major squad strengthening but unable to reduce its already high wage bill, in an outdated stadium with an 18,000 capacity in a league where Everton and Liverpool say they cannot compete with grounds that hold 40,000.
It cannot be run in the Premiership at anything other than a loss in its current home. Al Fayed has spent £196m of his own money on top of all the TV money received to keep Fulham treading Premiership water. Should the possibility to sell Loftus Road for property development and move to a bigger, modern ground elsewhere then the club would have potential but such a move is likely to be hugely expensive in itself in West London.
The only thing this can be is another vanity project or marketing opportunity - a loss leader for Fernandes' Tune brand and an expensive hobby for him to enjoy. He'll only enjoy it we're winning, but what state will the finances of the club be in when he moves on?
For now such worries should be put to one side. The feeling that swept over me and everybody else watching the press conference on Sky has been described by one message board wag as "like the first time I got laid". For me it was more like the sensation achieved immediately after offloaded a particularly large pile of shit. Which is, in effect, exactly what we've done.
For the first time this summer, I'm optimistic.
I've no doubt that if I suggested to Flavio Briatore and Bernie Ecclestone that their time at QPR was a gigantic missed opportunity they would laugh at me. After all, if I took over a business in a sector absolutely notorious as a black hole for fools to throw money into and came out four years later having made a tidy profit I'd probably be laughing too. But I can promise them now, a missed opportunity this most certainly was.
After the final game of their first season in charge – they'll remember it as the day they unveiled the new badge featuring Flavio's hair but to the rest of us it was a defeat against West Brom that could have been so different had Martin Rowlands not been sent off - I was fortunate/unfortunate enough to be invited downstairs for a post game meeting with the new CEO Ali Russell. The first thing to note from that meeting was that when Russell asked me "what I thought of today" I began to proffer opinions on the match, the tactics, the sending off and so on until he interrupted me and said he'd actually meant the "brand launch". That was the first inkling I had that Tango and Cash, and the people they employed to run the club, didn't have the foggiest idea what you were doing.
The second thing of note is that I told Russell that day that they were in the almost unprecedented position, at that stage, of being a popular board with the QPR fans. Few football fans agree with the way their club is being run completely, but QPR's faithful are particularly grumpy and cynical when it comes to board members. "Be careful," I recall saying. Three weeks later, the new ticket prices were released and the relations between us lot and those two have never really been the same since. Since then every time things seemed to be starting to go well and people were settling down they'd do something else stupid – sack another manager, sign another foreign nobody behind the manager's back, inflate the ticket prices again and so on.
I have no doubt that by the end of their time here the aim was to get QPR into the Premiership and then sell it – either recouping the money loaned in through the TV money or in the sale price. So, congratulations to them. However I also believe that it wasn't always like that. These are men with tremendous egos - I heard the comments they made when they first arrived, I was there for the flame throwers and fireworks. This was a vanity project to start with and in that regard they failed miserably. They failed so miserably that even though we reached the Premiership one of them didn't even turn up for the first game and the other was forced to turn and flee under a barrage of abuse from all four sides of the ground long before the end of a 4-0 defeat.
I wonder at what point you just become so rich and arrogant that the old principal about attitude to your customers ceases to be applicable? Those two have never once missed an opportunity, from the minute they walked in the door, to shaft us for money or make it clear how irrelevant we are to them or state their ambivalence towards football in general.
Imagine how different things could have been had they treated the supporters as a key part of the club and their plan. Had they focussed on communicating with the fans, on filling the ground, on becoming competitive on the field and honest off it they could have been lauded heroes here. Bhatia and Fernandes sounded good today, but it wasn’t difficult because they merely had to read everything Eccleston and Briatore had ever said about QPR and say the exact opposite.
The nearest Tango and Cash ever came to communicating with us was when the dissent became too loud for their egos to stomach any longer and then we were treated to the laughable statements on the official website. These were always clearly written by PRs and possibly lawyers working for Ecclestone and Briatore; people with absolutely no understanding of our club or football in general. If that's not the case then whoever did write them should be ashamed and fired immediately now those two have gone.
These statements always contained the killer lines that they saved the club (and were apparently therefore allowed to do what they liked with it) and got it promoted into the Premiership. Only men of such supreme arrogance could ever dare to offer the latter suggestion in their support when a blind monkey could tell you it was only achieved when they lost interest and pissed off, leaving it in the charge of a sensible bloke who realised that if you engaged the supporters and appointed an experienced manager for the team and left him to get on with it the job would look after itself.
"We don't do failure," was Flavio's initial assertion – one that was greedily gobbled up by the QPR fans desperate to be optimistic about their club. As they waddle off into the sunset with another bag of swag to throw on the pile I'm sure they stand by that. But, as they have been so often over the last four years, they'd be wrong.
Tweet and follow @loftforwords