Don't like calling us 'Queens Park' in the title of article below, but Hughes is right we are taking gambles. However, given Remy's transfer is double our previous biggest, we have not actually gambled much with transfer fees, which compare well with many smaller PREM clubs (Southampton). Our gamble seems to more with wages. Let's face it, if we go down we can cut our wage bill by getting rid of players who will not want to play in the CHAMP. But we will rarely lose much in terms of transfer fees as we have rarely paid much for players. So a gamble worth taking even if we go down? Too much negative opinion on this website about this gamble. I'm pleased we have signed Remy & I hope to see him help us beat WHAM this Saturday.
Queens Park Takes a Huge Risk for a Huge Payoff
By ROB HUGHES
LONDON – The January sales around European soccer resemble the scene inside a high-rolling casino, but with human chips, instead of plastic ones, thrown at the spinning wheel.
Two weeks go by. The big gamblers eye one another without making their big play. Then desperation spurs one club to go for broke.
On Monday night, the London club Queens Park Rangers, owned by a Malaysian airline entrepreneur and with input from one of India’s richest families, was in negotiations with at least four players.
The Rangers’ new team manager, that old wheeler-dealer Harry Redknapp, was flying the Channel between England and France. On Sunday, he was bidding to buy the powerful Rennes midfield man, Yann M’Vila. On Monday, Rangers was hijacking what was thought to have been a done deal between Olympique de Marseille and Newcastle United for the striker Loïc Rémy.
By Tuesday, he was in the English Midlands, where Q.P.R. had an F.A. Cup replay against West Bromwich Albion and where Redknapp was hoping to persuade two from West Brom – winger Peter Odemwingie and the towering defender Jonas Olsson – to switch teams.
A few days before all of this, Redknapp was blandly denying that he had any irons in the fire. “We’ve tried a few things, but I don’t know what’s happening in the market,” he said. “That’s down to the chief executive.”
And that’s Harry. The 65-year-old East Londoner comes to life in the January market. He is known as Houdini Harry for his expertise at guiding teams as they save themselves in relegation dogfights, but to do that, he first has to persuade club owners to speculate and spend on the players he feels can “do the business.” It is hair-raising stuff. Tony Fernandes, the Malaysian business high flier who is Rangers’ chief shareholder, fired the team’s coach, Mark Hughes, to give his job to Redknapp a month before Christmas.
The team, already expensive, was scraping along at the bottom of the Premier League. It still is, but a victory at Chelsea and a draw last Saturday against Redknapp’s former team, Tottenham Hotspur, gave a glimmer of hope that the forlorn bunch of misfits at Q.P.R. were responding to the new manager’s motivation.
But how does it do it? The bulk of Redknapp’s talking around players is to tell them he sees greatness in their shoes. They have it in them, if only they would work at it, to be world beaters, never mind just survivors in the big league.
Whether he believes it does not matter; what matters is that they do.
Meantime, he persuades the owners – Fernandes and the family of Lakshmi Mittal – that the talent on their payroll is simply not good enough. They must throw more chips, millions more, at the wheel or they are lost.
And it’s a gamble worth making, because last summer the English Premier League hugely increased its income when new television deals were signed. For the three seasons starting this coming September, after a new televisions partner, BT, chipped in £738 million, or $1.19 billion, and Sky and ESPN increased their existing contracts, there will be more than double the money on the table for the 20 teams that share out the Premiership pool.
The deals now are worth a combined package in excess of £3 billion. The pot keeps rising, in spite of economic conditions.
England has the game the world wants to watch on television, and staying in that league of 20 is the difference between high finance and potential ruin.
The owners know it. The players know it. The agents who move those players around flock to it like bees to nectar. And of course, clubs in other leagues, lesser leagues in financial terms, succumb to it.
Marseille’s sporting director, effectively its deal maker José Anigo, said on French television on Monday: “Loïc Rémy is somewhere in England. We at O.M. reached agreement with Newcastle, but we also talked with other English clubs.”
The price, thought to be about £8 million, was agreed on last weekend. But Q.P.R. could not only match that transfer fee to Marseille, it is rumored to be doubling the offer of £40,000 per week that Newcastle put on the table for Rémy.
But why, reporters asked, would a French international take the gamble of joining a team marooned at the bottom of the standings? Simple: His agent negotiates an out clause. He will play his heart out for the Rangers between now and May, but if it is not enough, if the club goes down, he gets to leave for the next highest bidder.
There are huge questions in all of this. Will Rémy, a striker who blows hot and cold in his native France, adapt at once to the English league? Will he link up with Q.P.R.’s gifted, but erratic, Moroccan playmaker, Adel Taarabt? Ditto M’Vila, who is admired for his midfield force but was once called a loose cannon by his coach at Rennes, and who was banned from the French national team after partying while on duty with the squad.
Many clubs have looked covetously at both Rémy and M’Vila. They have scoured the backgrounds that took M’vila, the son of a Congo player, from Picardy, near Amiens, France, to Stade Rennes.
Rémy, too, was lifted by his skills with a ball after starting off life in Lyon. His talent was honed at the academy of the local club, Olympique Lyonnais, and it later took him to Marseille, which took a chance on him after discovering in a medical examination before the deal that he had a heart abnormality.
Now, subject to similar medical processes that accompany all soccer transfers at this level, M’Vila and Rémy are expected to join the dogfight with Q.P.R.
So, if the money is right, might Odemwingie and Olsson.
Odemwingie was born in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan; opted to represent Nigeria at the international level; and married in England. Olsson is Swedish, loves to play the guitar and intends to resume his studies to be a human rights lawyer when he finishes playing.
It is quite a midseason gamble on players who have caught the eye of Q.P.R.’s Mr. Houdini. |  |
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