QPR’s accounts, released this week, read like the bank statement of a credit card fraud victim and underline the importance of Premier League status to the club ahead of a crunch home game with Sunderland.
Premier League >>> Saturday March 9, 2013 >>> Kick Off 3pm >>> Loftus Road, London, W12
Numbers have not been very friendly to Queens Park Rangers from the very first whistle this season. Beaten 5-0 to start with they then set club and league records for going through the first 16 matches without a win and are now adrift of safety by four points with only ten games left to play, haven’t scored a goal in a home league game in five attempts and have only scored eight times in total at Loftus Road. They have still only won three of the 28 games they’ve played.
There were some pretty unforgiving numbers on the club’s balance sheet this week as well as the accounts for last season – the club’s first back in the Premier League for 15 years – were released. Despite turnover rocketing from £16m in 2010/11 to £64m in 2011/12 thanks to the influx of top flight television money, the club increased its debt by a further £22m. The wage bill went from £26m per year in the Championship – already manifestly excessive for the level of football Rangers were playing at – to £51m in the Premier League and the overall debt has gone from £56m to £89m. Shareholders have put in unsecured loans to the tune of £60m in the last two seasons and it’s surely fair to assume with the scatter gun approach to the transfer market that has been employed in the last two windows that every one of these figures will only have got worse over the course of this season.
The obvious conclusion to draw is that it’s even more imperative than we could ever possibly have imagined that QPR do indeed pull off the great escape from relegation that a scrappy win at Southampton last week kind of, sort of, maybe suggests they might. Taking that wage bill, which would be outrageously high at £51m but is surely much larger now, back down to a division where the club’s turnover was previously £16m would – even allowing for a big increase in parachute payments – leave a hefty shortfall. Bear in mind as well that new rules in force in the Championship means that any club promoted club will be fined 100% of their losses over £10m – so taking QPR’s last promotion season as an example, a £26m loss for the season would have seen the R’s fined £16m on top by the league.
Not a pretty picture, but if there is a positive to take from it all then it’s who the money is owed to. A debt a tenth of the size but owed to HMRC would be far more dangerous to the future of the club than the one the club currently carries but owes to its shareholders. Tony Fernandes and Amit Bhatia have both used the term “debt free” in the past by which they mean QPR do not owe a bank any money like so many other clubs; their takeover was not financed by a loan leveraged against the club or the ground like the Glazer model at Man Utd; the tax is paid on time and the R’s are not in the situation they were in previously where they owed an outside group like the ABC Corporation money with a high interest rate. As far as we can tell the money going into the club is coming out of the pockets of the owners and while it is only being loaned in, it’s unsecured and with a negligible interest rate.
Now that may sound a little like somebody watching their house burn down but taking solace in the fact that it was a nice person who poured the petrol through the letter box but in today’s British game, where every club carries debt in some form or another, it’s not a cataclysmically dire situation to be in. QPR would be dead in the water immediately if the current owners decided to walk away, but were they to do so they’d have to find somebody silly enough to buy the club, and its debt, from them. The only other option would be to put it into administration and ultimately receivership at which point they’d simply become creditors who would receive Xp in the pound – they’d lose a hell of a lot of their investment essentially and it would not be in their interests to do it. This is not a situation like the one we saw at Crystal Palace where Simon Jordan borrowed money from a hedge fund to tide the club over, thereby giving the hedge fund the opportunity to put the club into administration if it defaulted – which it did and they did.
QPR are being appallingly managed finance wise – it’s as plain as the noughts on the balance sheet – but it’s being done as an advertising/brand building exercise for the Tune Group. That’s depressing, thinking of a famous old club like ours reduced to a sales vehicle for an Asian airline and hotel business, but it’s important when assessing the figures. Another £22m loss for a tiny football club with an 18,000 capacity stadium looks dire, but taken as part of the Tune Group as a whole it’s slightly more acceptable.
Shareholders other than Tony Fernandes have stepped forward this week to again emphasise the importance of the training ground development, the youth academy, and their long term plans for the club regardless of whether it’s relegated or not. We can only hope and pray they’re as good as their word. It’s easy to say these things now when the club might still stay up, or bounce back at the first attempt, but it will be interesting/terrifying to see if the rhetoric remains the same if the club remains in the division below – where clearly its brand and marketing potential are greatly reduced along with its income and turnover – for a prolonged period of time.
It would of course be so much easier for everybody if Harry Redknapp could manage to pull off his greatest great escape. The fixtures are said to be favourable, and a win at Southampton was a real boost, but it’s important that momentum is maintained and consecutive wins strung together for the first time in two years when a mediocre Sunderland team come to town on Saturday.
Through all the filthy financial horrors of the modern sport there are still the supporters who just want to go and see their team play football on a Saturday afternoon. After a second consecutive week where QPR have made the headlines for all the wrong reasons off the pitch, the Loftus Road faithful will no doubt be glad to see even a team as poor as the current Rangers outfit get out on the pitch and actually take part in a match this Saturday. Another victory and they, along with the guys writing the cheques, will be breathing just a little easier come 5pm.
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Team News: Whether or not Harry Redknapp keeps faith with the same team that won at Southampton last week depends on a mixture of fitness tests and personal preference. Julio Cesar left the field early at St Mary’s and faces a late check with Robert Green poised to deputise, while Bobby Zamora’s catalogue of complaints threatens to rule him out altogether for a second consecutive week. Esteban Granero was removed shortly after half time a week ago after a poor performance and Redknapp may decide to start with his replacement Jermaine Jenas against the Mackems.
Injury prone defender Wes Brown has suffered another set back with his knee ligament damage and is now likely to be out for the rest of the season. On loan Spurs full back Danny Rose – the outstanding Sunderland player when these two sides last met in November – has been out for a month with a hamstring injury but may be fit to return here.
Elsewhere: Just six Premier League matches this weekend spread over two days thanks to the FA Cup quarter final commitments of Everton, Wigan, Man City, Man Utd and Chelsea. So a good opportunity for those at the bottom, including QPR, to make ground on Roberto Martinez’s men and with Reading hosting Villa taking points from each other in a proper relegation crunch match at the Madejski Stadum it does have the potential to be a second great week in a row for QPR if they can find a way to beat Sunderland.
Southampton have started leaking goals again, and their home defeat by Rangers last week has played them right back into the mix at the bottom of the table again. They face a trip to Norwich this weekend where it’s hard to think of an outcome that would be a surprise given both team’s wildly inconsistent form this season. Apart from that West Brom v Swansea on Saturday and Newcastle v Stoke on Sunday look like dead rubbers – although with Tony PUlis coming under serious audible pressure from the club’s fans for the first time during last weekend’s home defeat by West Ham he’ll be keener than usual to halt his side’s lousy run away from home and get a result at St James’ Park.
Liverpool v Gareth Bale is the outstanding tie remaining at the top of the table and that will be live on Sky on Sunday as Spurs look to keep up their seemingly relentless pursuit of Champions League football.
Referee: Just as he was for QPR’s trip to the Stadium of Light almost exactly a year ago to the day, Cheshire official Mike Jones takes charge of this weekend’s clash between the R’s and Sunderland. Rangers were beaten 3-1 by the Mackems 12 months ago and had Djibril Cisse sent off for the second time in quick succession following his January arrival from Lazio – but they could hardly complain at the refereeing on the day. Hopefully the result will be more favourable this weekend. Jones’ only previous appointment with Rangers this season was for a 3-2 defeat at West Brom in October where, again, he had little to do with the demise of the Super Hoops. For a full QPR case file please click here.
QPR: For so long it was QPR’s terminally awful away form that looked like being their undoing but now it’s the results at Loftus Road causing concern. A win at Southampton last week was just the R’s third in the league all season but two of those have come on the road and if you throw in the FA Cup replay at West Brom it’s now three wins and a draw from the last five away from home for Harry Redknapp’s men. In W12 only Fulham have been beaten and QPR have taken just ten points from a possible 42 on their own patch this season. Scoring goals is clearly the problem. Rangers have kept clean sheets in three of their last four at home in the league and their against total of 44 stacks up better than any of the other teams in the bottom six – but they’ve managed just eight at the other end (compared to 13 away from home) which is the league’s worst total by a mile and hasn’t been added to for the last five home matches. If they go a sixth without scoring it will equal the Premier League record set by Redknapp’s Portsmouth side in 2007. Redknapp is praying his team can secure back to back wins for the first time since Doncaster and Sheffield United were vanquished in April 2011, and the first time in the Premier League since wins against Bolton and Villa in December 1995.
Sunderland: The Mackems have similar issues. Their goals against total of 38 is better than any other team in the bottom nine but just 31 at the other end is little more than a goal a game. Stephen Fletcher top scores with ten but nobody else has managed more than five for them this year. Away from home they’ve won three and lost seven of 14 but have won recently at our fellow strugglers Southampton and Wigan. Their last two league road trips finished in 2-1 defeats at Reading and West Brom. They haven’t won in five matches going into this one and have only scored four goals in that run. Sunderland haven’t lost at Loftus Road in five attempts spanning 22 years but the last time they did – in 1990/91 – it broke a run of ten matches without a win for Don Howe’s QPR side.
Prediction: Winner of last season’s Prediction League Nathan McAllister says…
“So many of us have quoted or paraphrased the famous John Cleese line from Clockwise (“I can take the despair – it’s the hope I can’t stand”) at some time or other over the last two seasons that it’s becoming something of a Loft For Words cliché - and with good reason. It’s a sentiment that long suffering Rangers fans can easily identify with. It also explains why my predictions tend to, shall we say, err on the pessimistic side; a defence mechanism I’ve developed after almost 35 years of supporting QPR: not getting my hopes up to temper the disappointment. It was no co-incidence that I won the Prediction League for the first and only time while Rangers were in a relegation dogfight.
Unfortunately, ‘hope’ is not something that can be switched on and off at will, and no matter how much I have tried to suppress such feelings, QPR have only gone and got me hoping again after the win at St Mary’s. Sure I keep telling myself that Rangers have two points less than they did at this stage last season, that the gap between them and 17th place was just a single point and even then they needed to get 15 points from the final ten games to survive by just a single point. But then I can’t help remembering that last year Rangers had to play Spurs, Chelsea and both Manchester clubs compared with fixtures against the likes of Reading, Villa, Fulham and Wigan this time around. I tell myself that Rangers have shown no signs whatsoever this season of being able to win more than one game in five, then remember that before winning their final five home games last season Rangers had won only two of the first 14 at home, and won only one of the 16 league games prior to the victory over Liverpool. So for the time being, while there is hope I’ve decided I might as well embrace it. After all, the ‘hope’ after the Southampton game felt a hell of a lot better than the ‘despair’ after Swansea. If our hopes are to be dashed, and they probably will, I’d still much rather Rangers went down fighting than play out five meaningless fixtures at the end of the season with their fate already decided.
“Does this mean I’m about to predict a Rangers win for the first time since December? In a word … no. Hope is not the same thing as expectation. I’m a little concerned that Redknapp is going to start Taarabt on the bench again, and while I can see the case for not starting him in away games I think he absolutely must play if Rangers are going to win games at home. I also rate quite a few of the Sunderland players - as well as their manager - and have been surprised they haven’t done better this season. I think this will be yet another tight game with little to choose between the sides. Rangers have drawn half of their home games this season and that looks the most likely outcome here – but, naturally, I’m hoping for better.”
Prediction: QPR 1 Sunderland 1 (Remy)
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