After almost eight tumultuous years on the board of Queens Park Rangers, controversial director Gianni Paladini has officially left the club this evening. In an article penned over several years, LoftforWords reflects on his reign.
In March 2004 a Queens Park Rangers side managed by Ian Holloway and bedecked in an unconventional green and white hooped strip travelled up the M40 to the sleepy commuter town of High Wycombe for a Second Division fixture with the local side.
QPR and Wycombe are clubs with little history together – the former a Division Three South regular made good by an eccentric used car salesman and subsequent regular in the top two divisions for the past 40 years, the latter a recent addition to the league structure from the depths of the semi professional ranks just happy to be here competing and embarking on occasional cup runs.
This particular meeting of the two sides, just a sixth competitive game between them in history, pitched the top side in the Second Division against the bottom. Ludicrous playing conditions dominated by a gale force wind contributed to a farcical 2-2 draw which ultimately both teams were happy to escape with. Like ships in the night, two clubs with vastly different histories and ambitions heading in opposite directions once more. For QPR it was another one of those obstacles that clubs on their way to promotion overcome all the time – quickly forgotten save for the odd “do you remember that bloody windy day at Wycombe” conversation in the darkest corners of Shepherds Bush’s murkiest pubs.
That the game at Adams Park is still remarked upon to this day by QPR fans says much for the impact on the club, the team and the support base since then of a bespectacled Italian man who took his seat in the director’s box for the very first time that day.
Gianni Paladini said he was smitten by QPR immediately, and swiftly mortgaged a property (whether it belonged to him or his wife was oft debated and largely irrelevant) to plough £600,000 into the club in exchange for a 21% stake.
QPR were doing well on the pitch at that time but remained a financial disaster zone off it. The reign of music mogul Chris Wright had left the club saddled with poor players on long expensive contracts and big debts. A period of administration was bizarrely exited, under pressure from the Football League, with a loan of £10m at 10% interest a year when the amount of money the club owed was considerably less than that. QPR had completed the unlikely feat of exiting administration in more debt than they’d entered it.
To make matters worse the identity of the loaner, who had the Loftus Road stadium as security, was known only as the ABC Corporation of Panama. This was widely believed to be, but never confirmed as, former Nissan Managing Director Michael Hunt who was jailed for four years in 1991 for tax evasion having, along with Nissan chief Octav Botnar, set up sham companies and charitable trusts in Panama to hide earnings and avoid tax worth £200m. Hunt was said to have been introduced to the club by the BDO Stoy Howard administrator Ray Hocking who later, when QPR tried to meet with the loaner to discuss revised terms, turned up to the meeting as ABC’s representative.
QPR have never made a profit of £1m a season and yet before they’d even begun the campaigns immediately after administration that was the amount they needed just to service the interest on their debt. Despite Ian Holloway’s sterling work in the dugout this was a club circling the drain that required immediate financial input to continue trading and competing for promotion. The fans rattled buckets and raised a not insignificant sum which was then, in another move only QPR could ever think was a good idea, ploughed it into the transfer fee and wages of Jamie Cureton who was neither needed nor very effective when he arrived. You really cannot leave Queens Park Rangers alone for a minute.
Jokers and time wasters came and went. Australian businessman David Thorne courted favour among long suffering supporters via this very website’s message board in its Rivals.net days. London businessman and property developer Haleem Kherallah adopted a more traditional approach of making grand promises through the press and then threatening to withdraw them all should a deal not be completed on his terms within the next ten minutes. Sadly for him, he didn’t have the grand promises trick off to any kind of art and his assertion that Paul Gascoigne - the drunk liability by this stage, not the footballing genius of ten years previous - would be the first man through the entrance doors on South Africa Road only served to undermine his flimsy case still further. Interest was also stated and never followed up by the owner of minor American league side Milwaukee Wave, Tim Krause.
Against this backdrop Gianni Paladini was a welcome addition despite initial warning signs. His initial stories of a footballing career with Napoli and the Italian national youth sides had to be cut back like an errant hedge when the wonders of internet research revealed he’d enjoyed nothing of the sort – a bad knee injury cutting short a promising career read the revised press release. Previous interest in Port Vale counted against him in the eyes of some, but of more concern was the decision by a similarly desperate and embattled board of directors at Vale Park to turn him away. A former football agent, he said, and sure enough there he was on Premiership Years on Sky sitting proudly beside Benito Carbone, Fabrizio Ravenelli and several others who helped to bankrupt clubs of a similar size to ours.
The QPR supporting board member of the time Bill Power welcomed the Italian with open arms, persuading a more sceptical chairman Nick Blackburn to bring Paladini on board. The pair seemed to get on famously initially, laughing off those who asked moderately difficult questions about what this football agent might want with QPR. The key point seemed to be more what QPR wanted from him. The club needed money - another £4m annual loss was looming large despite success on the field - and unlike several men with more mouth than trousers before him Paladini brought a sizeable sum of money to the table from day one and put it into the club. He was in.
QPR achieved their promotion. The players danced in the sunshine at Sheffield Wednesday’s famous old Hillsborough ground in front of 8,000 proud Londoners – Bill Power and Gianni Paladini stood on the field in the background, shaking hands and slapping backs.
In an interview with me in 2006, much more on which still to come, Paladini explained: “I kicked a few balls for Napoli when I was younger. I played for their youth team from the age of 13 to 18, then I broke my knee cap and had to stop playing. A few years ago I was living in Lanzarote, I’d worked on the deal to take Ravenelli to Derby and after that I had moved to Lanzarote and retired. Then my daughter Kate had a son who was disabled. I said to my wife we should move to England and help Kate to bring up the baby. When we got here I got my people to look for a football club to get involved in because I’m not the kind of person who can sit around and do nothing all day. I like to be involved, and I like football.”
Paladini’s involvement in QPR was about to increase substantially. The dust had barely settled on the club’s hard won promotion when Nick Blackburn - initially brought to the club by Wright and then left holding the baby when he pulled out - and fellow board member Ross Jones were removed. David Davies, former boss of the MEN Arena and another Wright appointee as CEO, went with them. Power was made the chairman, a popular choice, and he brought another QPR fan, Mark Devlin, on board as the new CEO – he’d previously performed the same role with Swindon Town.
This only served to increase the feel-good factor around the club rather than sound any alarm bells. Blackburn, Jones and Davies hadn’t been universally popular with the fan base for reasons I didn’t always believe to be fair, but whatever opinion you held of the departees it was hard to argue that having two QPR men like Power and Devlin with their hand on the tiller as the club moved up a division wasn’t a good thing. Paladini, at this stage, still the mysterious man in the background who’d mortgaged his (or his wife’s) house because he is “not the kind of person who can sit around and do nothing all day.”
Again, speaking with me in 2006, Paladini said that Jones and Davies had asked for nine extra staff to be appointed and a budget increase of £500,000 despite the big losses the club was making. Jones said at the time this was merely one of several business proposals put forward following the promotion and the board rejected it. Tales of altercations between Paladini and Jones in the directors lounge at a subsequent game with Millwall did the rounds.
David Morris, another QPR fan, joined the board after providing finance for the signing of Lee Cook from Watford – a promising left winger, and QPR fan, who’d previously impressed the W12 faithful while on loan - but money remained as tight as a mouse’s ear.
To try and ease the financial crisis Paladini took Power and the club’s then finance officer Dave Anderson to Monaco to meet with Antonio Caliendo, another Italian football agent, friend of Paladini and organiser of the annual ‘Golden Foot’ awards. Caliendo had received a ten month suspended jail sentence in his homeland in 1991 for corruption offences and was investigated, but never prosecuted, over the collapse of Hellas Verona football club in 1992. Paladini insisted his friend had done nothing wrong on either count, pleading guilty to the former simply to avoid jail rather than because he was actually culpable.
In a series of excellent articles for A Kick Up The R’s (for which the fanzine later had to apologise) at this time Cos Ataliotis claimed that there were two stumbling blocks preventing Caliendo and a consortium based in Monaco providing QPR with further funds. Firstly they wanted complete control of the club, and secondly they wanted their own manager in charge of the team instead of Ian Holloway – namely Argentinean Ramon Diaz. Bill Power was reluctant to agree to either condition.
In July 2004 QPR played a prestigious friendly at home to Dutch giants Ajax. Caliendo and Diaz both attended the game, and a deal was thrashed out over dinner after the match. Caliendo would become a board member to represent the consortium along with, rather randomly, Brazilian World Cup winning captain Dunga who would also invest £1m of his own money into the club.
This went ahead, and the appointment of Diaz didn’t seem like it would be far behind when Rangers started the season at the higher Championship level very slowly. It took them five matches to record a win and prior to a home match against fellow newly promoted side Plymouth Ian Holloway’s prospects of holding onto his job looked bleak. But QPR won, and kept winning. In fact they won seven matches on the spin and nine of their next ten games. They beat West Ham, Brighton, Crewe, Stoke, big spending Wigan – they beat everybody. Ian Holloway, after the promotion he’d achieved against the odds the previous season, should have been an unsackable manager anyway. After that run, that lifted Rangers as high as fourth, he became just that.
Paladini told me: “At no stage was Ramon Diaz ever offered the manager’s job here.”
That might well be true. Diaz went on to manage Oxford United, very badly, and vanish back from whence he came. I recall watching Diaz’s Oxford side one blustery night at Blundell Park where his tactic of leaving four men on the halfway line when defending corners had the home fans choking on their fish. Oxford were relegated.
Paladini demanded an apology from A Kick Up The R’s for other allegations made in the articles and received it, but never took them up on an offer for a right of reply.
But the story unravelled rather at the end of the season when something rather strange happened. Gino Padula, QPR’s popular left back and another Argentinean, was released at the end of his contract by manager Ian Holloway after struggling to make the step up the leagues. Some, including me, felt this was a harsh decision, particularly as our only other option in that position was Matthew Rose who was a not particularly good, and exceptionally injury prone, out of position centre half. Padula though it harsh too, but for rather different reasons.
Having been informed of Holloway’s decision Padula then produced what he believed to be a contract extension, agreed with Gianni Paladini and the board several months previously during the Diaz episode. The story goes that Padula had been earmarked as a potential go-between for the players and the new coach, to smooth a rocky transition that would have doubtless followed the departure of the ever popular Holloway. Paladini said the player was mistaken, that he’d come to him asking for help with a mortgage application and Paladini had subsequently drawn up a draft of what a contract extension might look like were he to be offered one. A draft of a three year contract at that.
Padula took the club to a tribunal after signing for Nottingham Forest on a free transfer and won a six figure sum in damages. Paladini accepted the blame and vowed to pay the amount himself. Later the club accounts revealed that QPR had paid it after all, something Paladini said Caliendo had insisted on because they were “all in it together.”
QPR’s form tailed off in 2004/05. The fantasy run of results through September and October never looked sustainable and so it proved. A comfortable midtable finish was mission accomplished nonetheless.
Off the field the club’s debt was starting to knock on the door of £20m which was perilously close to the value of the stadium it was secured against. Another loss in the region of £2m was incurred despite the money that Paladini, Caliendo, Dunga and the consortium from Monaco brought in. Only in football could the business be termed any kind of going concern.
The summer of 2005 was littered with tiny, seemingly insignificant, events leading up to the second home game of the new season against Sheffield United that would make the main headline on the ten o’clock news that evening for all the wrong reasons.
The club paid £150,000 to Chesterfield for centre back Ian Evatt who was a player Ian Holloway had scouted and liked, but not quite as much as Scunthorpe’s Andy Butler. The manager seemed somewhat surprised that Paladini had flown out to Evatt’s family holiday to secure the deal, which included payments to two separate agents including Midlands based Mel Eves who Paladini had previously come out on the wrong side of a legal spat with but had apparently since made up. The club also signed Marc Nygaard from Brescia’s reserve team, again paying agents fees up to £60,000, and former Inter Milan full back Mauro Milanese. They also signed Nigerian defender Ugo Ukah who, on even casual inspection, had clearly never played the game to any kind of level before in his life.
In the boardroom a row developed over a loan from German businessman Val Ehmer: father of QPR’s current promising young defender Max Ehmer and a business associate of Bill Power’s. In the witness box at Blackfriars Crown Court, where this particular chapter will end, Paladini said that he had agreed with Power and Devlin that the Ehmer money wasn’t required as cash from vastly increased season ticket prices was starting to roll in.
Paladini told the court: “One day I was in the offices at the club and Harold Winton told me that the club had done a good deal. I asked him what deal he was talking about and he told me we’d taken the money from Germany. The other board members had taken the money and pocketed it. Half a million pounds from the club they were supposed to love. I couldn’t believe this was true.”
Paladini said half the money went to Ross Jones, to repay the money he had previously injected into the club, and the other half went to places unknown. Paladini also told the court that maintenance contracts at the club were given to David Morris and his associates at big mark ups, including work on a new floor for the gym at the training ground which Paladini says he’d previously agreed a cheaper deal for himself.
The various defence teams of David Morris and a gang of six large gentlemen told Blackfriars that Paladini subsequently lost his temper spectacularly over the phone with Morris, launching a swear-word laced tirade against him in front of his young family. This, it was said, was not unusual for the Italian who had allegedly done something similar to Ian Holloway in 2004 when, in the midst of the amazing winning run, it looked like the manager may leave for Wolves.
The defence teams were in court because that Saturday, during a match with Sheffield United, Paladini alleged that Morris and the six hired heavies shut him in his office, worked him over, and forced him to sign a letter of resignation from the board at gun point.
Police recovered a substantial amount of cash from an executive box belonging to Morris and occupied by the “hired heavies” for the Sheff Utd match. Wages for the day’s work, said the prosecution, merely money to grease the wheels on a catering contract, said the defence – either way a sad indictment on the way QPR was being run at this stage. A gun was recovered from a car and positively identified by Paladini. Morris’ brother, who was accused of setting the operation up, fled the country before the trial. The charges, against all the defendants, were thrown out and Paladini was torn apart in the witness box by Morris’ barrister, the highly experienced and very well respected James Sturman QC who Chelsea FC wheel out whenever they’re in a spot of bother.
Whatever transpired that day, Paladini moved quickly thereafter to vote Bill Power off the board of directors with Dunga flying in for the first time since his initial press conference to cast the crucial deciding vote. Mark Devlin followed suit after Paladini claimed that CEOs are some of the biggest freeloaders in football and he could do the job just as well himself. By January 2006 Ian Holloway was gone too - placed on gardening leave for talking to Leicester City about their vacant managerial position. Despite it all, Holloway and Paladini had often been allies in the face of criticism including some particularly pointed remarks from Winton in 2005.
Paladini told me in 2006 that Holloway had wanted to release fans’ favourite Gareth Ainsworth to Millwall, and had pressured him into awarding an 18 month contract to terminally crocked striker Dean Sturridge without a medical despite his former manager Jim Smith strongly advising against it.
“If you’re happy with your wife, why are you looking at other women,” Paladini said of Holloway’s Leicester interest. A quote of which Olly himself would have been proud. I’m sure the irony wasn’t lost on him.
I’ve referred several times already to an interview I did for this website with Paladini back in 2006, which can still be read here.
At the time I’d only recently picked up the reigns of the QPR Rivals site from Ingham who’d been working hard to keep it running after Ron and Simon’s decision to set up an independent QPRNet. I’d been writing match reports for the site for a year or so while studying journalism at the University of Sheffield and fancied giving the whole thing a go myself. Six years later I’m still here - same chair, less hair.
Following the ousting of Bill Power, the hike in season ticket prices, and the questionable signings with even more questionable agents’ fees on top there was a good deal of animosity around the message board at that time towards Paladini. It wasn’t easy to have a constructive debate about him with an almost medieval witch hunt atmosphere around. You either hated him and slated him or, if you did anything slightly less extreme than that, you were working for him and not to be trusted. It was an unpleasant time to be a QPR fan and resulted in the ludicrous People’s Front of Judea situation that prevails to some extent to this day where a club that averaged 11,000 fans at home games somehow found itself represented in one way or another by the best part of a dozen supporters groups. There were times when none of these groups were able to work together or even sit in the same room, so deep did the divides run over the Italian’s reign at Queens Park Rangers.
The interview I got, right at the end of the 2005/06 season by which time Gary Waddock was the manager and the team was losing almost as if it was against their religion not to do so, came after one of scores of arguments on the LFW message board. Roley Birkin - long term poster, long term QPR fan, genuinely nice man – started a thread stating he had heard that QPR’s cheque to cover the cash advance required for away ticket sales for a midweek game at Crystal Palace had bounced all the way down Norwood High Street. I didn’t deny that this was the case, for all I knew it probably was, but merely pointed out that in a climate where anything Paladini did was immediately set upon as evil, anybody could make anything up about him and it would be believed as true. Nick de Marco, friend and lawyer of Paladini and regular poster on LFW himself by that stage, agreed and subsequently set up an interview with Paladini for me – ostensibly for my university dissertation about the Morris trial but also for publication on LFW.
As interviewees go, Paladini was fantastic. Nothing was out of bounds, no question went unanswered (although whether the answers were truthful or not is a matter of debate) and nothing was too much trouble. A one hour lunchtime interview turned into two and then three hours. I was invited to an early evening dinner at Nandos on Uxbridge Road where the conversation continued, standard practice for journalists doing long interviews but something that became a well spiced stick used to beat me by people who said I was consequently in the chairman’s pocket. All in all, including a QPR 1st meeting which Paladini attended in the evening, I was with him for the thick end of seven hours that day.
No other football chairman then or now would grant such access to a fan, particularly one as young as I was then. I labour under no misapprehension that he did it from the kindness of his heart, he wanted to put his side of the story across and throughout his time with our club was constantly worried and annoyed by what supporters said about him. Those who spoke out most vociferously, LSA member Paul Finney for one, were ostracised both by Paladini and the various hangers on he attracted.
Misdemeanours kept befalling Paladini and QPR: locked out of the training ground for failing to pay the rent, investigated by the league for taking an illegal loan from the chairman of Oldham Athletic another league club against competition rules, forced to cancel a pre-season friendly with MK Dons amid alleged death threats from QPR fans who Paladini called “an enemy within.” He said he wore a bullet proof vest to work.
That ‘enemy within’ included a good number of long serving, honest, passionate QPR fans who were made to feel, and in many cases told outright, that they were no longer welcome at their club. The various examples of incompetence throughout Paladini’s reign are one thing, the sinister way he manipulated the supporters – promoting those who backed him to the status of Super Fan while launching smear campaigns against those that didn’t - was a disgrace that the QPR fan base should have nipped in the bud right from the off rather than allow to fester as it has done.
My access continued on the subsequent pre-season tour of Italy. To give you a flavour of the unpleasantness that coursed through the divided QPR support at this stage the day after I flew to Naples - paid for with my own money - somebody I don’t know and have never met posted on the qpr.org website that Paladini had paid for my trip out there. Categorically untrue, but those were the times we lived in.
LFW was granted access to Lee Cook, Mauro Milanese and Nick Ward for interviews. Paladini provided further copy for us upon the news that Dunga had resigned from the board and withdrawn his financial backing for the club.
It was a fantastic trip for me, but not for the team. The facilities that Gary Waddock and Paladini said had been inspected in advance and were of the highest standard turned out to be unsuitable for the Dog and Duck Second XI’s summer tour of Ibiza. Sure, the hotel was the finest one in the whole of Sorrento, but Sorrento is a place for eating mozzarella cheese, drinking limoncello, and lazing in the sun. It is scenic, historic place surrounded by mountains, teetering on the edge of a rocky cliff. Space is at a premium. It is not a place for football. The only football pitch in the town belonged to the local semi-professional side. It looked like the exercise yard from a prison and played pretty much like that as well with its rudimentary artificial turf screaming cruciate knee ligament injuries.
The first match of the tour was played against Sorrento and finished in a 5-1 defeat for Rangers against a team of part-timers. Paladini spotted us making our way to the ground before the game and told us not to expect too much because Gary Waddock was worried about the pitch and had left most of his better players on the bench. Paladini looked at my brother Paul and said “you look quite big, maybe you can play.” Paul laughed, I laughed, Paladini laughed, everybody laughed. Ten minutes later the match kicked off with goalkeeper coach Tony Roberts playing up front and long since retired Alan McDonald in defence and nobody was laughing any more.
The training facilities, if they could be called that, were located in a suburb of Naples where they shoot first and ask questions at any subsequent inquest if your body ever turns up. It was a municipal football stadium that looked like it hadn’t been used since Paladini had two working knee caps and was out there competing himself. The grass went past the player’s ankles and swiftly accounted for Matthew Rose and Kevin Gallen prior to a second friendly game that we did win 4-0. Every day the players were doing a three hour round trip along a coastal road that hung out over the sea below and required more prayer than driving skill to negotiate just to train on an overgrown pitch. The tour, from a football perspective, was a total farce.
Something else happened that week though.
Gary Waddock had taken the decision to leave six of his first team squad behind in England, and transfer list them to boot. Waddock’s main election promise had been to rid Rangers of the perceived hoofball played by Ian Holloway, something the previous firm friends fell out over spectacularly, and instil a more attractive style of play on the team. It was a crowd pleasing promise to make, and Waddock kept reiterating it through a disastrous run of ten matches without a win at the end of the 2005/06 season. In 2006/07, Waddock believed QPR would be a different footballing proposition altogether; out with the likes of Steve Lomas, Ian Evatt and Marc Bircham and in with Nick Ward, Egutu Oliseh and Adam Czerkas. The problem with this was the new players obviously weren’t good enough and when the season started for real Waddock was forced to return to those he’d previously spurned, notably Bircham and Lomas, and rely on them with predictably dire consequences.
While in Italy I received, shall we say, an off the record briefing that one or two of the ostracised players had been less than accommodating in training with the new arrivals. Young, inexperienced and believing I was in possession of a bit of a scoop I plastered it straight onto the LFW message board during my morning trip to the internet café and then went about my day in the sunshine, interrupted only by frantic calls from people at home saying things had taken something of a turn for the worse.
It was a turning point for me, and this website. Weeks later another story about locked training grounds, unpaid bills, financial problems and the like appeared in the press. Paladini wished to refute this, but not in the statement on the official website sort of a way. He wanted a party line pushing, and another off the record briefing was mine as a result. I was given other bits of more palatable information as well; John Gregory’s Cullip-Camp-Bolder-Ziegler January shopping list well in advance, for instance, as he attempted to clear the mess Waddock had left behind. But my refusal to publish these unofficial party lines dressed up as my own opinions cost me that ‘in’ – other websites sprang up and did the job I’d refused to do.
Was this all sinister on Paladini’s part? Not necessarily. I believe a big part of his problem when he owned the club was spending too much time caring what the supporters were saying about him and trying to manipulate them – favouring some, like me for a time, while attacking others. He was also clearly trying to protect his position at all times.
There was a quote at one stage, about running the club “the Italian way”. This manipulation of favoured supporter groups – free hospitality, free booze, signed shirts, contacts, information – is common place there. It is not in this country, and should never have been allowed to take hold as spectacularly, obviously and for as long as it did at our club.
John Gregory did save Waddock’s awful team from relegation in 2006/07. He’s an easy man to dislike, and his currying of favour with local rivals Chelsea and oft stated love for Paladini meant many QPR fans gladly did just that, but he kept QPR afloat that season despite having one of the club’s worst ever teams at his disposal. Paladini meanwhile kept the players paid and the club out of administration, often by the skin of his teeth, despite a mounting financial problem.
The club was losing money hand over fist. This wasn’t Paladini’s fault, it had been doing that long before he arrived, and he deserves credit for keeping what was clearly an insolvent enterprise running for as long as he did – had he not, with loans secured against Loftus Road, we’d have lost our home ground during a second spell of administration.
At the time his critics, notably the QPR Report website, enjoyed running ‘said and done’ pieces comparing his words and actions – which was rather like watching the World Shooting Fish in a Barrel Championships played out online. Paladini said the club would soon break even and was “sailing in calmer waters” when it was in effect already wrecked on the ocean floor. He said he wouldn’t sell Lee Cook to Fulham for less than £10m, eventually settling for £2.5m and scrounging the player’s signing on fee back to pay off a tax bill. I did wonder at the time what exactly people wanted him to say? “We’re fucked and Cook will go for whatever we can get”? It’s not a strategy many would adopt is it? I did sympathise with him somewhat on that, but then Bill Power and Mark Devlin may have come in handy at this stage. He was keeping us out of administration while at the same time driving us towards it – valuing his own position over that of the club and outing people who could have helped. I said after meeting Paladini that I’d want him at a dinner party, but I wouldn’t even let him run my local corner shop.
QPR were clearly heading in one direction. At best League One, at worst we were about to cease to exist at any level at all in our current form. The ground was falling apart, the team was ten matches into the 2007/08 season without a single victory, John Gregory had the worst team this club has ever paid a wage to playing some weird rugby league game in training every day and the one bright young talent we did have at our disposal managed to drive himself and, tragically, three of his young passengers under a bus at high speed in the early hours of the morning in East London. QPR were about to go into freefall.
Step forward Flavio Briatore, a man who said he thought QPR was a barbecue restaurant when he was first pitched the idea of buying it. How did somebody who knew nothing about the club, seemed to care little for it when he owned it and got out at the first opportunity come to buy QPR and rescue it from the abyss? Paladini’s small army of supporters took to the web, and continue to do so, to peddle the unofficial official line that it was the Italian who had brought Bernie and Flavio on board and therefore “saved the club”. To dissent against Paladini risked horribly personal campaigns being waged against you by other supposed fans of the club and Paladini’s associated hangers on – QPR Report, Dave Thomas at A Kick Up The R’s and others all suffered.
Briatore soon became a new target for the fans’ ire – hiking ticket prices over and over, sacking managers again and again, interfering with the team selection and generally making the club a laughing stock. But Paladini was always there in the background, and this seemed rather odd.
There is a scene near the beginning of the forthcoming Four Year Plan film where Briatore is filmed discussing his plans for the future with Amit Bhatia and he says “the first thing I want to do is cut £2m from the salaries.” That’s in the early days, when John Curtis was playing at full back, according to film maker Mat Hodgson. And yet that January Paladini was allowed to go out and bring in Patrick Agyemang on a four and a half year deal, Fitz Hall on a four and a half year deal and so on. The story about Agyemang arriving looking for £6,000 a week for two years and walking out with £12,000 a week for four is probably exaggerated. Probably.
And these Paladini signings kept coming. Alessandro Pellicori and Matteo Alberti on contracts of ridiculous length and wealth for players of a park standard.
Briatore, as we know, is not a man shy of firing people. Paulo Sousa went for “leaking confidential information” but Paladini, who has been leaking information to his online supporters for years, remained. Long serving and highly regarded club secretary Sheila Marson went in the wake of an argument over the signing of Heidar Helguson, but Paladini remained. So many good, long serving, QPR people lost their jobs at Loftus Road while Paladini was here and yet he stood firm, despite often being the one at fault. He became known as the Teflon man. Briatore tolerated nobody, except him.
Not only tolerated but financially rewarded handsomely. The QPR accounts show that Paladini was repeatedly paid unsecured, zero interest, five and six figure loans by the club. Why would this man so keen on sacking people and saving money, keep Paladini and keep loaning him money from the business? In a sycophantic interview with Brian Rowe and Peter Davies on JNet Radio Paladini was asked this question by a listener and immediately branded anybody who said he had taken any money out of the club a liar. When the fact that this was in the accounts was raised the point was dropped and the conversation moved on.
It became so ridiculous that it actually emerged from the other side of the darkness and became funny again. What did this man have to do to get the push? What did he have on those in charge at Loftus Road? Given that he actually left the club immediately after the takeover by Tony Fernandes and Amit Bhatia this season but has only now agreed a settlement I’m not sure we’ll ever get to know.
While Paladini was around, QPR were only ever three weeks away from another disaster. Whether you think he was malicious or not, I’m sure we can all agree that he was incompetent. Even in the early days, with the Gino Padula incident, he did little to mask that clear and obvious fact.
Last season was a spectacular one in the history of Queens Park Rangers. Flavio Briatore had thankfully taken a back seat leaving Amit Bhatia and his former university friend Ishan Saksena to run the club – they promptly appointed Neil Warnock as the manager of the team and left him to it. The results were immediately impressive. Warnock saved the team from the relegation trouble it had worked itself into during the quick fire reigns of Briatore’s final three managers and then set about building a solid unit that, as we now know, successfully won promotion to the Premiership.
It took 19 matches for QPR to be beaten in the Championship last season, and in the end they only lost five times. The fifth of those defeats came on the very final day of the season against Leeds, but by then the result was academic and the promotion had been secured. Given the results and basic maths of three points for a win that’s no surprise in itself, but QPR fans and players had to wait until half an hour before the kick off of that Leeds game to get the go ahead on their big celebrations. When the confirmation from FA headquarters came, Gianni Paladini ran out into the South Africa Road directors box screaming his delight and relief. When the FA report into the Alejandro Faurlin fiasco was released two months later it became clear why.
Midway through the season, and again only QPR could muster such a set of circumstances, the FA had levelled seven charges against them relating to the signing of Alejandro Faurlin. In summary Rangers were accused of fielding a player who was owned by a third party and then falsifying documents to try and prove that they hadn’t when the FA came calling. Five charges for the club, two for Paladini himself, and the whole promotion was thrown into doubt.
The length of time between the charges and the hearing quickly became a farce. The FA started investigating in September, brought the charges in March, and then held the hearing in the week before the final match of the season. It deprived the QPR fans of the chance to properly celebrate the promotion when it was confirmed at Watford a week before the Leeds game. When the report into the case was released by the FA it quickly became clear that we were lucky to have been able to celebrate at all.
It turns out that Faurlin was actually bought from his Argentinean club Instituto by an agency called TYP for £250,000 in 2007 – they would be entitled 70% commission on any transfer fees or economic rights Faurlin went on to earn in his career. Standard practice in South American football, strictly forbidden here since the Carlos Tevez affair at West Ham.
In 2009 QPR announced the signing of Faurlin for a club record fee of £3.5m via its official website. It was of course nothing like this and in fact no money at all had changed hands initially. Ian Mill QC, defending QPR alongside Nick De Marco, admitted that this story was false and described it as a “puff” designed to make supporters think that the underfire board of directors was actually spending money on the team. At the time the club had just appointed Jim Magilton as manager, an unpopular choice, and those previously mentioned web allies of Paladini peddled the line that this was a Magilton scouted and selected signing. Later, when Faurlin turned out to be quite good and Magilton less so, that party line changed and Faurlin became a Paladini find after all. Scandalous really, and sickening – the lack of shame of those doing this dirty work remains brash to this day.
The FA and QPR agreed that Paladini had been aware of the third party ownership of the player when he was signed, and agreed with TYP that it would be suspended when he moved to QPR. The length of that suspension though became the key. The FA said that it only covered the first 12 months of Faurlin’s three year deal at Loftus Road – not an unreasonable assumption to make given that the letter from TYP to QPR suspending their influence stated 2010 rather than 2012. QPR said this was a misprint but neither they, nor TYP, could produce the secretary that drafted it to give evidence much to the FA’s annoyance.
QPR sent the paperwork on the transfer to the FA with no mention of the TYP situation at all, and paid a fee to unlicensed agent Peppino Tirri for good measure. Paladini, a former football agent himself remember, said he was unaware FIFA registered agents had to be registered with the FA as well. Club secretary Terry Springett was not advised of Tirri’s involvement, and his name was not included in the original documentation.
It might, you would think, have been prudent for Paladini to produce the letter he had drafted with TYP at this point. Not only did the FA not get to see it, but apparently neither did Springett and club lawyer Chris Farnell. Having arranged for its draft (Ian Mill described the letter as “inept”) Paladini claims that he popped it into his desk drawer and left it there – conveniently finding it just as the FA turned up asking questions. QPR were policing themselves, depriving the FA of the chance to do so, and would have continued to do that had Paladini not, one year later, gone to the club’s finance officer and asked for £615,000 to buy Faurlin out of his TYP agreement after a successful first season in English football. Farnell, panicked and possibly with head in hands, immediately ordered the situation be referred to the Football League and subsequently the FA.
The subsequent hearing, which Paladini emerged from each day telling the awaited new crews only that “the sky is blue”, said of the Italian’s evidence: “Paladini repeatedly answered questions by making the points that he wanted to get across, and at some length, rather than answer the question that had been asked of him.”
Unbelievably, considering they didn’t deduct any points from QPR, the commission found that QPR did gain a sporting advantage through all of this. The commission concluded that QPR would not have paid the significant £615,000 fee it eventually did for an unproven player like Faurlin in the first instance – the failure to notify the FA of the third party arrangement meant QPR were able to get a player for free in a way other clubs would not have been able to do. This sporting advantage covered the whole of the 2009/10 season, and until November last season.
Thankfully the expert opinion came from the ever whimsical and nonsensical David Pleat who claimed that unless you sign Messi or Ronaldo no one signing can give any team that much of an advantage (way to completely write off the whole transfer market David) and therefore Faurlin hadn’t made that much difference to QPR. Thankfully, it seems that David Pleat has not seen QPR play since Faurlin signed for them.
The club’s reaction to this? They fired Ishan Saksena, who hadn’t been around when Faurlin was signed, because, according to Bernie Ecclestone, they were unhappy with how the Faurlin hearing had gone. The Teflon man had slipped through again – surviving an episode that should have cost us our promotion, and even though it didn’t subjected QPR fans and players to needless stress and panic right up to the very final moment of a season that should have been one of celebration. The departure of Saksena, and subsequently Bhatia, while Paladini survived was, for many, the very final straw for him and the previous regime. This wasn’t funny any more.
The official party line proffered on the We Are The Rangers Boys website was that the return of Amit Bhatia to the club as part of Tony Fernandes’ welcome takeover in August would make Paladini’s position “stronger than ever”. The reticent way the new owners approached discussions on the Italian said otherwise.
The local press, that had been quoting a “QPR insider” who sounded suspiciously like Paladini for years, reported that he’d been seconded to Italy to try and offload Alberti and Pellicori. Those players were subsequently paid up and waved on their way, rubbishing a rubbish story. Paladini was gone, no longer involved and negotiating a settlement on his contract which was confirmed today.
The man it seemed would never leave, who protected his own position at QPR above all others and often the wellbeing of the club, has gone. Gianni Paladini was undeniably bad for our club over a hellishly long period of time. He put in £600,000 when we desperately needed it(and subsequently received more than that back in the form of salary and the inexplicable unsecured loans) but thereafter almost everything he touched turned to dust. He ousted Bill Power and Mark Devlin and then drove the club to the brink of bankruptcy, splitting the support base irreparably as he went. His favourites liked him so much it almost seemed as if they supported him more than the club, and he was presented with a commemorative picture at a Player of the Year dinner as a thanks for the work he did. His opponents, often targeted in malicious ways for voicing concerns, hated him so much many stopped going to QPR altogether. He was, at best, accident prone and, more accurately, completely incompetent. The deal with Oldham, the deal for Faurlin, the incident with Padula – crass incompetence, sackable offences, all placing the club in real serious danger of points deductions and big fines. And still he clung on while long serving and highly valued employees were sacked around him.
QPR CEO Philip Beard said: “On behalf of everyone at the club, I would like to thank Gianni for his contribution to Queens Park Rangers over the years.”
Yes, I’m sure we all agree, he’s made quite a contribution to Queens Park Rangers over the years.
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