While QPR negotiate a fine for the FFP regulations they breached in winning promotion, Nottingham Forest live with a transfer embargo for breaking the same rules in the same way. And they’re not pleased.
The Nottingham Forest fans are coming, and they’re not happy. Not happy at all.
After years of baiting managers who dared to rival Manchester United for the league title until either they coughed, or their team did, or in the case of Kevin Keegan both, the one time Alex Ferguson got riled up in return was when Arsene Wenger responded to one of his barbs with "everybody believes they have a more attractive wife”. Now there’s an old joke about your wife being different to your football club because you can’t leave your football club, but they do have something in common and that is it’s quite alright for you to sit in the pub and slag off your wife or your football club until closing time, but if somebody else dares to say a word against either then it’s time to go outside for what former Ukraine manager Oleg Blokhin once famously described as a "man chat”.
Even the most ardent QPR supporter knows and admits the club has been badly run in recent years. Throwing stupid money at ridiculous signings, paying ludicrous wages on contracts of stupid length, lumbering itself with bloated squads chock full of ageing professionals, many of whom went months on end without playing a single minute of action. Opinion differs on whether Tony Fernandes is naïve or incompetent, exploited by football’s sharks or just your standard idiot. But almost everybody agrees that the money spent, the debt accrued by the owners, and the return they’ve got for that on the pitch has been little short of shambolic.
But when outsiders point the finger our hackles come up a little bit. Why is it always "big spending QPR”, for instance, when at the moment Rangers seem to be getting their house in some sort of order while Derby County spend £25m on players, and God knows what besides getting Paul Clement over here from Real Madrid, while recouping nothing and winning none of their matches? Why does that rich Russian at Bournemouth never get mentioned in a "financially doping a lower league team with a 12,000 capacity ground so much they got into the Premier League” sense?
Nottingham Forest, and - in a quirk of the fixture list - Wednesday night’s visitors Blackburn Rovers, have more cause than most to wish ill on QPR. They broke the Financial Fair Play rules in 2013/14 just as QPR did and have been saddled with a punitive transfer embargo ever since. Blackburn have lost Rudy Gestede, Tom Cairney and others without replacement, Forest have just sold Michail Antonio to West Ham. QPR’s gamble paid off, in that they were promoted, thereby escaping the Football League jurisdiction and embargo. Now Rangers are back they’re negotiating with the league over how much of a fine they should pay, while still being allowed to sign players and push for promotion again. Forest and Blackburn, meanwhile, look as far away from that top six picture as ever.
The Financial Fair Play rules as originally written are not legally safe, which is why they’ve since been changed. The fine QPR would be facing under the original rules, which they’re being judged by, would be punitive compared to the turnover, income and profit of the business. Put simply, you can fine BP £1bn if they break the rules because they make £25bn profit every year so it’s proportionate. You can’t safely, legally fine the local Spar Shop £750,000 because it’s out of proportion. If QPR were to go to court with the league and win, the rules would be completely shot — hence the negotiation over a proportionate fine.
But fans of Nottingham Forest and Blackburn Rovers don’t see or care about this, and why should/would they? They see a team that broke the rules in the same way as them running around winning promotions and signing players, while they drift around in midtable signing cast offs and seeing their best players leave. It’s also worth pointing out that when Nottingham Forest’s current owners took over the club was in a state of crisis. Nigel Doughty, father of our midfielder Michael, had died suddenly, the team had almost been relegated to League One, the squad had very few senior players contracted to it and a massive, immediate recruitment and rebuilding was required. While £8m on Britt Assombalonga may seem excessive, it can’t be right that clubs in such situations are told they cannot spend more money than they’re bringing in, should the owners want to, while they attempt to at least give themselves a competitive squad. Another reasons the rules are flawed.
If the boot was on the other foot, and QPR were starting the season poorly under a second year of transfer embargo while Nottingham Forest, freshly back from the Premier League, were swanning about signing Massimo Luongo and Tjaronn Chery while casually negotiating their fine with the league I can’t imagine we’d be too happy either. I can’t imagine we’d be up for a discussion about the legality of proportionate corporate fines. You can see why they’re upset.
The issue of how the Football League keeps working itself into these colossal legal messes for which it is totally ill-equipped to deal with in the face of football clubs owned by extremely rich foreign businessmen and all the lawyers they could potentially bring to the table is one we’ll look at in the Match Preview on Friday (stop sighing at the back).
Another thing the understandable ire of the City Ground faithful against QPR and the draconian embargo they’ve been placed under is masking somewhat is the reason they got into this position in the first place. Forest, like Leeds, like QPR, like Blackburn, is a historic community asset, steeped in tradition and part of the fabric and identity of its home city, being run incompetently at the whim of rich foreign businessmen. These people need no qualifications and no previous experience in the job, they need not state their intentions for the club nor divulge how they intend to go about their work, there is no meaningful vetting process nor any real recourse if they decide — deliberately or otherwise — to run the whole operation into the ground. You turn up, you prove you’ve got the money, and you too can own a football club in this country and do whatever the hell you like with it.
Forest have more history than most, former European Cup winners under Brian Clough as their supporters will remind you in every conversation given half an opening. Their owners are currently the Al Hasawi family from Kuwait, who seem to have the Tony Fernandes gift of public relations in that no matter how many times they mess up, how many times they overspend, how many truly awful managerial decisions they make and how dreadful the results are on the pitch retain the support of the fans because they’ve "put their money where their mouth is” and "have their hearts in the right place” and allegedly used to watch Nottingham Forest a bit in the 1980s or walk down the Uxbridge Road to work every day. Fawaz Al Hasawi, who runs the club day to day, can also be found sounding off ill-advisedly on Twitter.
Nobody can argue they took over Forest in any kind of a positive state, following Doughty’s tragic and sudden death. But, equally, it would be a pretty lenient judge to assess their reign so far as anything other than a dismal, costly failure. Forest, like QPR, are no further on than when their current owners arrived and they’ve spent many millions achieving that. Forest fans can, and will, and should point fingers at the league and at the unfairness of it all but it wasn’t the League who sacked Sean O’Driscoll after a 4-2 home win against Leeds with the club in the promotion picture and replaced him with that titan of managerial mediocrity Alex McLeish and then had him walk away less than a month later. It wasn’t anybody other than the Al Hasawi family who brought Billy Davies back to the club and then stood by and let him use his position to settle old scores with the media, banning newspapers and TV stations from the club, rather than managing the team proficiently. It wasn’t anybody else who allowed Jim Price, a relative of Davies’, to assume senior positions at the club and actively engage in the censoring despite being struck off as a solicitor in Scotland and thereby being one of the few people who does actually fail the League’s tissue paper thin Fit and Proper Person Test.
It was also the Al Hasawi family who went down the lazy route of bringing back a club legend as manager. God knows any English football fan has a lot of time for Stuart Pearce but he’d shown at Manchester City, and with the England Under 21s, that management, and more specifically tactics, were not a strong suit. They stuck with him through three wins in 23 games too, including a loss in the FA Cup at Rochdale, before finally taking him up to the woods with a shot gun in the crook of their elbow to do the decent thing.
The Football League, FFP and QPR feel a bit like the Nottingham Forest version of Mark Hughes, Mike Rigg, Jose Bosingwa and Phil Beard — scapegoats to get angry with to delay the inevitable pointing of fingers at the actual culprit.
The other, much smaller, issue in all of this is QPR could easily be caught out this week. Apart from Rangers’ weird, chronic failure to ever win a game at the City Ground, and Brian Clough punching a pitch invader in the side of the head, we have little history of animosity with either Forest or Blackburn Rovers. QPR may find themselves blindsided in the next seven days by two clubs, rightly or wrongly, bearing a grudge.
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