Mick Beale, Les Ferdinand, Lee Hoos — Fans Forum Friday, 14th Oct 2022 04:22 by Clive Whittingham With the team motoring, the safe standing installed and the Stan Bowles Stand standing, one wondered what would fill the vacuum at the annual QPR Fans Forum at Loftus Road this evening — as ever, there were some of the curviest curve balls imaginable. LoftforWords takes the piss. It’s what we do. We’re unashamed about it, we make no apologies. We’re a group of people who go to the well for each other whenever it’s required, and spend ridiculous amounts of our spare time and disposable income following Queens Park Rangers around the place, pointing at the things we see there and making inappropriate jokes about them. We can read a set of accounts and try and put into words how that relates to why we can’t “sign a fucking striker”; we can hire in analytics types to provide the glittering, granular tactical insight into why we score of second phase set plays; but most of all it’s us trying to crowbar jokes, graphic sexual imagery and Airplane references into eight straight years of Championship drudge. Preston away again is it? If you want a website grown up enough not to do bits and pieces about Steve Bruce’s fat back then, I’m sorry, we’re just never going to be for you. (If we are for you, do give to our Patreon so I can pop the heating on for half an hour). With this in mind there will, naturally, be piss taking tonight, as we once again burn the midnight Peroni to turn around our write up of the annual QPR Fans Forum. It will never not be funny to me that you get a professional football manager, one of the club’s greatest ever players and current director of football, and the CEO of what is a multi-million pound, internationally owned business on a stage and start asking them about hand dryers. All that “Evil Les” stuff about his agenda and his mates and this scandal and that disgrace that keeps the fires of Twitter burning, melting away into so many complaints about why the doors don’t lock properly on the bogs in Ellerslie Road. Usually, and this evening was no exception, that’s because these forums have a handy knack of being immaculately timed. Beale himself said at the start: “I was thankful of a good week last week, because when I saw it in the calendar and saw the fixtures I thought… that could be interesting.” I’ve told this story before, but it’s particularly applicable now as Beale faces his first one oh so conveniently on the back of a three-game winning week and while joint top of the table, but Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink sat on this stage once and fielded questions about a play-off push and how he’d like to build the team in the event of promotion to the Premier League — a week later he’d lost 6-0 at home to Newcastle, two more he’d been splashed over the front page of the Telegraph, and three after that he’d been sacked. Had you held this forum in April, it would have been a different crowd and vibe entirely. Hell, even if you’d held it at the start of September, I think it could have been aggy. Here we are basking in the pre-Luton glow of last week, and all is right in the world bar the water pressure. What I did want to say before we begin though, is I think occasionally the piss taking in this write up might have strayed, or at least given the impression of straying, into a sort of arrogant, high and mightiness. That what I care about at QPR is more important than what the people asking the questions care about, that my questions are more worthy than theirs, that they are idiots and I am not. Don’t get me wrong, some of the questions are borderline moronic, and I will continue to take the piss tonight. But I want to row back ever so slightly because, for all the wise cracks, for all the talk of “fans forum bingo”, for all the piss taking — we’re lucky to have this forum. The club is under no obligation to do it. We’ve seen, in the past, what happens when they don’t, and how issues can build and fester into a real problem for them (well, not them, so much as Phil Beard), but they could just go “fuck it, big hassle, make me.” There are two other clubs in this league that were tipped by many (yes, ok, us) for good season, who have bigger and better stadiums, larger support bases, vastly bigger income streams and all the FFP advantages that provides, currently languishing at the bottom of the division having both already changed their managers — one has an absent foreign owner desperate to sell and a CEO who previously oversaw the ongoing financial clusterfuck at Reading; the other has the perfect chairman, but one who never speaks publicly, has recruited lousily and is grossly underperforming for his outlay. I’ve seen both sets of West Brom and Boro fans on social media this past week pining for exactly this sort of open forum where you can, as we’ll see, go along, grab the mic, and ask whatever the fuck you like. So, as much as I take the piss, know that it comes from a good place, of love. And, it must be said, of tiredness. I don’t know what the timestamp on this article will say when it’s posted, but it’s 23.29 now, I’ve been in the house an hour, I started day job at 06.30, and will do so again tomorrow/today. Anyway, here we go: Mick Beale = MB; Evil Les = LF; Lee Hoos = LH. On the pitch- On the appointment of Beale in the first place, LF he say “it’s early days, but like everybody else we are pleased with what we’re seeing at the moment and the direction the club is going in. It’s something we spoke about for a long time — bringing somebody in with that academy background who understands what it takes to develop players. It’s what we’ve been speaking about since the day I came here, it’s about the assets we’ve got and making them better and products we can sell on. We don’t want to do that, we want to get back to the Premier League, but we understand where we are as a club.” Where we are as a club is a place where as the director of football delivers this message, he slowly sinks into the floor because his stool is broken, and has to be replaced. And it’s live. - The potential sale of key players came up time and again. QPR in this ground and this financial situation are stuck between the rock and the hard place of wanting to keep their best players to get them to the moneylands upstairs, but knowing they need to sell to comply with FFP and allow them funds to reinvest in more players. It’s a tough trick to pull off, and I’ll assemble the relevant comments from all three on the panel in this bullet. MB: “The biggest thing for me was making sure when I spoke to the owners, Les and Lee was will Chris be here, will Ilias be here, will Seny be here? Will Rob be here? It’s important because you can build from that and recruit to compliment them, which I think we’ve done. It’s about tapping into each players’ journey. It’s no problem that Ilias, Chris, Seny, any of our players want to go on and play Premier League. You use that. You hold them responsible for their dreams every day. If a player tells you he wants to go and achieve a lot, then you work on a plan with him and hold him responsible. Hopefully they take all of us there. If not, we do need another Ebere Eze where if we can’t go together we let him go, but we have to have that conveyer belt. The answers I got from the club are the reason I’m sitting here now.” LF: “We desperately want to keep Ilias Chair and Chrissy Willock, especially the way they’re playing at the moment. We can’t stop bids coming in. It would take a big bid to get any of them away, our plan is to get back to the Premier League, we need our best players around for that, they’re two of our best players. But for the club to be sustainable sometimes you have to sell one of your best assets. We’re hoping it doesn’t happen, we want to push on with these boys.”
- Recruitment. MB: “I think we’ve recruited really well, especially considering where we are financially compared to the clubs that have come out of the Premier League and one or two others in the league who’ve spent a lot of money. We went to Bristol last week and it was the first time six of the seven signings have played together, I think we’ve re-energised the squad really well.” MB again: “The changing room is a similar age, similar stage of their career, a number of them were at very big clubs where it didn’t work out and they’ve had to drop down and tried to push themselves back up either taking a club or showcasing themselves. The recruitment has been really clever with regards the type of player we’ve put in the building together. I always talk about knowing where somebody is going to sit at lunchtime. It’s important. I need to know if I recruit Kenneth he’s going to have some rapport with the other players. Same with Ethan, Tim, Tyler, Jake Clarke-Salter. If you look at them and their age group and backgrounds there is a lot of similarities. That’s the key for me. If I’d come in and the squad had looked different then we’d have recruited towards that, or I would have advised us to.” Andy Belk kids, stick with me on this, we’ve got a gem. - Sign a fucking striker. And, indeed, ring the fucking bell. It’s finger puppets time, and your master of ceremonies today is LF: “It’s a subject we’ve spoken about on many occasions…” (no shit — ed) “…but it’s what's out there and what we can afford. We’re always looking. The scouting team are scowering all over the place to find the right person for us in terms of that. We’re sincerely hoping Lyndon carries on the form he showed the other night. There’s goals in Lyndon. We’ll continue to do what we can with the resources we’ve got to try and take us to where we want to go. It’s simply because of the money. The financial situation we’re in right now. We’d love to spend £10m on a striker, we don’t have the resources to do it. We have to pick somebody we think we can develop into what we want him to be.” - Of course for a long time the answer to much of this is QPR have to sell to be able to buy. The problem now, according to LH, is the market for Championship players has disintegrated so much it’s almost Ebere Eze/Jarrod Bowen or bust. LH: “From an EFL standpoint the market is dead. Pre-Covid you could get a few million for a player form another Championship club. Now, unless it’s a club with a parachute payment, that market has disappeared. You can see that this summer with how few fees were paid for players from the EFL. Our model has had to transform from not just producing a player for sale, but a player who can sell to Premier League or top notch European club in order to generate the money we need. That’s the risk now. It’s Premier League or bust. This is one of the big impetuses that came out of the fan led review, pushing the Premier League for a new distribution model. The current one is broken without a shadow of a doubt. As a category two academy there is set compensation for players under 16, when we see Premier League teams not paying fees for our developed players, then coming and picking off our best players at U16 level it’s like…come on guys, you’re picking our pocket of stuff we have for the future and you’re not giving us anything for the players we have now. It’s only a matter of time before the whole thing crumbles. I hope the government helps us out with this, they said 'if we need to appoint an independent regulator we will', but I’m hoping sense prevails with a new distribution model. With that distribution model would have to come cost reform with player salaries — there would be no point getting new money from the Premier League and then salaries sky rocket again because that kills the business.” LH later… “If you have a fringe player then he’s not going to the Premier League and if he’s going to League One or lower Championship, you’re not getting a fee for him. You might get contingencies, maybe a sell-on, but there’s just no money out there right now. Look at our business this summer, we didn’t pay a fee for anybody. It’s all frees and loans. There are a number of clubs in that same situation now.” - As if by magic, the shopkeeper appeared. January transfer funds. Honestly, you couldn’t make it up, literally the next question. LH: “I’m not expecting the Premier League to come up between now and January with a whole boat load of money. Under the current financial regulations, when MB talks about not having the finances and LF talks about not having the resources, what that actually means is the headroom we have under the profit and sustainability rules. In order to spend more money we have to generate more revenue — player sales is something we don’t want to do because we want to hang onto everybody, so it comes down to how much you guys want to spend… There’s no sense going to the owners for more cash because they’re already putting in the maximum amount allowed.” - On last season’s collapse, not a great deal was said, but it’s something we’re keen to dig into with LF in one of our forthcoming Patreon interviews which I’m about to start bugging Paul Morrissey about. MB said: “last year, I wasn’t here, but hearing from everybody it was disappointing from March down. January was a big month, everybody got excited inside the building, you were all excited. I want to get this group into the stage of the season where we can draw on that as a positive. We haven’t played everybody once yet. Let’s get to the halfway stage. My big aim is getting the whole place, the players, all the staff, after the March international break, close enough to the automatics and the play-offs. That’s the first aim. From there we can draw on last season and really push on. You can only dream and look forward based on the standards the players set, they’ve set themselves big standards early this season which is exciting, but it is early.”
- Here’s one that got asked several times in several different ways, and never really answered, because I suspect they can’t. Chris Willock’s contract expires in 18 months’ time, and quite clearly as a free agent in this market would command a large wage and signing on fee. Is he about to sign a new one? LF: “Sincerely hoping nobody leaves. We’re in the midst of talking to people at the moment and seeing where we can go with it. There’s a financial situation, but the boys are happy here so now’s a good time. We’re speaking at the moment. Hopefully we can speak the numbers that make them happy and they’re happy to sign and stay.” MB: “Chris is really happy at QPR, he realises what the club has done for him and there’s nowhere he’d rather play football right now. We’ve got a really happy squad — I’d say that for all the players, in the last window there were some players we offered to leave but they didn’t want to, which shows we’re creating the right environment. I said this at the weekend, there is a lot of talk of individuals here at QPR, but the team has to be the star. I’m trying, with everybody else, to create a style that lasts longer than some of us are here, and a squad that lasts longer than somebody who wants to move on, if they do then no problem. There’s a lot of talk about Chris not being involved on Friday, it was important for everybody - the team, the fans, and for Chris as well — that the team won without him. The team has to be the star here. Chris is the best in our team at what Chris does, but he’s not our best passer, he’s not the best for work ethic, he’s not the best for blocking or putting a body on the line. When he’s not there, somebody else comes in and brings their qualities. That’s how you bring a strong football club and squad. If a Premier League club came and offered money and Chris wanted to go we’d have to look at that, it’s not in our eyesight right now. We’re creating an environment at Heston that makes all the players want to be here.” Later in the business part of the evening I pushed LH on whether the FFP headroom issues were preventing us offering competitive renewals to our existing players — recruitment seems pretty good, but retention less so, at QPR these days. Are we running the risk of another Bright Osayi-Samuel or Ryan Manning situation with Chris Willock? LH: “Ryan Manning was a very different situation. Bright had a ridiculous offer. The only other club in England interested in him was a Premier League club but they didn’t have the confidence to take a chance at a tribunal, because they thought even a couple of million at tribunal would have been too much. He landed on his feet well and got a mind boggling offer in Turkey. A very different situation with Ryan… I wish him well. We offer the best wages we can for the best players we can and it’s just constantly trying to get people through. We have a lot of players on the periphery, it’s about how we deal with those guys, I don’t think we’ll get fees for them. If a player really decides to just run out of contract there’s nothing we can do to stop him. We didn’t sell anybody this summer, I don’t think we’d have got the full value for them this summer to justify selling them, who knows what will happen next summer? I think the players are on the right trajectory. The finances always play a part. If somebody says I’m going to run you down to a free there’s not a lot you can do, if a Premier League club tells them to run it down to a free and they’ll give them £40k a week we’re never going to compete with that it’s out and out impossible. But by doing things like structuring the contract right, making sure they’re alright, sharing the benefits for the club, that’s the sort of thing we’re trying to do now to keep people on board with us.” - MB said he’d “had a word” with the builders at the new training ground in Heston a few times about the noise, but that the work on the new building was progressing well and that it was helping the players feel the club was growing and moving in the right direction. “I can’t explain how important it is that the players are excited to come in every day. It’s part of my job to make the environment like that. It’s exciting for the club, when I go back many years when I was playing in a different academy you didn’t know where you were going to play when you played QPR as a schoolboy — one season at this place, one season at another. The fact we’ve now got what will be a Premier League training ground eight-ten months away is hugely exciting. Recruiting this summer, we could have recruited more good players if it wasn’t for finance, but I wouldn’t have wanted to show them around Heston the first day we walked in there to be honest. But by next year I’ll be proud to show people around and that will be huge for the club.” Beale later revealed that as part of that youth development, post his release by Charlton, he had a trial in QPR's juniors under Warren Neill - but didn't get a deal. He's not bitter though, he promises. LF: “In the short time we’ve all been training on the same site, the young players are seeing the finishing line which is the first team. They’ve not been able to do that for many years here. It’s really encouraging, when the first team are training now, some of the youth boys are coming up and watching them train. It’s a nice feel. If I’m there I say come in a bit closer so you can listen to what Mick’s saying. You can take that away. Seeing that training ground coming together will bode well for QPR going forwards.” - Given the disintegration of relations between the first team set up and the youth/academy/reserves by the end of last season, the integration of first and academy teams came up a fair bit. MB sits on a technical board with Chris Ramsey, Alex Carroll, Paul Hall, LF and LH. MB described Chris Ramsey as “the man who never takes an hour off, never mind a day” and said he looks after the first team forwards, and said when he went for dinner with Paul Hall last week Hall paid so he’s “one of my friends now”. “We’ve got ex professionals, good players, at the top end of the academy coaching. I seek out their advice on the team as well. Imps played at this club and came through, it’s important I get his take on things. It’s two way, I need to take opinions on the team. It’s not me hiding it away to myself. We’ve had 16 players from the B Team come over and train with us, not including goalkeepers. I was delighted with how the B Team played here against Millwall on Friday. Every time I see them play I’m learning new names — we’ve got a lot of young players it’s fair to say. Every one of the 16 has acquitted themselves well. They won’t all play for QPR but there are definitely players in there that can make an impact. We couldn’t be more integrated.” Beale always seems at his most enthusiastic, impressive and empathetic when talking about young footballers coming through the system. I won’t minute the whole thing here but on the YouTube rewatch above, if you watch nothing else watch his answer from 33.30 on what qualities young players need to make the grade… - It’s been a bit of a running joke in the Crown about how Mick Beale seems to have known so many of the new arrivals from a ridiculously young age — cut Kenneth Paal’s umbilical cord for instance. I quite like the question about players he’s inherited who have surprised him. MB: “I didn’t know too much about Sam Field. Last season was unfortunate for him because he was injured, then he came back and the team didn’t do so well. That was the boy I met. Delighted to be back, but it coincided with the results not being great. His application to pre-season, the way he is around the building, is absolutely fantastic. He’s doing everything he can. He was a nice surprise. He’s got a lot to do, Sam. But he’s trying to do it every day, I like that, he’s a grower. Ilias I watched as a player from afar and I thought he was a really nice player to watch but I didn’t know if you could win with him. But I’ve got to tell you, he goes… He got the armband at Sheff Utd last week because he gives everything you can give, every single day. He’s a cheeky chappie, in a nice way. He’s worth a lot, to me as a coach. Lyndon, with the tattoos, looks like an aggressive Scotsman, but he’s not. He’s a sensitive young man. I can’t tell you how much the fans have helped him, especially after his big miss here, singing his name. Around the building every day he gives his team mates a lot. I played against him in Scotland and he bullied all of our defenders, I wanted him to get that back when I came but that’s not his profile, how he looks is not the gentleman that comes and sits in my office. He’s the complete opposite to how gruesome he looks. From the outside you can have a vision of a team, then you get in here and you realise you can’t do without that player, because he’s part of what makes that team gel. You never know that until you live with them. Nobody has surprised me in a bad way.” - Here’s a fun one. Paul Heckingbottom’s comments post QPR win at Sheff Utd last week about our time wasting were raised. Cards on the table, I agree with the Blades boss. I think it’s endemic in the Championship, I think the referees at this level are so abysmally inept at clamping down on it they actually end up condoning and encouraging it, I’m sick of watching it done to us and us doing nothing about it in return, but I do think at Bristol City and Sheff Utd we took the piss at times. Still, as answers go, this was full on “if you come for the king you best not miss” stuff. MB: “I don’t want to speak out of turn about another manager, he has to manage his club and I have to manage mine. He’s had a bad week. I think maybe those comments come from a bad week. He’s under a lot more pressure than me to guarantee that his team will go up, because that’s the outlay and the expectation there from the money they’re spending there. We did genuinely have injuries in that game, the people going down with cramp weren’t faking they went down because they’d stopped playing, that’s more dangerous than time wasting. Seny Dieng had an injury — I’m looking at Jimmy Dunne wondering why are you taking the goal kicks, it’s only when they come close that they can tell me Seny is injured. That’s not time wasting. The crowd and the people in the stadium forced the referee to give Jimmy a yellow card when it’s clear our goalkeeper is injured. That could impact the outcome of the game if Jimmy has to make a tackle and get sent off, or if Jimmy is on four bookings and that’s a ban now. I think the referee got duped into that. The referee blows the first and the final whistle, if he thinks we are… just add the time on. Seven minutes was it? They had the time there. They had the time, they had the finances, they pay their players a lot more than we pay ours, he’s the home team and he lost. They lost 1-0. Probably should have lost 2-0.” Wallop. Eat that and tell me you’re still hungry. (QPR lose the return fixture 2-0).
- Kenneth Paaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaaaaal, running down the wing, etc, etc. MB said his time in Brazil with Sao Paolo gave him a great insight into the mindset of younger, foreign players coming into the UK. “It’s little things. I didn’t speak great Portuguese over there. When I had a problem in the house there was one person at the club I could ring but the way I am as a person if I rang him once that week I didn’t want to ring him again. You can transfer a talented player from one club to the other, but what makes them them? Kenneth came over, my first thing is he’s in a hotel in Chiswick — how do I get him out of there? I know what it's like to live in one room. I did it when I moved to Aston Villa for three months. There’s a lot of time to kill after training, but if you’re sat in a room… It gives you time to overthink. His fiancé is pregnant I was mindful of that, I was mindful of the challenge of the league, I was mindful of how judgemental you guys can be because I had a fan say to me after his second game he’s the worst player he’s ever seen play for QPR… I thought… WOW. Ok. Well, that’s interesting. You have to give a young boy a chance. It’s really early days for Kenneth. The recruitment team did a really good job with him, we’ve done a good job integrating him. His fiancé will give birth in the World Cup break here in England, what a lovely moment for him to be living through. He’s not just a left back, he can go and play in midfield for us. I like you like him, but he’s still got a lot more to bring to the table. It is a gamble, you look at his stature, the fact he hasn’t played outside Holland, the intensity of the Championship and the way some of the teams will target him and the way some of the teams have targeted him already… you don’t know how he’s going to handle it. The biggest credit is to Kenneth so far, he’s adapted really well. In pre-season we saw it, we got quite excited, then it’s fair to say the Championship did catch him by surprise and he did have to adjust. So far so good.” - George Thomas and Nico Trävelmän became rather the elephants in the room for a while as conversation developed through several questions about the number of fringe players there are at QPR sucking up not only FFP headroom space, but also places in the youth and reserves ahead of youngsters coming through, while palpably never going to be good enough for the firsts. MB; “The gap between U21 and first team football is massive, we all know, compared to when Les and Andy were coming through here under the old school reserve regime. It’s huge, but in your club you can make is smaller by training together, putting players down to make that team. The second team is there to support the firsts. The young players have to know it’s not a team you stay in for a long time. You get in it, prove you’re good enough, and play for the firsts or go and play men’s football somewhere else and come back. I want our B Team to look more like an old fashioned reserve team. I want the B Team to play more games, not less. You can’t play 25 games in a B Team to be ready for 46 game Championship seasons. We need to put three game weeks in. When you have a first team squad of 22, the reserves are the ones who don’t make the 11, the next best players are on loan, so the B Team is the fourth team and it’s there to serve the first team. The aim is not to stay there for a long time. In our club we’re trying to make that huge gap smaller. I think we’ve got a lot of players here, I want to work with a slightly smaller squad with the same budget. I think our budget is fine, I just want to bring it a bit closer. Les feels the same.” - Standard question on refereeing decisions. As ever, we’ve had correspondence. As ever, the authorities mostly agreed that we’ve been fucked over. Swansea, in particular, was a bone of contention where the panel, and as it turns out the EFL and PGMOL, felt they should have been down to ten men after a minute. Nothing ever changes, it’s a pointless exercise. I did like, however, Beale’s ongoing commitment to make it all about us, and not worry about things we can’t change such as the now abysmal standard of refereeing in this division we’re playing in. “I try to take things like that out of the equation and make it all about us.” Whether that survives a five game losing streak, or some of the decisions Steve McClaren had during a winless run that cost him his job, we’ll wait and say — it’s easy to say while it’s going well of course. But I like his no excuses culture, I think it’s good for us — we can often be a bit ‘woe is me’, like we’re the only team that ever had a dodgy penalty given against them. (Not you Stroud. Fucking goblin.) - Yoann Barbet’s departure was raised. Here’s the answer from LF: “It was a situation where it was finances. He felt he was worth a lot more than we could afford. When you get to that situation there’s not a lot you can do. We made him an offer, the offer wasn’t good enough for him, he felt he could earn more elsewhere, that’s’ the unfortunate situation we find ourselves in sometimes. He’s moved on, Jake’s come in, I’m sure you’ll agree Jake’s doing a fantastic job at the moment.” Hmmmm, ok. I could write a thesis on this. Yoann Barbet moved here on a free transfer from a near rival in his mid-twenties, all of that commands a certain wage which you won’t (and absolutely shouldn’t) be able to command from QPR in its current state as you go into your 30s. Fine. It was more the manner of that departure, the “we’re not discussing contracts with anybody until the summer” comment in this forum last year, the stories via Dave Mc of players sticking stuff in storage and giving up their accommodation while awaiting for a conversation, Barbet left to do a lap of the pitch with his wife and kid in front of 100 people post Sheff Utd H because nobody knew he was off… that stuck in the craw. Clint Hill, Ale Faurlin, Nedum Onuoha, absolute stalwarts of this club, have all said the same thing under this regime — the way their departures were handled was not right. The club didn’t cover itself in glory over this, or Charlie Austin for that matter, and it wouldn’t take much adjustment for it to get better. They often say “we made him an offer” by way of a get out. If I offered you £10 to come up to Barnet and clean my toilet tomorrow would you do it? Probably not. Have I made you an offer? Yes, there, in writing. I think we need to be better. More to the point, Ale Faurlin thinks we need to be better, and what he says goes. - Elijah Dixon-Bonner, a player who left Arsenal to join Liverpool as a kid, has signed on after a trial. MB was at pains to state that while he has a “soft spot” for him, as a London lad who went up to Liverpool and he watched out for while he was there, he left the youth coaches to make their own decisions about. Everybody is “quite excited” but he’s not somebody we will “see straight away”. - The apparently weird low-balling of Millwall over Danny McNamara over the summer came up. MB: “Danny was in the last year of his contract, a very good player, I think a future Republic of Ireland international. We made a really good offer. I know what was said in newspapers, but they don’t know. We made a really good offer. It wasn’t accepted. He signed a new contract there. We wish him well for the future when he doesn’t play against us because he’s a really nice boy. There’s nothing more to it than that. We were very fortunate in the summer that a lot of young players wanted to come here and play and I think overall we’re delighted with Ethan aren’t we? It’s hard with loan players sometimes, but he makes our environment better because of the personality. He certainly makes our team better. We made a very good offer, Millwall were very strong they wanted to keep him, outside of playing against us we wish him well.” - Now, here we go. First team motoring, Stan Bowles Stand done, safe standing in place — what, we wondered, would be used to fill the vacuum. And here it was. A very articulate gentleman took the mic near the end of the first half and dollied up a nice underarm delivery about what advice they would have for his football mad 21-year-old son who was about to leave university. If you want to hear a bit more of just what a top bloke Mick Beale is, and how his career developed, then this exchange starts at 01.07.15 on the YouTube clip. It was, as only the QPR fans forum could deliver, a masterful set up for Curtly Ambrose to step up next to the crease and ask for what advice they would give his nine-year-old son who’d just been released from QPR’s academy, despite a litany of local interest and accolades, and had his heart broken. And here we have, for years to come, saved on YouTube, our Scotty Canham moment. In reverse. Because this is QPR, and this kid inevitably goes and carves things up ten years from now, busting all of Haaland’s records as he goes, and we’ll always have this clip. I hesitate to bring this up because the clip above makes Harry Redknapp look good, and as both regular readers know I not only think Harry Redknapp looks like a gout-infested old-twat’s ball sack, but that most gout-infested old-twat’s ball sacks would have done a less damaging job of managing our club. Nevertheless, there exists in the internet, a clip of a West Ham fan standing up at one of their forums back in the day, accusing Redknapp of outright nepotism for picking some fat kid Frank Lampard ahead of the next wunderkind Scotty Canham — please see Peter Skapetis in your LFW textbooks. To be fair to the bloke, he also mentions Matt Holland, who Redknapp also released to a sparkling career of Premier League and Republic of Ireland caps. Anyway, Redknapp disagrees, says Lampard will be worth a billion quid one day, and usually I’d point out that Redknapp once said “if I had eleven Jamie Mackies I’d be alright” shortly before selling Jamie Mackie to Nottingham Forest, and was absolutely not about to shove Gareth Bale out on loan and replace him with Callum McManaman whatever any of you think, but, on this occasion, he was right. Where was I, ah yes, uber cringe. LF dealt with it well: “It’s really difficult. A lot of us have got kids, we all think our kids are the best. They come into an environment like ours, and coaches have to make decisions. John Barnes came to this football club and wasn’t good enough, Cyril Regis came to this club and wasn’t good enough. A lot of players get released at nine. It’s tough. People go into an academy at nine, people have to make decisions. That’s what they get paid for. Sometimes they make the wrong decision, nine times out of ten it’s the right one. It’s difficult as a parent, I understand, we try to put things in place to let kids down as gently as we possibly can. If that’s your dream and it gets shattered and it’s hard to come back, but he’s nine, if he’s good enough, he’ll find his way.” Now, coming back to my intro. I’m desperate to take the piss here. Because that is some serious Eastenders level beef: a guy who gets a ticket to the fans forum at Loftus Road on a Thursday night, tees up a softball question about his eldest academic son, only to come in with the killer one into the kidneys about the one we let get away. You don’t mess with FAAAAAAAMLY. Absolute respect, total brilliance of the QPR fan forum genre. Les gave it the big don’t argue, as is his right, and the internet set to work on taking the piss out of the dad. I’m just going to put a very small caveat in the ground in the ground here. There will always be stories like John Barnes. But the academy is not sacrosanct. It should be criticised, critiqued, scrutinised, with the rest of the club, by us as supporters and stakeholders in the future of the club. It is seriously well staffed, it is ridiculously overpopulated with players (as admitted elsewhere in this forum), and it is still talking about Ebere Eze, Joe Lumley, Ilias Chair… Who’s next? The spend, the coaches, the set up, should not be beyond reproach. Yeh, probably, this is just another disgruntled parent. I remember when my brother got released by Scunny, we had all manner of needle and bitterness towards the coach there and how he’d been treated, and the only player from his age group (Jack Muldoon) who ever went onto anything else had to do so at other clubs. But did Paul ever make it anywhere? No. Decent footballer, but not of that level. We had another parent approaching us at LFW, pre-Covid for full disclosure on timescale, asking us to run their story about how they’d moved their lad over from Palace’s academy because he wanted to play here as a QPR fan, and then withdrew him quickly out of alarm about what they found here. It could just be another pushy dad, the worst kind of touchline parent, living vicariously through his kids, we told ourselves. But don’t immediately dismiss it as such. Paul Bruce released Chris Mepham, a QPR fan, from our academy and Brentford went on to sell him for £8m — he still goes on QPR coaches to away games with his dad when he can, and when Alex Baptiste tried to sledge him at Griffin Park a few years back he let him know in no uncertain terms that he’d watched him for most of the season and he was in no position to speak. Like I say, we take the piss, but we are starting to wonder a little bit. Off the pitchLH was left on the stage by himself for the second half, to avoid the embarrassment of last year where Mark Warburton excused himself early from a forum in which he was being asked no questions at all amidst a hail of debate about taps for the bathroom which I’m sure he could get at home. He ditched the stool, stretched himself out in front of us, Sue Cook pulled out, and here’s what went on. There's one in the chamber, and move, and fire, and move, and fire. - Training ground all good. All the pitches are now up and running — I’ve played on worse snooker tables, seriously. LH: “A few issues up there, and particularly down here where the pitch is the worst I’ve ever seen for this time of year because the UK is not used to the extreme temperatures it had this summer and because it’s a plastic mesh pitch here when the plastic heats up it affects the root system. The building is on schedule, finished by June, on budget, even better." - New Stadium less good. Although, Now 26 That's What I Call 90's Greatest Hits, The School End might be back on the table. Baby we'll turn back the hands of time. Round and around and around and around we go. LH: “Covid threw that into a complete hiatus, it didn’t go anywhere. Nothing has moved forwards at all. Council hasn’t moved forward at all. We continue to look at all options. People do keep asking what would happen if we bought the school, and interestingly Francesca (Smith, head teacher) the head of the school sits on our community trust board as well and she would love another location because they’re outgrowing that school. It’s then about what could we do here? What could we do with a bigger footprint? … There’s no point in acquiring something and then wondering what we can do with it. Decide what you can do with something and then what you need to make that happen. Adding a couple of thousand seats to use once a fortnight does not lead to financial sustainability, it’s a drop in the bucket. Up to this season our ticket yield was £15 per ticket, this year it’s £18. If I add a couple of thousand people, it doesn’t add that much to the bottom line. What the club needs is something it can use on a consistent basis on non-match days. Last year our non matchday activity, excluding the Saudi-Super Cup which made money, it was £150,000, whereas at Burnley that was measured in the millions.” “We just continue to do all the machinations. The council have said they’re always interested in what we have to say so the ball is in our court. We continue to work with that business plan.” LH went on to point out that the economic situation currently, and a potentially cratering housing market, would make a move even less unlikely because much of it would presumably be financed by selling the current Loftus Road site for housing. Absolutely fair fucks to Alan Dyer from the Fantasy Island message board. Quite often at these things questions get asked, answered (or not), we move on. But he took the mic and said he “wasn’t convinced” with what had been said about the stadium, seeking clarification. Wouldn’t be fobbed off by the timescale, because “it’s been going on ages”, and raised sites at “John Lewis” and “Twyford Avenue”. Good man, good questions. He asked whether the problems at the Linford Christie Stadium are on our side or the council’s, what’s being done to resolve it and basically whether it’s dead in the water. I suspect he knows, as many of us have heard, that QPR and the council talk to each other about the Linford Christie Stadium about as often as I talk to Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine. LH swats aside thusly: “At the moment Linford Christie is owned by the trust and the trustee is the council, the council has not moved the consultation forward at all and I assume they have a lot of different things to deal with. Dialogue continues with the council. In the meantime we will look at every opportunity. Is it the number one priority of my day when I come in every day, no, but it’s not on the back burner either. We’re not going to come in shouting WE’VE GOT TO GET THIS DONE, and then make a stupid decision on the stadium.” - Work on Loftus Road as it is now, including specifically extending the Loft End roof to provide more protection in the front rows… LH: “This stadium I carve out a small amount of budget each year to do what I can. This year it was dedicated to sorting out the ladies toilets over in the Stan Bowles Stand. Every year we try to do something. A major piece of work like that, which would require structural work as well, that’s not on the cards right now.” - Safe standing. Great success. Further extension based on supporter consultation. Credit given to James and Terry for bringing and pushing the idea. “I looked over there the other night, it looked like the area where people were having the most fun. If there was a demand to extend it, again I’m not going to go kicking people out of their seats. It would have to be carefully done and planned. If that area evolves and grows organically then great.” A season ticket holder in the Lower Loft who’d sat in the same seats for a decade with his son did raise the point that now his lad is 21 they are going to be kicked out, and the basic answer to that was ‘yeh, tough, need to make way for new kids.' Making the tickets cheaper in the standing section risks “cannibalising the revenue stream, further eroding the FFP headroom, and doesn’t make any logical sense whatsoever” added LH.
- Ticket prices came up in the context of QPR getting some grief for charging Hull City fans £35+ to come down here for a midweek game, and Reading offering the rest of the Championship £20 tickets on a reciprocal basis. I mean not for me to comment on the financials at Reading, who pack half the attendance into one end at a discounted rate, so they can’t expand the away ticket allocation, while the rest of the ground sits empty, but I’ll leave that to LH. “You will not be charged based on what we charge them. You will be charged based on what that club charges their fans in an equivalent area of the ground. Reading came up with an idea of a £20 ticket, the London clubs rejected that. Millwall just said they can’t survive on £20 while paying the stewards what they pay them for the away end. That’s what it comes down to. We charged Hull a lot of money, we do, but this is an expensive stadium to run and we’re paying London wages. Up at Sunderland I paid £1.57 for petrol, I came back home and paid £1.65. Same petrol, but the overheads are higher in London. I’m not here to win friends, I’m here to do what is right for the club and I know what it costs to run this stadium. If Reading have taken a business standpoint to supplement that then that’s up to them, from a FFP standpoint I’m looking for every inch of headroom I can get under those regulations, not for my bonus but to put that money out on the pitch.” Additionally, the ever escalating costs of buying one-off tickets to home games, or paying on the day. LH: “A one off game is expensive, you’re right. But we’ve put out a number of products, if you’re coming to a midweek game there is a package, various options we’ve put down to lower the price. It’s no different to buying a season pass to LegoLand versus going for a one-off day. I’d love to put tickets on for £10 but if it’s costing me £30 per person to put the match on I can’t lose £20 per person.” - The ticketing discussion inevitably led onto an FFP debate, which drives so many of the unpopular decisions at QPR. LH: “The redistribution with the Premier League is probably the easiest and best way to address FFP/P&S. The whole financial regulation of football needs to be addressed and has to start with the revenue coming in. In terms of challenging the existing rules you have to get 18 teams in the Championship to vote to change it, and I can’t find 18 clubs to agree on a common theme to change. Some clubs want to lower the three-year threshold, others want to raise it, others want to leave it as it is. I got a benchmark exercise from the league the other week, and I looked at the revenue from the top club compared to what we are and thought… Good Lord how can we compete against that? Fair play, we have a gem of a manager right now and he is competing against that.” In addition to that, a point was raised by one of our LFW brethren about Watford skirting around all of this by constantly shuffling players and money from their right hand to their left and back again with Udinese. LH: “It is an issue, does it annoy me? Yeh it does annoy me. When I pushed on this the feedback I go was they found a legal way to get around the rules. It defeats the intent of what they’re trying to do — protect the competition. I don’t know how it works in Italy, but they have a massive loophole they can use and exploit there, and they’ve done it quite well. One thing we have learned is if you’re going to move on this there has to be harmony between the Premier League and EFL. There was no harmony under the first set of FFP rules that we got burned on which is why it got so messy.” - LH said the home kit ran out at precisely the moment they wanted it to last season under the ‘just in time inventory’ concept of retail, and didn’t leave them with a lot of merchandise sitting around requiring a late, deep discount. Last season’s away kit was extremely popular and they did pre-orders before placing another order. This year the big problem is supply chain and delivery, Errea - “a really, really good partner” LH - warned a year out there would be supply issues. A full compliment of everything was in before the Reading H game so it’s all there now. On goalkeeper kits, the keepers have three colours to wear, but only two are for sale, because if they put all three on ale it wouldn’t fill the minimum sales to justify the order. - Sky TV fans forum classic, can we refuse, why are fans getting pissed about etc. The league and Sky were amenable to LH request (under a little nudging from LFW dare we say) to move the Norwich midweeker back to 19.45 so QPR fans can make the last train back to London — no doubt shortly to be called off in another strike but the principal stands. LH “There is a perception that the league is a three headed monster, but when it was pointed out to me there was a problem I spoke to the league, they asked for 24 hours, they spoke to Sky, it wasn’t a problem”. Last season the club were also able to get Sky to ditch nonsense proposals to show Barnsley A at 20.00 on a Saturday night because that is not one of the contractually obligated slots in the latest Sky deal. If you are moved to a slot that is in the contract, you’re fucked, basically. The breaking news about the end of the 15.00 blackout is early days, but LH acknowledged media has moved on and it’s not just about Sky it's about non-traditional players now. LH: “There’s a big debate in the league about how streaming affects numbers, looking at our numbers unless it’s a big trip with a northern club in a midweek, then our numbers tend not to be affected by whether we stream it or not. It doesn’t replace being there live out there, that’s what you pay for and why you come to football. If you can’t make it, then you do it. Maybe Blackburn, Tuesday, you might think I won’t do that now, but the affect on the away support you’re dealing in 100s, not 1000s of people.” - Sky have now shifted our December 10 game with Burnley to Sunday lunchtime, avoiding a potential clash with an England World Cup quarter final. LH did point out that the EFL rules remains in place — three international call ups and you can postpone. QPR expect to have Roberts, Dieng and Chair away for the group stages at least. He also pointed out that the extra day would give more time to free up those players who exit in the round of the last 16 or before. - Loyalty points - a different complaint to last year where it was pointed out that people who’d hoarded points when times were good and could now use them to pick and choose fixtures like Fulham away, now with the new concept of 20% guaranteed for general sale the accusation is that people who pick and choose now might get one to Luton ahead of those who go every week. LH says you can’t please everybody and I make him right, I think the general sale thing is a good idea even though it argues against me and a number of my mates who have historical loyalty points stacked up. We've got to grow our support base, one good way of doing that is encouraging groups of young lads who do want to go away all the time. - A recent social media storm blew up around outspoken Accrington chairman Andy Holt’s revelation that part of Sky’s coverage of the EFL, and Sky Bet’s sponsorship of it, includes an affiliate scheme whereby clubs profit from their own fans’ losses if they sign up to Sky Bet and register as, say, a QPR fan. How much are QPR making from that, wondered Martin Calladine? LH: “Not this past Sky deal, but the one before it, that was part of the deal where there was an affiliation and if they lost then the club got a share of the loss. That’s been taken down with the new deal. The difference is the view of gambling. The previous Sky deal people had a more laissez faire, stand back approach to whatever people wanted to do regards gambling. I think there is a lot more awareness now in terms of warnings. It’s a good idea we don’t do that any more and you can’t join an affiliation programme.” - A point was raised about the club condoning homophobic chanting by not condemning it publicly when it happens, particularly among the away following. LH completely condemned the “Chelsea Rent Boy” chant, said he felt Chelsea would be loving life knowing we’re singing about them while they’re off and away at the top of the Premier League, and wished we would stop, but made the point that as a club if you come out and tell 300 people to stop doing something, what tends to happen is you then get 400 people doing it in spite. - Recast. LH reiterated an answer he gave to us a year ago that they’re a good partner to work with, they admitted early mistakes in the deal, and there hasn’t been a problem since. Paul Morrissey said the problems with the B Team game earlier this week were in house, not with Recast. - A point was made about the “can I have your shirt” signs — lots of the same people in the same bits of the ground hoarding shirts. LH said he hadn’t considered it before but would look at it. - Trevor Sinclair’s comments in the week of mourning for the Queen got an all too predictable mention. Will he be booted out of the Forever R’s club? LH said Sinclair had scored “one of the all time great own goals” but he was in there for what he’d done on the pitch, and it’s a slippery slope if you start retrospectively putting people in and out of things like that based on political views they may hold one way or another. A smooth answer to a daft question. - LH did make the point that rather than waiting for a fans forum to raise a complaint about hand dryers, supporterservices@qpr.co.uk has been set up as a dedicated email address to try and deal with these complaints as they come up/save us listening to them on nights like this. LH: “Don’t wait, send them in right away.” Regret incoming. If you enjoy LoftforWords, please consider supporting the site through a subscription to our Patreon or tip us via our PayPal account loftforwords@yahoo.co.uk. Pictures — Action Images/Ian Randall Photography The Twitter @loftforwords Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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