Merry Christmas and a happy new year 2024/5

Merry Christmas everyone, I hope you're all having a great day.

 

Christian Nourry's Christmas message to QPR fans ...

As we move towards the end of 2024, CEO Christian Nourry has provided an update on areas across the club.

• A focus on youth

In my pre-season message to supporters in August, I said that we had entered the phase of making the alterations to set up the football club to allow us to involve a greater number of young players in our 1st team.
Via the leadership of Martí and Xavi and supported by individual development coach Kevin Betsy and the rest of the staff, it has been brilliant to see some of our brightest and youngest 21 and under talent get opportunities and take them: Kieran Morgan (18), Daniel Bennie (18), Rayan Kolli (19), Alfie Lloyd (21), Karamoko Dembele (21) and Liam Morrison (21) have all contributed positively thus far.
Credit must also go to our recruitment and academy teams for identifying the youngsters that were signed and developing our own boys to get to within a chance of 1st team level.

• Player recruitment

I have been so impressed with how our players have worked to rapidly immerse themselves into the club and the Championship. My heart goes out especially to Žan Celar whose progression on a game-by-game basis was significant in the final couple of matches before his injury. The way that the senior lads have helped to bring this group of players together, witnessing friendships forming and strengthening at the training ground on a daily basis, it is wonderful to see and I am so proud of them. We have headed in a new direction for the football club over the last year in having a deliberate portion of our player recruitment process based on personality, geared towards identifying good, hard-working and highly motivated human beings as well as being technically suitable and I hope the fans can see on the pitch that this is having an impact – whether we are winning or losing, this group of players is doing it completely together.
Heading into the January transfer window, there will naturally be speculation and questions from fans about whether or not we can and/or will look to make reinforcements. My message is this: we head into my second January window at the football club in a significantly different situation to the one I found us in when I arrived: with overall a greater level of depth in the majority of areas of the pitch compared to this time last season. The hard truth is, we have yet to see the true potential of our current squad owing to injuries and settling-in periods – we had accounted for the latter at the start of the season, whilst the former was always a possibility given the nature of Championship football. That said, where there are market opportunities that could benefit the football club and fit within our limited budget, we will always weigh them up.
The lack of cover at left-back so far this campaign is something we are aware of. At the start of the season, we felt loaning Ziyad Larkeche to gain valuable match time was right for his development. In terms of cover for Kenneth Paal, as a group we felt we had that in Jack Colback and Morgan Fox, both who have played significant minutes there in their careers. Unfortunately, injuries have meant that we have struggled for consistency in that position.
We also discussed adding a third striker on loan at the start of the campaign, but the group was confident in the abilities of our academy strikers coming through and did not want to block their pathway to the first team. Injuries to Michael Frey and Žan have obviously had an impact in this area.

• Development Squad

There are a lot of exciting developments to talk about in this part of the club. We are taking a clear approach to our youth teams: we want to see our youngest players exposed to the highest level of football as early as possible, as in my prior work with some of the most prolific academies in world football, like Anderlecht, this has been an approach that has yielded immense success. At our recent U21s match vs Colchester United, we had three 15-year-old players start. The average age of the starting XI of our U21s so far this season has been 18.4 years old.
In our recent FA Youth Cup 3rd round victory against Swindon Town (who knocked out Manchester United in the same competition last year), we only had four 2nd year scholars start, while six were 1st years and one was from our Under-16s.
Whilst this approach may mean that our U18s and U21s experience fluctuating levels of match results, it is maximising our ability to develop potential into possible Europe top 5 league-playing talent in the future.
I want to take this opportunity to shout-out our youth coaching and youth recruitment staff up and down the structure for embracing our changes in approach with such genuine excitement.

• Women’s team

It is such a joy to have our Women’s team in our elite training centre at Heston. They endured a number of significant structural changes at the start of the campaign, with the appointment of a new Head Coach in Danny Harrigan and the signing of 11 first-team players. After a period of adaptation, their form has been excellent: unbeaten in 8 matches in the league and making it to the FA Cup 3rd Round stage for the first time since 2015.
The eagle-eyed fans amongst you will notice that we have made it a priority this season to introduce you to these incredible women through the set-up of additional women’s team dedicated social media channels and via ticket offers for existing season ticket holders for the select matches that they currently play at MATRADE Loftus Road. In the November international break, our women took on one of the strongest teams in the league this campaign in Norwich City and beat them via a late strike in the Loft End from Melia D’Santos. The women did this in front of the third largest crowd at Loftus Road for a women’s game in QPR history.

• Community

I am so privileged to lead a football club that puts its local community at the heart of everything we do. I want to praise the players for making a club-record number of Christmas-time community visits (11 different events). Last season, the players did a record number of Community appearances across the overall campaign and we are on track to eclipse that number also. Andy and his team at the Community Trust are world-class at what they do and with them having recently reached the 50 mark for full-time employees, which I want to congratulate him and them for, I have no doubt that they intend to make an even greater impact in 2025.

• The team behind the team

It would be remiss of me not to mention the incredible staff at the club who fans don’t see – the ones based at the stadium and at our training ground who are so dedicated to QPR and work tirelessly. I fully understand results on the pitch dictate their working week and despite the challenging period of the season we experienced, their enthusiasm and professionalism has never waned, and is a real strength of the club’s.

• Your support

Finally, I would like to thank you all for your fantastic backing of all of our teams so far this season. On the men’s first team side, Martí and I were both publicly clear at the start of this season that we felt this was going to be another challenging campaign – this may have surprised fans because of our second half of the 2023/24 campaign form, but change, for the long-term betterment of the club, takes time. Don’t be mistaken, there will be further challenging periods ahead, and as players and staff we head into the Christmas period aware that we need to get better at what we do everyday and learn from any missteps that we’ve made so far this campaign. But make no mistake – win, lose or draw, everyone at your club is working tirelessly to make us as competitive as we can possibly be. Once again, on behalf of everyone at the club, I would like to wish all QPR supporters a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.