Keiran runs through the figures on this thread, as you say, very grim and explains the 'lack of ambition'...
As I ended it mate, 'we can always hope'. I agree with you, I don't see the point unless you strive to be in the top division at the top of your game.
The club does have an ambition and that's to be sustainable. Through piss poor business sense, the Tony era has put us where we are now. Any dickhead knows with a capacity of 17,000 and a small fanbase that you can't pay the wages of Robert Green and Julio Cesar !!
I don't think anyone here disagrees with that ultimate aim and ambition. Everyone who is mad enough to post on this message board wants to see us win every game we play and win every competition we enter. I confess my enjoyment of football isn't dependent on us being in the PL and I had as much (or more) fun supporting us in L1 than I did in our recent PL stint, but that doesn't stop us agreeing we want to win and be promoted. The question is how we go about achieving that ambition. Do we carry on paying £27m a year in wages to the current crop of players, which is eventually, without any change and especially if we invest more, going to lead to us breaching FFP. That could very feasibly lead to a points deduction & transfer embargo, and likely relegation. In that scenario it would be very hard to rebuild in L1 and could even lead to a further downward spiral. Or do we try and do something different? Sell Dykes, Willock, Chair & Dickie for whatever we can get for them, release StefJo and the others on big contracts, and try and bring that wage bill down from £27m to something closer to £15m or under? Reducing the wage bill doesn't have to signal a lack of ambition. Luton's wage bill is £14.1m. Coventry at £13.2m. (Rotherham's is £8.2m and they're not far behind us in the table. Millwall are on £20m.) We need to look at Luton and Coventry as examples - clubs that are well run and are delivering better results than ours for half our wage bill. Ideally, we can get to what Luton and Coventry have without going through the pain of L1 like they had to!
Who the owners are and how they behave is relevant to me, maybe not others. To be fair to him Rick Parry has been working for years to get rid of parachute payments and have a much bigger and more equitably distributed ‘solidarity’ payment from the PL to the EFL, which seems to be agreed in principle but they will never get enough PL clubs to vote for it as too many fear they will need parachute payments at some stage….
The problem is that doing what you suggest would very likely result in league one obscurity as well. Unfortunately, the way things are, there's no solution on the horizon.
Agree it's a bit damned if you do, damned if you don't. I suppose I prefer the idea of doing it on our terms than it being forced on us by the authorities.
Think we have done this, the ambition is to sell our best players every season for profit to help us closer to sustainability. Unfortunately our whole squad isn't even worth that put together so it ain't going to happen any time soon.
£25m really isn’t much for these billionaires - a bit of fun and small change. We need to look at the positives, QPR is a great London club with good history. Maybe we need to be smarter. Grow our international fan base - sign a Korean or do a Wrexham.
I agree Raving (about damned if you do, damned if you don’t). But the EFL need to create leagues that do allow clubs to be ambitious - that is negated by always looking over your shoulder at FFP rules. Sustainable clubs = great principle. But the other side of the coin is for the EFL to build more income for clubs to be ambitious, create competitiveness and get more fans in. Yo-yo clubs, with their parachute payments, are mostly like the top six of the EPL a distance apart from the rest of the league. The quicker salary caps are brought in the better. It might give players a kick up the ar$e and a bit of fight as they get close to relegation and a wage cut (they will still be earning much more than the average man in industry). With a period of adjustment required to implement, someone needs to get clubs on board and bite the bullet and be creative and ambitious for the future of non-EPL football.
What is it about Mittal that makes you think he is “odious”? Stinking rich from being a ruthless businessman?
It’s all relative I suppose, but google Mittal Co Cork/Irish Steel or Mittal cash for questions or Mittal Kazakhstan if you are interested. Plenty of others just as bad but he seems to have a particular disregard for his own workers. Fines galore around the world for poor health and safety standards, an impressive death toll in Kazakhstan and Liberia etc etc. Probably lots of things he could have fixed relatively cheaply, but when you spend $60m on your daughters wedding (to Amit) perhaps spare change is short. That’s why I find him odious. It’s just a personal opinion.
FFP has totally f*cked this club, added to incompetence of naive owners. Any worth our best players had has dissolved as we have slid down the table. I think whatever happens this season we need a complete clear out of the underperformers and sicknotes. I'm even beginning to think relegation might be in the best interests of the club for a complete reset, Gazza knows League One so I'm sure he'd know which players would give value. Much as I'd hate it we are in a financial nightmare that is deemed 'fair'...
please log in to view this image Ryan Bourne @MrRBourne NEW COLUMN: Tomorrow the UK govt will outline plans for a new regulator to make football as popular with its customers as the financial services, energy and water sectors. Gambling with an innovative crown jewel in the name of preservation. Backwards. please log in to view this image thetimes.co.uk Ryan Bourne: It’s time to cry ‘foul’ over plans for new regulator that oversees football Today the government will publish plans for a new football regulator, based on Tracey Crouch’s “fan-led review”. The MP’s report in 2021 recommended giving “f 1
Can we ask Roller to do an update on this (relatively) rosy summary of a few years ago, once he has done his podcast with Clive of course. Seems to me out attempt to support Warburton’s promotion push has really done us no favours at all going forward. Not that it was the wrong thing to do, but seems like a one off attempt which can’t be repeated for some time.
QPR have reported an annual loss of almost £25m – largely the result of gambling in vain on promotion last season. The club’s holding company’s audited accounts for the year ended 31 May 2022 show a loss of approximately £24.7m for the 2021-22 season. That is a loss of around £474,000 per week. The alarming figure represents It appears to image mage Rangers has sought to portray; one of a club that has learned from past financial mistakes and been focused on steady progress and reducing losses. The smaller loss for the year ended 2021 is largely because of the sale of Ebere Eze to Crystal Palace It was initially hoped that sale would herald an era of sustainability, achieved through developing and ultimately selling players for a profit. However, an excellent run during the second half of the 2020-21 campaign, when QPR, then managed by Mark Warburton, struggled badly before a major upturn, led to a belief that promotion the following year was achievable. That upturn was largely inspired by the loan signings of Stefan Johansen, Charlie Austin, Sam Field and Jordy de Wijs, who were all signed on permanent deals in the summer of 2021. Over the course of the year, QPR bought players for £2.8m and sold for just £250,000 during the same period, while wages rose by around 10%. The club also dismissed enquires about the likes of Ilias Chair in the belief that reaching the Premier League was a realistic ambition. That approach initially seemed to be vindicated and Rangers were in the thick of the promotion race. However, a spectacular decline in results led to them sliding down the table and Warburton losing his job. In short, the gamble did not pay off. “The increase in losses is mainly due to the decision to retain players and not to be active in player sales in the 21/22 season as the club focused on challenging for a play-off position,” admitted QPR chief executive Lee Hoos.
So people asking on here for us to gamble and go for it. We did. We lost We are now ******* for another 3 years. No idea where we are going to go from here
