Singing from the same hymn sheet – Fans Forum Wednesday, 30th Jul 2025 16:07 by Clive Whittingham An earlier than usual fan forum was held at Loftus Road on Tuesday night, with CEO/DOF Christian Nourry, head coach Julien Stéphan, director of sporting operations Ben Williams and head of methodology Jon De Souza on the panel. It’s been another summer of upheaval and change at Loftus Road – would we have it any other way? – and you sense there’s much still to come and to do between now and the end of the transfer window, even though the opening game is now little more than a week away. One of the positives of this season over last, one would hope, is a more harmonious relationship between the head coach and the people running the club. Particularly with Christian Nourry who, in case you were in any doubt prior to this week, couldn’t have made it more clear on Tuesday night that this is his ship and he’s in charge. That relationship with Marti Cifuentes had become fractured going way back to last summer and culminated in the messy garden leave situation in April. Julien Stéphan, presumably, is coming into this eyes wide open and accepting of his role as a cog in a machine, rather than traditional manager. He certainly appeared very at ease on Tuesday night – his English was good and his rapport with the audience was there straight away. I’m always admiring of people who can not only speak a foreign language well, but also be funny in that language and Julien certainly got a few laughs from the crowd here with his riffs on English food and such like. While you could be cynical about the oddly early timing of this fan forum – get it out the way before the team starts losing – it could also be seen as a conscious effort to draw a line under that acrimonious 24/25, move on and show everybody how different it’s going to be this time. Cifuentes didn’t appear at this event last year, the first manager not to do so, and a later online forum to focus on the football side of the business that was promised multiple times, and even took online questions from supporters, never materialised. Here Stéphan (JS from this point on) did appear, along with Jon De Souza (JDS) and Ben Williams (BW) about whose remote working role there has been so much conjecture. That, immediately, signifies a change and a more harmonious working relationship which can only be a good thing – as long as it lasts. Nourry (CN) started off with an opening monologue explaining: “The last 18 months have been about taking a football club that was in a really challenging moment in the middle of that 23/24 season, ultimately fighting for our lives in the context of the first team, and also had a significant amount of change happening to the senior management team. Six months of trying to remain in the division and then assess everything we could look at and spend time on to see how can we, based on the ownership group’s re-factored vision, create a situation where we can start making steady steps to not being a football club that’s losing £25m a year, and incrementally get to a place where we give ourselves the best possible chance on the pitch. We want to ensure that is joined up from first team level all the way down to academy and the women’s team. It’s been a lot of analysing in the first six months and then the last 12 months bringing in processes and appointing the right people to help us on this journey then start to execute on what we think will be important on the football side.” We then delved into off field “issues”, often derided as the bit of the forum where we talk about the water pressure in the ladies’ toilets. Now, I’m not saying these issues aren’t important (they are), that it’s not something bordering a bit of a disgrace that so many of them have been allowed to persist for so long, or that people aren’t entitled to their complaints – everybody you speak to has their own Loftus Road bugbear, whether it’s leg room, painting the stands, away coach provision – but it did feel a bit weird that you’ve got a former Champions League and French cup winning manager making his first public appearance as our head coach and for the first half an hour he sat there silently while we talked about the PA system. I mean, I do kind of love it about QPR in that “smallest big club biggest small club” way – heard about your Arsenal victory Julien, but we’ve got hot dogs to discuss mate – but also… Lee Hoos used to do semi-regular updates on the club’s YouTube channel where he’d talk about operational matters submitted by fans and I wonder whether that would be a better forum for this stuff rather than sitting the manager and his coaching staff there and talking about beer pricing. Credit, while we're here, to Andy Sinton for leading a wonderful tribute to Mark Lazarus who we lost yesterday. You can look back on our 2017 interview with the great man here. Off fieldLet’s rattle through these… - CN said he was a huge fan of the safe standing areas that have been introduced to the stadium. The club is actively looking at how it can be expanded into other parts of the ground and will be consulting with supporters through this season with a desire to implement that for the start of 2026/27. “It’s been a great addition to Loftus Road and it’s allowed us to accentuate what is so special about this ground which is in an increasing environment of new stadiums that feel like soulless bowls we have an old-school English football stadium that when it’s full and you’re under the lights it feels quite magical. The safe standing has really added to that.” Personally, I think that’s great news. I’d put it through the vast majority of the stadium if we could. - CN apologised for the “non-existent” state of the PA system but don’t expect it to be fixed soon. “There are mechanics of this stadium which are just 50, 60, 70 years old. We have done a sonic audit of the stadium away from a matchday to find out what an overhaul of that sound system looks like. Unfortunately, the minimum cost for this is going to be £1m to do it properly. This season we have not made significant investments into items of capital expenditure because the running costs of this business this season compared to last, depending on which category you look at, between 3.5 and 4% up following the most recent government budget and the implications of that. We are looking at what a phased plan of improvement looks like with the aim of making the first capital investment into that project next summer.” - Improvements and better features for the QPR+ platform, to go along with its increased cost, such as full replays of games immediately after full time, are at the behest of the EFL. CN says the league “mandate how the streaming platforms from club to club will work. The price is the minimum we are allowed by the EFL and is out of our hands. We don’t have control over when the full 90 minutes becomes available. If clubs were given more control there would be a lot of really interesting things each club would look to do - there’s certainly not going to be less pressure to do that this year than last because I’m sure both Wrexham and Birmingham would love to control their streaming rights.” - Really good question asking how the club balances short term competitiveness versus long term financial stability in a league where you’ve now not only got Ipswich, Southampton and Leicester arriving with parachute payments but also Birmingham and Wrexham coming up from the division below chucking big money at their squads. CN: “Short term competitiveness versus long term sustainability is literally the most difficult thing about this job. The reality is this division continues to go nuts. The average player wage in this league will be at its highest ever, certainly for the last ten years, based on everything we’re seeing in the market this season. You have two teams that have come up willing to spend Premier League wages in the Championship to attract talent, and you have the bottom half of the league freaking out about it and responding by breaking transfer records left right and centre. Wrexham have built an entertainment product through a football club and are achieving sponsorship revenue that is potentially seven/eight/nine times the average Championship team’s sponsorship revenue when they were in League One – that was last season, they were clearing close to $30m in sponsorship. Through the current P/S FFP rules they can spend whatever they want. They’re not going to infringe on that. Whether we like it or not it’s a successful model and it's put them in the place they’re in now. There are other teams looking to gamble – if we have one season where we spend loads of money and jump into the Premier League we can face those rules. That’s why the ongoing Leicester PSR case is really interesting and we hope the EFL treats that with the level of severity we think it should be treated with. “In response we have to try and maximise our revenue and reduce our costs wherever possible. The cost base of running a business in London, not just a football club, is at a really difficult level right now because of macro-economic conditions. That puts more pressure on how we generate revenue. Across standard commercial channels we have tried to maximise what we can do – attendances are up 8% over the last 24 months versus the 24 months before Covid, revenue from tickets is 6% up, retail is up 10% particularly in things like retro-wear. We’re also looking to maximise the wonderful facility we have at Heston which in the last 12 months has become something really interesting for a number of national teams during the international break, other EFL teams looking to train close to Wembley around the play-offs, we’ve had some really exciting teams spend time with us like the German and England women’s teams. We’re working closely with the Premier League and other entities around things like international youth tournaments to be a host for those teams. On the player side the only way we’re going to increase our budget is buying players at x price and selling them at y price. That’s the only way you increase headroom in a significant way. We’ve made great headway but we’ve some way to go to catch up with other clubs at this level who have had a successful player trading model for three or four years and now have that budget.” - Catering. CN: “After the last fan forum somebody showed me a picture of their hot dog, which is not some sort of euphemism, and it did not look like something people should be eating. Our catering contract came to an end in the summer, we spent four or five months looking at multiple potential partners to work with, to try and encourage people to spend more time in the ground before kick off which helps us generate more revenue. After a very competitive process we have remained with the previous catering company but with a number of provisions that require improvements. There will be better food options, a wider range of options, a more street-style food rather than the classic four or five options we had. We will be seeing a decrease in beer prices this year and draught available more readily across the stadium. We’re in a position contractually now to work more collaboratively with the caterers to deal with the concerns you have.”
- New stadium, or improvements to the current one. CN “I've said clearly the only way to transform revenue for a football club is to build new infrastructure or improve on existing infrastructure that allows you to achieve more revenue through non match day situations and then have a situation where you play good football which means that teams want your players. Those are the two ways to try to increase revenue for this football club. We’re constantly looking all the time at how we can improve non match day revenue here, which is why you saw last year the launch of Pitchside, this remote working venture where the hospitality boxes in the week are used now by companies and freelancers who need office space. We had close to a record year for off season events around Loftus Rd when the season ended. So, we're trying to maximise as much as we can with the existing site, but obviously we want to have meaningful conversations with local government and also stakeholders about what we might be able to do, whether it's in relation to this site or an additional site. Ideally we would like to do more work at Heston and complete a second phase of development of the training ground. It's certainly something that would probably further allow us to bring in additional revenue.” - The recent news that CN has joined an advisory board at Hammersmith and Fulham council, and hopes that might lead to a new stadium. CN: “It was a humbling invitation I received a few months ago from the council to join their economic advisory board. We’d spent time with them in my first few months and they felt we had some good ideas, but second of all it was a hand reached out to us because in the context of their ambition to make White City an innovation and tech hub that QPR can be a major partner in that. The objective is how can businesses like Imperial College, L’Oreal just down the road and QPR work together to help the council achieve its ambition of being an innovation and tech hub for London, and second of all how can we work together on infrastructure projects to ensure the growth and money spent in this area continues to increase.” - In all 20 minutes of the two hours were reserved for unvetted questions from the audience, the first of which came from Steve Sayce on the club’s “tokenisation partnership” announced yesterday with TokenFi about whose parent company there have been concerning coverage in the Italian press.CN: “TokenFi is a platform which provides the infrastructure via blockchain for people to create coins. It is not a coin, and nobody in this deal is going to be recommending or asking fans to spend money to buy coins or invest in different bits and pieces. That’s not the reality of the deal or the business itself. There has been press reporting around Floki three years ago, a preliminary inquiry was done into Floki and the reality is if a club is going to have a crypto coin as a sponsor then the reality of how the blockchain works and the anonymity around it then the true ownership and individuals around that coin will be less transparent than if it was a different type of sponsor. Nothing implicated Floki specifically, our deal is not with Floki but with a platform that is essentially giving individuals who want to create a coin the platform to do so on the blockchain. We have done our due diligence as we have on a number of crypto opportunities in the last 18 months and passed on several of them because we were concerned with partnering directly with coins and whether that would encourage fans to buy them. This is analogous within the crypto industry itself and nowhere in the deal do TokenFi have the right to look to sell coins to our fans, nor will that be pushed.” Hmmm. On the pitch- The total radio silence from the club from the moment Marti Cifuentes was removed from his position, really up to the point JS was appointed was the first football question raised. Asked for an explanation on what actually happened CN straight batted: “Look, unfortunately we’ve concluded proceedings legally with Marti and we wish him all the best but as part of that it’s not something we can comment on apart from being very grateful for all the work he did. What he achieved in 23/24 season was genuinely phenomenal, he created some amazing memories and moments for the players and fans and it’ll be remembered as a really bright period at QPR. It’s a situation that’s been concluded, we wish him well, and we look forward to the future.” - 31 minutes in it was time to finally hear from JS, although hearing from him initially was quite a challenge as he had a dodgy microphone. CN passed his along the line. JS: “This is the boss.”
- Positions we still need to strengthen.CN: “We’re talking all the time, every day, about how we can strengthen the squad bearing in mind our budget and where the squad is now. It’s important JS and the guys who’ve come in had a good period of time to assess the squad. Our transfer window is not over. We’re looking to strengthen wherever we can under the budget constraints we’re in.” - Plans for the women’s team. CN: “We’re at the beginning of a four-year cycle at the end of which we want to be in the second tier of women’s football. Last season was the first where the women’s team was under the banner of the parent club. The Trust did an amazing job supporting the team in the fourth tier. Women’s football is growing massively, events like The Euros will only accelerate that further. Last season we learned a lot and off the back of understanding how the fourth tier works and what works and doesn’t work we’ve put together a plan this season which has seen us hire our first full time women’s head coach, Danny Harrigan. We’ve been very ambitious in the women’s market so far and attracted tier two and three players to join us this season. They’re coming here to try and achieve promotion and we’d like to do that as quickly as possible. It’s tough with Luton, Fulham and Norwich in there with similar ambitions but I’m excited about the journey the women’s team are on. We’ll have at least three games at Loftus Road this year and we want to break the attendance record.” JDS: “What we’re trying to do with all the teams including the women’s is put the players and staff in the best possible conditions to succeed. To do that we’re giving them support from methodology. The team gets similar support to what Julien gets and all our teams get. Andy Belk’s recruitment department cover the women’s as well, as does Ben. So essentially for the women to succeed we’ve recognised they need support in the same way all our teams do. They train at our training ground and the idea is to give them all the conditions they need to succeed this season and build a platform to succeed in future seasons.” - CN says the club is focused on “incremental improvement, which as a fan can be frustrating to hear because you want to win as much as possible as quickly as possible” but on what he would count as success for QPR he said: “I've been pretty public about the fact that I wanted to see us have a younger squad. When I arrived I think we were the second oldest starting 11 in the division – only Rotherham had an older team. Now it's not youth for the sake of youth, but this league is becoming more and more energy sapping, more and more intense, and if other teams average ages are going down and they're having success there's a reason for that. So, we're now in a place where the average age of the squad is about 24.5. We'll see where we end up at the end of the window, but that's three or four years younger than 18/19/20 months ago. So that's an important measure. Across the club now we've implemented a much more robust 360 appraisal process. So, is the feedback that we're getting from every member of staff inside the club - whether they're on the pitch or really far away from it - is it a place of these are the things that are really working for me and I feel like I'm in as close to the best possible conditions to succeed I could be in? And is that trending in the right direction every time that we do that process internally? People who feel like they're empowered and people who enjoy coming to work every day, I know it's a bit of an age-old adage, but that's the sort of magic around the football club that can allow us to outperform expectations from time to time. So those two really, really important bits and pieces and then I think the most important thing in terms of the quality of the human being in this building, but especially in the playing stuff, is having a group of players that want to give literally absolutely everything in the tank for you as fans at Loftus and away from home. Who love each other and love fighting for this football club, but also really are passionate about working in the community and supporting all the amazing work that the Community Trust is doing. So hopefully beating last year’s record number of appearances that players made in the community, but also players that care enough about the club where they try to understand the club and therefore able to connect with you as fans because it's genuine and authentic and then ultimately they become people that you want to support as well.” - Asked to explain the role of head of methodology JDS says that both Birmingham and Spurs have recently recruited people to a similar role so he’s no longer one of a kind. JDS: “We have 13 teams, from our U8s through to our first team and women’s team. It’s trying to put the players and coaches in the best possible condition to succeed. It’s about having a clear way of training and playing that allows players and coaches to progress through the age groups with as minimal disruption as possible. You move up from the U8s to U9s and U10s and the only thing that changes is the size of the shirt. The style of play should be consistent. It’s very much principle based. We want the first team to win games and sell players. What have successful teams in the Championship done over the last ten years and can we build principles that follow that? And what are top five league teams around Europe looking for in players? The way we play and train is about developing a style of play and game model that allows us to win and develop individuals within that to sell for significant fees that we can re-distribute. My role is medium to long term, I support Julien now but I want the club to be winning in five or ten years’ time. The day-to-day tactics are very much down to Julien and the first team staff. It’s not my role to talk to him day to day about the individual positions of players. It’s my job to make sure everybody is working within the principles of the club. It’s important that if any one member of staff leaves the club the club is still in a position to succeed in the future.” - Where does Steve Bould fit into this, and will he be in the dugout on matchdays? JDS: “Steve’s role is very unique. It’s a club-wide role. We’ve looked at where the game is going physically, technically, tactically and we feel the art of defending is going out of the game. In Steve we’ve attracted a top level player and coach who can develop our players to an elite level in defensive principles. He’ll work with all coaches throughout the club on what elite defending looks like, and work with our senior first team players to develop them. Monday to Friday his main role is to support Julien and the first team staff, and work with the other teams as well. At the weekend he will be there to support the first team, U21 and U18s. He won’t be on the bench on matchdays but he’s very much involved with first team preparation, delivery, strategy.” JS: “For me Steve is more than a defensive coach. He has a lot of experience that I intend to rely on every day. With the defenders he has to focus on the technique and the organisation. It’s a new situation for me, I’ve never had this kind of support in my staff before so I feel lucky to speak with him every day because his experience is amazing. It’s good news for QPR and the defenders are lucky to have a legend like this on staff. - JS obviously arrives with quite the reputation for developing young players having worked with Dembele, Doku and others at Rennes and this something the club have understandably been keen to big up since appointing him. On the current young prospects at the club he said: “We have two questions for young players, the first is do they have the quality to play I the first team? After five weeks I can answer, yes. The second is what is the best moment to put them in? It’s collective responsibility, not only mine but all the club. When you put a young player on the pitch you need to be sure it’s the right moment. Confidence can be very fragile with young players and he may struggle in the next week or the next game. So, what is the right moment? - The long talked about Ebere Eze sell on clause should he move to Arsenal or Bayern Munich this summer as rumoured has been reported this week in Palace circles as 15% of any profit they make. CN: “I did start tonight by talking about how much we’re losing as a business every year. Look, our hope is with the approach we’re taking to signing players who may or may not know the league but we believe in their potential… that our focus is about fine tuning that process, finding the best talent we can attract and having the best coaching staff in the building to help maximise their potential. We don’t sit in the office thinking what we’ll do if Eze gets sold. It’s not in our control. If he does depart it’s a massive success for people who were in these chairs in the past, because the club achieved a significant transfer fee and a sell on. If that happens we’ll have that conversation, but if we’re serious about being a sustainable football club then our response to money coming in cannot be how do we send it immediately back out of the door?”
- Morgan Fox and Jack Colback, as reported this summer by LFW, have offers on the table from the club but are exploring other options, hence no announcements yet on whether they’re staying or going at the end of their contracts. CN: “We said in June we have ongoing conversations and neither of those two situations are definitively sorted in on direction or another hence no formal announcement.” - Asked for some concrete specifics on what exactly BW’s new role at the club is he said: “It’s about putting our players and coaching staff in the best possible condition to succeed. Every time a person in blue and white hoops crosses the white line to play a game of football – men’s, women’s, academy – it’s not easy to win, it’s not given, it’s earned. It goes a lot deeper than people think. Everything is connected. My new role is to make sure that not only from a football perspective but from an operational perspective – performance, the way we travel, the environment the players and staff are in - systems and the people who underpin the way we deliver that Saturday to Saturday or year to year, people are working synergistically together to create a high performance environment. We know it’s hard, the Championship, the dev squad, it’s hard, and unless it’s all working together synergistically gaps will open. My new role is to ensure we are buttoned up and all those details are taken care of. It’s making sure Jon, Julien, all our coaching staff are in the best possible position to succeed, because all the details are thought about and in place, and structures are in place to make sure we deliver on a Saturday.” So, there you go. - On the contrast between English and French football JS said: “It’s different. More rhythm, more tempo, more intensity, less control, more transitions. But at the end it’s 11 v 11. When you play football you want to score one more goal than the opponent, it’s easy. We watched a lot of games before we arrived in England, a lot of Championship games, but the most important thing is to put the player in the best condition. They have talents, they just need to give everything and show that talent. To do that we have to put them in the best condition. 11 v 11, one ball, and the spirit to win every game. Away, home, the same. Every time, every game, every minute, home and away.” - CN denied that JS’ arrival coupled with his own background means we’ll be seeing an influx from the French market. CN: “It’s more a question of talent versus how much they cost. There is a lot of work that goes into signing a player and one of those pieces of work is understanding as much as possible about their background, history, injury perspective, personality perspective and certainly there are markets where different members of staff have more relationships that allow us to answer those questions in stronger ways. Some of our scouts have better contacts in other countries. So, not especially but obviously it helps when we’re looking at the French market to have three guys who know it incredibly well.” JS: “The most important thing is not the nationality of the players. It’s the mindset, the talent, and they understand when they arrive at QPR it’s a club with a big history and a culture. We have players from Australia, Scotland, Ireland, France, Brazil. For me they need to understand what is QPR and what QPR represents. Talent and represent the values of the club, that’s the main thing for me.” - We then got into the nitty gritty of formations and tactics and exactly how much control the head coach has over that with all this talk of game models and all the teams throughout the club working “synergistically”. It was asserted by the questioner that JS has often preferred a 4-3-3 in his past jobs, where as CN has been preaching 4-2-3-1 since he arrived here. CN: “It’s just not true. I said in my first interview here that when we looked at introducing a game model concept to the club we looked at the last ten years of the Championship and what shape teams had most success in, winning games and developing players. I’m 98% confident I’ve always said 4-3-3, if I’ve talked about 4-2-3-1 it’s in the context of different phases of play. Shapes in football in 2025 are incredibly fluid. What’s most important in the game model is the principles of play align up and down the structure. In the context of the Championship you’re going to have to be flexible to maximise your chance of winning against an opponent who sets themselves up in a certain way. The priority is, are the principles of play aligned from U18s, U21s and the first team so that kid at 16 has one less thing they have to worry about in terms of understanding stylistically what we’re looking for at first team. Of course, we have a shape we identify and prefer because we think it’s the most efficient way to recruit players. We have 15 positional profiles we think exist within a 25-man Championship squad. Under each positional profile you have checklists – 15/20 characteristics a scout is looking for in a ‘six’, five or ten psychological ones, another five or ten physical and athletic. It’s allowed us to structure our operation to scout by position. Rather than having a scout for Ireland or the Netherlands we have a scout for a position and when they get to a place where they’ve got a certain number of players they really like that’s where the groupthink piece from the recruitment department comes in. If you’re going to games and focusing only on left backs for ten weeks then you’ll start to notice things about left backs that you wouldn’t recognise if you watched the game in its totality.” JS: “You said everything. This is the manager. … For me it’s not a question of 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1 in the model approach, it’s a question of flexibility on the pitch. The most important is knowing how you want to build, attack and defend. It’s not a question of formations. The players need to understand which triggers, and how you adapt when you want to create danger, optimise the strength of the players, and deal with the strength of the opponent. We have principles of play that need to be understood well by the players, but it’s adaptation and flexibility. Sometimes we will have three players to build, sometimes four, sometimes we will defend as a 4-2-3-1 sometimes 4-4-2. If you can’t read how we play then it’s a good sign because it will be difficult for the opponent to see how we want to play.” JDS: “The game model is the club’s game model, it’s not mine or Julien’s. We want to set it up in a way that it outlasts all of us. Formations, shapes, are all frameworks that depend on the current group and individuals within that. It’s about principles so if a member of staff leaves the whole system isn’t changed. If we focus on the real, real details we’re never going to get success, we want to give the coaches the freedom and autonomy to deliver what’s right for the players they have in front of them. But the principles underpin everything we do. We would hope if you came to watch any QPR team the shape and the framework might look slightly different but thew way they play and the principles are similar.”
- The club has obviously got itself into some awkward contract situations over the last ten years where players like Osayi-Samuel, Manning, Dickie, Kelman and others have had to be sold when we perhaps wouldn’t have wanted to, and for less money. Under CN they have been aggressive at tying players down – JCS got a nice contract extension despite his horrendous fitness record, Sam Field has had two new deals in 18 months. CN: “The absolute ideal is when there is a couple of years left on a contract there is a decision made either way. Either commit to a new deal or move on, because we’re trying to protect asset value and keep our best players. It’s not always possible but we fight as much as possible when we’re in those difficult situations to maximise the money we can get or convince somebody to stay.” - The ongoing issue of the club refusing to disclose those contract lengths to supporters was then raised and CN was again pressed to end an unpopular policy which in our opinion does little to help the club in the gossipy world of football and mainly acts to piss off supporters who’ve seen the club suffer largely through recruitment and retention decisions over the last decade which the club is actively now trying to hide information about from us. CN started his answer by saying “it’s interesting that in the interactions I have with fans on a day-to-day basis in the local area or on the tube or on matchdays this is not something that anyone has asked about but in these forums it’s something people want to talk about”. I’m sorry, I know this issue is a hobby horse of mine, but that is disingenuous because this issue has been raised in every discussion I’ve ever been party to involving CN, and not just by me but by reps from AKUTRs and WATRBs too, it’s come up at every fan forum, it’s mentioned on our message board weekly and it was a large part of Dave Mc’s interview last week where he very successfully and skilfully highlighted how ludicrous the notion that clubs get information on release clauses and contract lengths from press releases on official websites really is. People do care about it, it is important and to just try and dismiss it as something a small group of weirdoes at the fan forum care about while the real, proper QPR fans on the tube don’t give a toss was not fair or correct. If we’re preaching unity and support and get behind the club and the players, it’s not helpful to try and divide supporters up like that. It was followed by a question asking JS for some advice for somebody’s 15-year-old son – is that more or less important? CN: “Ultimately everything we do and every decision we make we think is going to help us make as much money as possible and lose as little money as possible. It’s never from a place of looking to withhold information or keep things from fans for the sake of it. Every year more teams in this league are adopting this policy. We believe it maximises our ability to get the best possible price for a player when we sell them. We will continue the policy because in the 20 months I’ve been here this policy has helped us maximise revenues from player sales.” - Leadership structure. CN: “Obviously the club previously operated with a CEO and DOF. We don’t have a DOF but we do have a more empowered head of recruitment. Then we have a structure with much more responsibility for department heads to run their side of the business. Euan and Ruban know the club inside out on the commercial and finance side.” - The long-mooted pursuit of category one status for the academy. CN: “Having category one status is like having a badge or a medal from a governing body that says you do this number of things and you have these facilities, if you have slightly less facilities then you’re this category. Whether we’re one or two doesn’t make any material difference to whether we can keep our best academy players, nor does it impact on how much money we get for them if they move to another club. The biggest thing it does is marketing. If I’m a parent whose kid has three opportunities, which one am I going to? Kids also like the idea Cat One is shiny. Reputationally there are benefits. Day to day what we’re missing structurally is we don’t have an indoor facility at TSG, we use one across the road at Cranford School. That’s the only piece we’re missing for Cat One. The cost of running a football club in London versus elsewhere is much more, in terms of our annual financial commitment to the academy we don’t quite meet the level required for Cat One but we’re pretty damn close. If ultimately the board and Alex Carroll think moving to Cat One will help achieve our goals to a greater extent then it’s something we will do. If we don’t we’ll continue to exist as Cat Two. In the last 20 months we have transformed our youth recruitment in terms of how aggressive we are, and we are attracting players from Cat One academies to come to this club – Kieran Morgan the most high-profile example but all the way down through the U14s we have boys coming here from Arsenal, Brighton, Fulham etc. That comes with demonstrating we give young players a chance, that’s by far the biggest thing we can do. That’s got to be the focus.” - The club’s appalling injury record last season was raised, specifically with regard the number of muscle injuries picked up by the likes of Ilias Chair, Rayan Kolli, Alfie Lloyd, Michi Frey etc which cost the team dearly on the pitch through 24/25 and was a regular bone of contention for the previous head coach. BW: “I understand you all want to see your favourite players play on a Saturday, I get that. In the last 15 years you’ve seen injuries increase across all the leagues because the distance the players run, sprinting, has increased by 50%. What people were used to is not the game we see any more. The fallout is more muscle injuries because muscles are trying to do 50% more work in the same amount of time on the same sized pitch. In the context of QPR when I first came here a couple of seasons ago the average for the previous three or four seasons was around 80% availability. In the last two seasons we’ve had 91% and 85% respectively. An average 88% availability – across two seasons it would be unfair to cast doubt or shadow over the incredibly hard work the performance and medical team have done across three different head coaches. That said, two seasons ago 91% was a nice number, all your favourite players walking across that white line every week, last year there were more difficulties. However, last season was also an unusual season. Injuries are multifaceted. A muscle is something that contracts which means we can train it to be stronger and more robust in the gym, running more, coaching drills. Some injuries are non-contractile tissues. You can’t train that – bone, ligament, cartilage. Last season 45% of the injuries were non-contractile tissues. It was just an unlucky year. Last year you had one less total injury than the season before when you had 91% availability, it’s just the injuries we did sustain including a couple of quite significant surgeries were non-contractile and we couldn’t prevent them. All performance teams have the same issues – the sprint distances and intensity of the game has increased and we’re all trying to do the best job we can with the information we have. I don’t think there is something fundamentally wrong with our player health model, it’s improved over the last two seasons has improved on what it was before. We’re looking club wide because our availability has not just been good with the first team, it’s been good across the academy and the women’s. Club wide the job is good and continues to evolve, but I do understand the frustration when the player you want to see isn’t out there. Let’s see how we do this season – hopefully we make good decisions and have a bit of good luck as well.” I think the vast majority of this is fair enough. What I’m not totally on board with is this suggestion we’re just upset because our favourite player wasn’t there when we went to the game, like we’re all 11-years-old with Jake Clarke-Salter posters on our wall, that there weren’t a significant amount of muscle injuries in our players last year, or that the first team issues are somehow offset because the injury record in the academy and the women’s was okay. Whichever way you spin it, injuries were a huge problem for us last year - at one point all our centre halves were missing at once, at another all our centre forwards. To pretend otherwise is just daft. The club is repeatedly pushing the narrative that last season the injuries weren’t that bad, that we were midtable in the Championship for injuries, that they were caused in part by the previous head coach not rotating enough in three-game weeks (rotating with what, exactly?), and now that we actually had one fewer injury in 24/25 than we did in 23/24. That’s not only a contradiction of what CN said at the fan site meeting in January, where he said the addition of injury updates to the official website from October last year wasn’t a new policy it’s just that “honestly, we just didn’t have any injuries to report” but it also completely fails the eye and smell test for anybody who stood behind the goal at West Brom and watched Paul Smyth play up front by himself, or down the side at Stoke watching Karamoko Dembele centre forward supreme, or remembers six months ago when we had to beg a loan from Southampton because Clarke-Salter, Cook and Morrison were all crocked at the same time. Often, it’s better to just hold hands up to mistakes like BW’s remote working arrangement, apologise and say you’ve learned from it. It buys you so much more time and support from this fanbase if you do. Telling people we actually had a good injury record last year does the opposite, because they know it’s untrue.
- The Brentford and Brighton stick was wielded once again. CN, quite rightly, points out “Brighton and Brentford’s success in recruitment was 95% because of multi-billion pound betting companies that Matthew Benham and Tony Bloom put together that hired and continue to hire 500+ data scientists building models and algorithms that far outweigh the sophistication of any football club at the time. We just don’t have that level of resource. What we are trying to do is the most difficult thing in football and is a lesson you can take from those two clubs which is having a plan and having the courage to stick to it. Our edge is going to be consistency. Continuing to follow the processes in recruitment that uses a far higher level of data than the club has used in the past and higher than the average Championship club. Having a big focus on player personality checks in terms of referencing and high-performance player interviews we have as part of the medicals. Continuing to bring average age of U21 setup down as young as possible to give young players as much exposure to as high a level of football as early as possible, even if they struggle. The best way of accelerating development and seeing if a player can tolerate that development is by setting really, really difficult challenges to solve. Continuing to back the work we’re doing on the performance and medical side because we are not Burnley last season who had 35 players at first team level to pick from, so they could have 11 injuries and not have an issue. That’s not the reality of QPR. Sometimes you will watch young players play for this football club and they will make mistakes. Our biggest request to you guys is support them, don’t get on their back. The most exciting thing about the approach we’re taking is you can play a massive role in it. We won’t get everything right, we will make mistakes, the players will make mistakes, but if we want to get to a place of having a budget that allows us to dream of bigger things this is the process we need to go through.” - The dreaded five-year plan remains Premier League, according to JS. “We have to be ambitious, in football if you’re not ambitious you stay at home. We have to be realistic but ambitious. In five years, why not in the Premier League? It’s a good ambition for everybody and a good challenge. Let’s see, I think it’s possible.” JDS: “If we’re able to be here in five years’ time still consistently delivering the same messages that means we’ve been successful.” BW: “You have to have ambition, and you have to have courage. In five years time I hope we’ve had the courage to execute everything we thought was important, we didn’t back down from it, we didn’t bow our heads to things everybody else was doing, we didn’t have thoughts turned because somebody’s got their own TV programme. Within our four walls we have to have our plan, stick to it, have courage, hold each other accountable and crack on. Nobody will do it forwards. In five years’ time I want to have executed our plan and if it worked we’ll be in the Premier League, if it was a bit bumpy then we’re nearly there. As long as we can say we did it that’s the most important thing.” CN: “None of us are seated in front of you today to make up the numbers. We believe and we spend day and night working because we really believe we can do something bigger than the individual achievements anybody could achieve here. We’re going to give it everything we’ve got all the time, stick to the courage of our convictions, and also be open because the reality is football is changing at a rate that is so aggressive and intense that having the humility to know it changes and be smart enough to spot where we can get those little edges will be important. The culture we want to create and who we want to be as people will not change, but taking advantage of things that come along the way is going to be critical.” - The mindset and mentality of a team that goes on losing streaks quite as often as QPR do was raised from the floor. QPR have won two of their first 17 matches in each of the last two seasons and over the past five seasons have had separate winless runs of 13 games twice, 12, ten, eight, seven three times and six twice. JS: “I don’t think it’s a question of mentality, it’s the ups and downs of the Championship. For me the most important thing is the belief. Away, home, you just want one thing – winning. We want to play well of course, we want to win in this competition. The message to the players from the start of pre-season has been trust yourself each game, each day. If we’re losing 2-0 with five minutes to go then you can do something, you can create danger, you can score goals. Mindset of course, but belief is the most important. Believe in your team, in your players, and they need to believe in the principle of play. We have to deal with the emotion in a season – you’re not the best team after two wins in a row and you’re not the worst one after two defeats.” BW: “Two or three seasons ago the club had a model where the manager could bring in players. You had a group of players who weren’t all aligned to the same style of play. Then it becomes hard. That’s changed and we’ve got a club model. You’ll all have seen a change in our playing squad to meet that. We have belief in the system and the methodology. Outside of that you have intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. How do we motivate players? How do we put the players in the best possible condition to succeed? All I want when they cross the white line is them thinking how they can affect the game of football. We make sure their nutrition is sorted, we have psychology buttoned up, they’re not waiting around we have slick daily routines and our travel is good… all those things mater. If you add the marginal gains up it makes a difference. Over the last two years we’ve spent an awful lot of time making sure all those processes and models are in place to remove as much off the players’ plate as possible and they can think just purely about football. We all make mistakes, it won’t always go smoothly, but the transition we’ve made over the last two seasons is getting our players and staff in a psychological and situational position to deliver to the best of their ability.”
- On Kwame Poku, CN: “What’s nice about that deal is it reinforces human connection still counts in a big industry in which social media has taken over and agents are agents. Andy Belk and his team have been keen on this player for years. We made four or five offers to Peterborough last summer. The commitment and the extent to which we knew the player made a significant impact on his decision making. It’s a big credit to the structure we’re putting in place. One thing we’re seeing among young players is they’re doing much more thoughtful career planning, they think carefully about where they want to be at this age and then work backwards to how they can achieve that. A big part of that is how am I going to get better at this club? Having Levin Betsy as an individual development coach who has coached the majority of the 18–23-year-old players currently playing for the England national team, coming into a culture where you will have individual player development sessions every week, these things count. Julien’s record with wingers speaks for itself, one of them is probably going to win the Ballon D’Or this year. So it’s always a massive team effort. We’re grateful Kwame has picked us, but not humbled. There’s a lot of exciting things going on here and we’re seeing the market respond to that with the level of player who wants to come here.” - The final question from the floor was a really good one, and credit to the guy who asked it he actually pressed it a second time and it was essentially that a plan A is all well and good and a clear identity and strategy is something the club has often lacked, but what happens in the worst case scenario? At what point do we admit we’ve got it wrong and pivot, if things do go wrong? Or do we just plough on ahead expecting it to turn for us eventually? CN: “There are some fundamentals that universally in football are correct. If you get minutes into younger players earlier they are going to develop better and be more interesting to other teams. The only way we will increase the player budget under FFP is by having more players other people want. Prioritising their development logically follows the reality of the transfer market. The reason there is an intense focus on that is five years ago the average age of somebody going from the Championship to the Premier League was about 24. In the last five years that age has come down rapidly. Premier League teams want players who are good in their squad as soon as possible, because they also want to sell them to the top 50 teams in Europe. Adam Wharton, for instance. These players have got to get to a point where they’ve got 70-80 Championship appearances by the time they’re 21/22. There are parts of the approach that if we’rgoing to have a chance of increasing the budget then it’s the only way. Then there are smaller points where we’re constantly questioning every month. For instance, the game model. What happens if the Championship reality changes in terms of style of play in the next two years and that is not suitable? Obviously we’ll have to change it. There are structural truths that are just hardcore realities. Then there are pieces around our identity which we’ll have to look at. The one thing that is clear is that any club which has gone from a place of stagnation to one of success in the modern era is that they have consistently year on year on year stuck to their fundamentals. The way we’ve structured the club is we’ve got people who may not be on the ground day to day, whistle to whistle, match to match but are here to identify the next four or five advantages that are coming down the pike. Whether that’s technology, conditioning, coaching methodology. If you think about wanting to sell players who have to develop players where there is currently or soon will be a shortage of players in the market. At the moment number sixes is a position in European football that is increasingly in demand because teams are struggling to find players who have the physicality and athleticism to be a more destroying player while also having capacity with the ball to play as many teams want to play. We feel there is a similar shortage in centre backs, which is one of the reasons we’ve hired Steve Bould.” 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 - Ian Randall Photography Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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