Queens Park Rangers Deserve To Go Down

Queens Park Rangers have made all the wrong moves this season, and the Championship is the best place for them.

Sometimes, when subjecting yourself to the poor football that can characterise the games played in and around the Premier League relegation zone, schadenfreude is the only consolation and reason to keep watching hapless defending and off-target strikers. The 2012/2013 season has been welcome then, with a number of excellent, exciting performances from the teams ‘mired’ in the relegation battle – a young Aston Villa side stunning Liverpool in December by scoring three times at Anfield; Wigan unlucky to beat Tottenham by only one goal back in November; Reading with a very late, very unlikely comeback from two goals down against Chelsea; and Queens Park Rangers going on a January run that included defeat of Chelsea and draws against Spurs and Manchester City.

Despite QPR’s January run, we can still keep alive the footballing tradition of taking pleasure in others’ misfortune with the league’s bottom team. QPR have tried all the tricks of survival preached by the book of short-termism, a culture that has often plagued the lower reaches of the league. They have hired the English media’s favourite man, Harry ‘Houdini’ Redknapp, and he has used all his famous footballing acumen to splurge on players who once had a good season, or are surplus to requirements at clubs he once managed. Despite the efforts of a man who may just be football’s greatest charlatan, QPR still sit last in the table. They may yet survive, but the manner in which the club has gone about this, and the perilous position that the owners have put their club in, will make it somewhat satisfying if and when they do fail.

When Harry Redknapp was appointed to help save the club in November last year, he argued against the club’s practices since Tony Fernandes’ takeover in August 2011 – “You shouldn’t be paying massive wages when you’ve got a stadium that holds 18,000 people”. He seemed to assure fans that he would get them on the right course by declaring;

“There are a lot of players at this club who earn far too much money…. I don’t really want to see the owners have their pants taken down like they have in the past.”

The look of consternation on Harry Redknapp is becoming a regular look

The opinions being expressed were a bit different only a month later during the January Transfer Window, with the announcement of a £53m price-plus-wage deal for the signing of two merely good players, Christopher Samba and Loic Remy – “This is an unbelievable signing. Tony Fernandes deserves a lot of credit for this one – he has worked so hard on bringing him in.” Along with other ‘big-name’ signings like Jenas, Townsend, Bosingwa and Cesar, these players’ contracts do not have clauses in them that will see their wages reduced in the event of dropping into the Championship. This means that they will have to be sold off at a loss, or the club will have to pay wages that they will not be able to afford. This financial hit will be compounded by the loss match-day income and of their portion of the Premier League’s record new TV deal, thought to be around £60 million for the lowest clubs.

QPR’s wage to turnover ratio was an incredible 91% in 2011/12, and their wage bill stood at £58.5m even before their high-profile January signings. Compared to the other teams promoted to the Premier League in 2011, by the end of last season QPR had recorded a loss of £22.6m, while both Swansea and Norwich made profits; they will surely post another loss this year. Swansea stands as an antithesis to QPR; a well-run club featuring a team deeply ingrained with a footballing philosophy, a team that features players bought using a sophisticated scouting system, at prices and on wages that few at QPR could grasp. Swansea sit a more than comfortable 8th in the league, and recently won their first trophy in over 100 years with a triumph at Wembley in the Capital One Cup.

QPR fans with that sinking feeling

After a humbling FA Cup loss to League One team MK Dons in January, and in a move that was not encouraging for fans, the man who has put much of his own money into the club, Tony Fernandes, said that he would be the first to leave the club if their problems could not be fixed. The director of Russian team Anzhi Makhachkala, a club not exactly noted for their financial prudence, highlighted the degree to which these problems are self-inflicted when discussing the signing of Samba – “At QPR he will earn almost as much as he did at Anzhi. In my view QPR have lost their minds.” In typical Harry Redknapp style, the QPR manager has already begun to distance himself from the impending crisis, much as he did at former club Portsmouth – “If he [the chairman] wants to bring a player in then so be it. As a football manager I can’t make someone spend money…There is not going to be meltdown because of something I’ve done,” he said. “If the [financial] results aren’t good that was before I came to the club.”

It’s unlikely due to his chumminess with the press, but it would be satisfying for Redknapp to finally lose the air of man-management magic that he has cultivated were QPR to succumb to relegation. The club’s style of planning and governance should not be rewarded with survival and another Premier League season focused on overpaid, mediocre players and mediocre football. It would be best for all if they went back to the championship, ditched the mercenaries, and focused on what made them a proper, league winning, team.