The Changing Face of Queens Park Rangers

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Earthtimes - The changing face of Queens Park Rangers - Feature [Author? 'DPA]

London - As the wave of foreign investors goes on, English fans are becoming accustomed to clubs changing their image overnight, but the case of Queens Park Rangers still stands out as remarkable. The absurdity of the situation was made clear by Luigi De Canio's first public statement after being appointed manager.

After talking about how "excited" he was by "a fantastic opportunity", and thanking "Bernie Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore, two businessmen with an incredible track record of success in sport and other fields", he insisted he was fully focused on preparing the team for their forthcoming away game.

Nothing remarkable about that, except that it was at Hull.

Even in the increasingly bizarre world of English football, the juxtaposition was remarkable.

Briatore, a man who has had relationships with such supermodels as Naomi Campbell and Adriana Volpe, a man who fathered a child by Heidi Klum, a man usually associated with Formula One and the playboy haunts of Monte Carlo, Barcelona and Shanghai, casually mentioned in the same sentence as Hull, famously the largest city in Europe never to have had a top-flight football team.

Briatore and Ecclestone's bid for the club was approved on September 1, with the sale officially being completed last week.

After a desperate time for QPR, the future is unexpectedly bright.

When the club was founded in 1882 by old boys of Droop Street Board School, it was named St Jude's, after the patron saint of lost causes.

It became QPR four years later, but there was something appropriate about the original name.

Briefly, when Dave Sexton was manager and Rodney Marsh and Stan Bowles, two of the great mavericks of the seventies, combined a life of boozing and gambling with playing wondrously, QPR threatened the elite.

They were runners-up in the top-flight in 1976, but were soon relegated. They were promoted again, but slipped back into the second flight in 1996, missing out on the real bonanza of the Premiership.

Since then, they have been fighting almost constantly to stay afloat. It was rumoured that they would go into administration in September if they did not clear an unpaid tax bill.

And that wasn't the half of it. The club chairman Gianni Paladini was allegedly forced by another director to sign a resignation later at gunpoint in May 2006.

Kiyan Prince, one of the club's most promising prospects, was murdered outside his school.

Another youth team player, Harry Smart, narrowly escaped death when he fell under an underground train in an incident in which Tu Quang Hoang Vu, a Vietnamese architect, was killed.

The young centre-forward Ray Jones, who had broken into the first team, died in a car-crash earlier this season.

They slid down the table, and seemed to be facing relegation to the third flight.

Things couldn't have been much bleaker. And now, suddenly, Naomi Campbell and Tamara Beckwith have been spotted in the crowd, and the club are being linked with Alessandro Del Piero and Francesco Totti.

QPR remain third-bottom of the Championship, and Saturday's 1-1 draw with Crystal Palace - in which they were repeatedly thwarted by goalkeeper Julian Speroni - means De Canio's four games in charge so far have yielded only five points.

"It's something to build on," said De Canio. "We won't face a goalkeeper as good as that every week."

Certainly Briatore isn't panicking. "We set a target for four years' time," he said. "If it happens earlier, it happens earlier.

"You need a strong base and the moment you arrive in the Premier League you stay there.

"When we started (in Formula One) at Benetton (now Renault), we said we wanted to win the championship in five years. Afterwards, we had our champion in three years."

For QPR, for now, just staying up will do" Earthtimes