Briatore and Ecclestone Speaking About QPR - How and Why They Bought QPR and Their Plans for QPR

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Mirror - Football - Ecclestone and Briatore exclusive
Exclusive by Oliver Holt Chief Sports Writer 21/12/2007
Bernie Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore are sitting in a backstreet pub in Knightsbridge, west London.
They're talking teams. Not Renault or McLaren, but QPR.
They're talking team players. Not Lewis Hamilton or Fernando Alonso, but Rowan Vine and Michael Mancienne.
They're talking venues. Not Monaco or Monza, but Loftus Road and Deepdale.
As usual, Briatore bubbles with enthusiasm. But he stops gabbling, just for a second. Ecclestone is speaking and, generally, when Bernie speaks, you stop.
"One hundred per cent, we were going to buy Chelsea," Ecclestone says. "Seriously. One million per cent we'd have bought it. No argument. It was ready to be done. Then Roman came along."
There was a putative bid for Roma, too, but the deal was too complicated. Then there was Arsenal. That came to nothing.
So why Queens Park Rangers? Flavio looks round the pub and answers in the infectious spiel that makes him the marketing genius he is. But Ecclestone stops him again. "Tell him the truth, Flavio," Bernie says.
Flavio gives him a thanks-for-nothing look, then tells the story of how two of the most charismatic and powerful men in sport came to buy a west London institution.
"Ok," Briatore says. "I've a friend who wanted to open a restaurant with me in London. We'd been talking about opportunities, discussing opening a high-end pizzeria or maybe a churrascaria.
"Anyway, a couple of weeks went by and this guy phoned me out of the blue and said there was an opportunity to buy QPR. I was still thinking food. QPR? I thought maybe it was a barbecue restaurant."
But Briatore, boss of Formula One team Renault, quickly found out what he needed to know about QPR and in September, he and F1 billionaire Ecclestone paid £1m for the Championship club and agreed to clear £13m of its debts.
They saved it from going out of existence and are now planning for the Premier League. "I don't want to buy players for QPR just because they've a big name," Ecclestone says. "We don't need to massage our egos like that. Our egos are big enough to look after themselves."
Some fans are sceptical. They think Ecclestone and Briatore might be in it for the real estate.
But why would a bloke worth £2.4bn be bothered about a bit more loose change?
Truth is, things are looking brighter for QPR than they have for a long time. With the investors they have, they're the envy of every club in Englan Industrialist Lakshmi Mittal, the world's fifth richest man, joined Ecclestone and Briatore as a major shareholder yesterday.
Qpr are bottom of the table but with Ecclestone around, won't be for long. "Abramovich, watch out," Ecclestone said with a wicked grin.
A few weeks ago, the 77-year-old watched QPR play Sheffield Wednesday. It was a cold afternoon and Briatore's friends sat in the Loftus Road directors' box with cashmere blankets spread on their knees.
When QPR missed a chance, Ecclestone looked around disdainfully at pained expressions on people's faces.
"Nothing happened," he says. "We're not playing the pools. We're only looking for a result."
In the second half, he made the occasional dart back to the directors' room to check on the racing from Lingfield Park.
But he and Briatore have caught the football bug, like Abramovich, like Mittal, just like a lot of awfully rich men.
"Most guys with a few quid, whether they've thieved it or whether they've earned it, are competitive people," Ecclestone says. "It's the needy and the greedy. Most of all, it's about trying to prove they're right."
Ecclestone said he was upset when he saw the state of the facilities at Loftus Road. Things are going to change fast.
Boss Luigi di Canio has been given money to bring in a host of players in January to help push the club clear of trouble.
Old sponsors will go. New ones will come. Briatore has plans for top London restaurant Cipriani to do the VIP catering, and to hire a leading DJ for the pre-match entertainment.
They want to get fans to the game earlier, get them more involved in the club. Revenue, it is fair to say, will increase. Briatore and Ecclestone, after all, have always been rather good at that side of things.
"Look," Ecclestone said, "football's something that goes on when Formula One's in its off season. Getting QPR back on top would be like buying Spyker and building that up.
"There's no point buying Ferrari. The only way is down. At QPR, we're in Formula Renault at the moment. Next, we want to move up to GP2 and then GP1.
"If we hadn't bought the club, there wouldn't have been any singing or anybody complaining about anything because there wouldn't have been any club to sing about.
"Now Flavio is doing his best to make sure the club succeeds so the fans should be very happy. We'd both like to do things that haven't been done in football before. Everyone seems to follow the same format. Maybe what we do will be wrong but there's only one way to find out.
"Everyone's copied what I did years ago in Formula One."
What if things only improve slowly and the crowd starts to sing rude songs about him and Briatore? "We'll sing along with them," Ecclestone says.
"But they'll have to have good voices if we're going to listen to them," added Briatore.
The grand plan goes like this. Stay up this season, consolidate next season, promotion to the Premier League the season after.
"We need to work on the stadium, the sponsors, the team, everything," said Briatore.
"This isn't a case of throwing money at something. Bernie invests in an efficient way and when I won championships in Formula One with Benetton, I won with lower budgets than a lot of the other teams."
In January, QPR visit Chelsea in the FA Cup. Ecclestone, a Chelsea fan and a mate of the owner, is relishing it.
"I go to Chelsea with Roman now and again," he says, "so we might have to go easy on them, put out a weakened team and give them a bit of a chance."
New Stars Of The R's
Flavio Briatore
Age: 57. Women: Engaged to model Elisabetta Gregoraci. Business: Managing director of Renault Formula One team. Worth: Is thought to have £70million fortune.
Bernie Ecclestone
Age: 77. Women: Married to former model Slavica, has two young daughters, Tamara and Petra. Business: Supremo of F1 Racing. Worth: Estimated at £2.2bn.
Lakshmi Mittal (left)
Age: 57. Women: Married to Usha and has two children. Business: CEO of Arcelor Mittal, world's largest steel company. Worth: World's fifth richest man worth £50bn.
Mirror