-
[Update: Note in response to criticism of his article, Mick Dennis responded to criticism.]
Mick Dennis/Daily Express - This is no Way to Go
FITZ HALL is an unlikely harbinger of revolution. The defender has played for six clubs without getting noticed for much other than his wonderful nickname – One Size.
But Hall has just joined his seventh club, Queens Park Rangers. They have signed seven other players in the first eight days of the transfer window and are starting to restructure the football landscape.
QPR fans gloat that their club is now the richest on the planet. Formula One tycoons Bernie Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore bought control in August. Last month, they flogged a fifth of the club to Lakshmi Mittal, the wealthiest person in the UK and the fifth richest in the world.
QPR lost the war of the wads with Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea in the FA Cup, and their January purchases have been of workmanlike players, such as Hall.
Yet everybody assumes that QPR will start to climb, and we are all waiting to see whether the new rulers intend to spend enough to establish the London club near the top of the Premier League. It is a prospect which is utterly alarming and deeply depressing. The QPR deal has reshaped football's landscape.
Rich owners are not a new development. English football was shaped by them. Edwardian factory owners, who wanted their works team to beat rival factory teams, lured better players by paying them. The ground rules were set – a rich man could try to make his team better than the rest.
But the stakes were raised when Abramovich flew over London, looked down at Stamford Bridge and, like Little Britain’s Andy, said: “Want that one.”
Abramovich’s example led the world’s super-rich to the Premier League and now they are moving into the Championship.
Queen’s Park Rangers have been a shabby, shoddy little outfit for decades. You can tell a lot about a club’s ethos by the way they treat away fans, and anyone who has huddled in the dank, decrepit away end at Loftus Road will tell you how much the club has been allowed to decay.
Yet QPR could now cruise out of the Football League because of an accident of geography – Loftus Road just happens to be quite handy for Mittal’s £57million home in Kensington Palace Gardens.
At other clubs folk toil away to pay bills on time, work hard to improve stadiums and strive to get the football right. On that treadmill, you have to run to stand still, and all that drives you is the hope that your manager might piece together a sequence of results which will bring some success.
The arrival of Ecclestone, Briatore and Mittal threatens to crush that hope. Daily Express
Welcome to QPR REPORT - A completely unofficial and unaffiliated fan site focusing on G-d's Chosen Team, Queen's Park Rangers (QPR) FC. (Visit also QPR Report Messageboard and Follow on Twitter.) QPR Report accepts no sponsorship, advertising or financial contributions. In 2008, QPR Report was named as one of the top two blogs in the Football League