Congratulations! "Trained at Loftus Road!-
- Throughout the day, updates, comments and perspectives re QPR and football in general are posted and discussed on the QPR Report Messageboard...Also Follow: QPR REPORT ON TWITTER
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- QPR's Week in Review: QPR and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week
- Some QPR Fans Meeting Today
- In Search of QPR Season Ticket Buyers Richard Lewis & Michael Prodomou!
- Congratulations to Ex-QPR Goalie Chris Day on Winning Promotion!
- On This Day...Ten Year Flashback: Peter Winkelman Wants QPR in Milton Keynes
- Flashback: QPR's 2008 AGM Report
- Add to the list of American/Canadian QPR Supporters (Or QPR Fans from Central or South America)
- Some Past Years re QPR Season Tickets
- Victory for Blatter? Bin Hamman Withdraws from FIFA Presidency Race
MIRROR/Michael Calvin - Why Brendan Rodgers is keeping Barca spirit alive and well trust is in short supply at QPR
Brendan Rodgers is the Northern Irish manager of a Welsh club with a Catalan philosophy. He’s made his mistakes, most notably during six months at Reading – tomorrow’s opponents at Wembley.
But his team would be welcome additions to the Premier League.
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Flavio Briatore insists that he trusts Neil Warnock.
Whether the Queens Park Rangers manager should trust him remains to be seen.
Briatore’s casual betrayal of QPR fans doesn’t bode well. Obscene ticket prices are straight out of the Formula 1 playbook.
The little men don’t matter in that crass, superficial, business.
Lest we forget, Briatore was banned for his role in the Crashgate scandal.
Would you trust him? Mirror
People - Newly promoted QPR eye move for Spurs defender
- QPR are eyeing a move for Crystal Palace defender Nathaniel Clyne.
- Rangers boss Neil Warnock wants a new right-back and 20-year-old Clyne, who has rejected a new deal at Selhurst Road, is top of the list.
- Spurs defender Kyle Naughton, 22, is another option but the Premier League new boys could be priced out of a move. People
Daily Mail/Des Kelly
Bernie's scant reward Having achieved promotion back to the top flight, Queens Park Rangers rewarded their celebrating supporters for a decade-and-a-half of patient devotion with a season-ticket price rise of 40 per cent.
Some reward. QPR's owners might as well have punched every fan squarely in the face and then congratulated them for having such punchable faces.
Remember QPR will pick up £90million for going into the Barclays Premier League, mere pocket money for a club already bankrolled by Lakshmi Mittal, Britain's richest man, and Bernie Ecclestone, who somehow scrapes by on £2,500m.
To his credit Mittal's representative on the board resigned in disgust at the hike, but major stakeholder Ecclestone appears untroubled about screwing the paying public.
The F1 mogul admits he has little interest in football - he prefers Chelsea - and the word is Flavio Briatore, the Crashgate cheat (allegedly), is really driving QPR's greedy pretensions.
The club badge has already been re-styled to look like a 1970s aftershave logo, now fans are bearing the cost of the strategy to make Rangers a 'boutique club'. And you have to say it stinks.
Rodgers climb is good for all Daily Mail
Kenny Dalglish/Daily Mail - Confusion over Rangers ruling
"....One thing that has confused me about the Alejandro Faurlin affair is the argument made that QPR didn't deserve a points deduction because Faurlin wasn't a 'Messi or Ronaldo' and could not have been that significant to the club's final points tally this season.
I don't understand that at all. Surely the key point was whether Faurlin was owned by a third party when QPR bought him. If, as the tribunal deliberated, he was not, then fine. QPR are cleared of that offence. But to suggest the quality of the player had a bearing on the outcome is wrong.
If an ineligible player appears in an FA Cup tie, his club are kicked out, regardless of that player's ability or performance. Why would that not apply in any competition? Mail
News of The World/Andy Dunn
Saint Warnock faces battle to survive QPR madness
May 29, 2011
Neil and pray... Warnock faces a tough season ahead with QPR's current owners Neil and pray... Warnock faces a tough season ahead with QPR's current owners
WHEN Mohamed Al Fayed tugged the drapes from a statue of Michael Jackson in the corner of one of football's most iconic grounds, it seemed the asylum of Premier League owners was finally fully booked.
Just as it had when a gaggle of Indian chicken farmers sacked one of the game's most respected managers, tried to hire Diego Maradona and buy David Beckham and Ronaldinho.
Just as it does when a silent oligarch sacks his fifth manager in seven years for the crime of going 12 months without a trophy.
Truly, the 'No Vacancies' sign has been up on the door of the Premier League madhouse for some time.
Since absentee owners saddled Manchester United with outrageous debt, since a couple of jokers made Liverpool a laughing stock, since Far Eastern fancy Dans flounced into Birmingham promising Alex McLeish £80million to spend.
And delivered sweet and sour sod all.
Briatore and Ecclestone are the smart alecs who will parade supermodels in the stand while fleecing the great unwashed
Little did we know there would be room on the funny farm for a couple more.
Step forward Flavio Briatore and Bernie Ecclestone, the shareholding geniuses who must surely have given their blessing to charge fans a minimum of £47 a throw to get into their ground.
The smart alecs who will parade supermodels in the stand while fleecing the great unwashed.
All the while, the fit and proper persons' test remains on football's statute book.
It is a complex piece of Premier League legislation but let me simplify it for you.
Got a load of dough? You're in.
And Ecclestone, Briatore and the Mittal family sure have a load of dough. Not that they look likely to spend any of it on new players. Oh no.
As Blackpool - accompanied by a nauseating cacophony of misguided romanticism - found out, you can get promoted, refuse to dig into your pockets, lick your lips at the £40m cheque from the Premier League, pocket a parachute payment... and have a damn fine chance of repeating the process all over again.
Yet these characters from the silicone world of Formula One feel free to sanction the doubling of season ticket prices at the princely palace that is Loftus Road.
"The rises are in line with other London-based Premier League clubs," said an official statement.
So. It's your first season in the top flight since 1996.
Compared, say, to the Emirates, your stadium is a bit of a dive. Your only 'star' is a Tottenham cast-off and, instead of watching a team that has been assembled for astronomical sums, the home fans will support names who are of the household variety only in their own households.
Yet you still want to have the same tariff as Arsenal, Spurs and Chelsea.
But I guess we should have expected this. After all, Ecclestone goes generally unchallenged in Formula One, where fawning rules.
Briatore, in case one should forget, had to leave Formula One because one of his drivers, Nelson Piquet Jr, claimed the perma-tanned Italian had told him to crash.
Ecclestone, meanwhile, leaves matches at half-time. To beat the traffic.
It is a wonder he doesn't deploy a safety car around Shepherds Bush.
The plan for QPR is... to make sure next season we are competitive and keep all the good players we have at the moment - Flavio Briatore
Yes, they might have zillions. But they are a couple of proprietors almost beyond parody. But at least they have achieved the extremely unlikely. No. Not taken QPR into the Premier League... but make most people have sympathy for Neil Warnock, the only man who could romp to a Championship triumph yet still lose the vote of his peers for the division's manager of the year.
Those are the same peers who are more likely to refer to him not by his name but by an anagram of it. (Google it.) Yet Warnock now has one of the most thankless tasks in football.
Warnock lost his main ally in the boardroom when vice-chairman Amit Bhatia - son-in-law of Lakshmi Mittal - resigned, saying his "vision, strategy and direction for the club is very different from that of other shareholders."
It seems Ecclestone and Briatore have no intention of selling their 67 per cent share to Mittal (a scenario most supporters would welcome) and have offered their backing to Warnock.
From Monaco last week, Briatore said: "The plan for QPR is... to make sure next season we are competitive and keep all the good players we have at the moment. The coach is now looking to set up a very good club."
Hardly a promise of transfer largesse. Indeed, informed talk has it that Warnock will be lucky to get £10million to spend. He will have to please supporters who are now feeling disenfranchised by the alarming hike in ticket prices, while all the time looking over his shoulder to see the latest Italian manager being linked with his job.
Winning the Championship without any lavish backing from the board might not have been enough for fellow managers to honour Warnock. But if he merely survives another season under these characters, he deserves a medal.
Warnock might not be the most straightforward chap around. But set against the rogues' gallery of football club owners, he looks like a saint. NewsofTheWorld
- David Conn/The Guardian: Why QPR Were Fined Rather than Deducted Points
- The Premiership Money
- Almost 25 Years Since Jim Gregory Resigned as QPR Chairman
- QPR Summer Calendar
- Flashback Nine Years: QPR Exit Administration (and with the ABC Loan!)
The full 86-page FA report on "FA vs QPR and Giannia Paladini" can be read here..Selected Excerpts from the FA Report Can be Read Here
- Flashback to the Briatore/Ecclestone Takeover
- The Bushman Archives of the 1968/69 Season
