Totally under the radar, QPR announced the signing of Burton Albion forward Rumarn Burrell on Saturday evening for a fee rumoured to be in the region of £1.3m.

Facts

Rumarn Burrell is a 24-year-old striker from Birmingham who played his youth football at Coventry, Scunthorpe and Grimsby (quite the uphill paper round). Of Jamaican heritage, he made his debut for the national team in May this year against Trinidad and Tobago in the Gold Cup and scored in a 3-2 win.

Having signed professional forms at Blundell Park he played four times for Grimsby in League Two towards the end of 2018/19, debuting in the Mariners’ 2-0 home loss against Stevenage.

There was enough noise around him at this stage to tempt Championship big boys Middlesbrough into a three-year deal for an undisclosed fee that summer, but he then wasn’t seen again in senior football for another year-and-a-half when he finally made his Boro debut as a sub in a 2-1 FA Cup loss away to Brentford. A subsequent loan spell with Bradford City later that January brought only two substitute appearances in League Two.

There was a similarly unproductive loan spell to come at Kilmarnock in 2021/22. Even at Scottish Championship level he was afforded only one start and eight sub appearances in which he failed to trouble the scorers.

Having been released by Middlesbrough in the summer of 2022 and picked up by Scottish League One side Falkirk things did finally start to motor a bit for the young Jamaican. He scored a first senior goal in the last minute of a 3-0 win away against Edinburgh City in August and finished the campaign with 12 goals in 20 starts and 22 sub appearances.

After the expiry of his one-year deal there he joined League One rivals Cove Rangers and broke out into a 24-goal season from 40 starts and two sub appearances. This included a hot streak of 14 goals in 11 matches and back-to-back league hat tricks against Stirling and Annan in November/December.

That first prolific season of his career was enough to bring him back to England and a shot at League One in this country with Burton Albion. The Brewers made a ridiculous number of signings last summer for new manager Mark Robinson – 23 permanent and loan arrivals in one transfer window – but the season would turn into a relegation struggle and Robinson was gone by Christmas. In those challenging circumstances – Burton finished one place and one point outside the relegation zone - Burrell impressed with 11 goals in 29 starts and five sub appearances up front. That despite not scoring at all in his first 12 appearances. With two assists into the bargain that was a goal contribution every 165 minutes in a poor side.

He now joins QPR on the now standard but still tiresome undisclosed fee and undisclosed contract, though rumours are Rangers could have paid as much as £1.3m to secure his services.

Analysis @greg_spires

I don’t know about anyone else but that was a fun announcement to receive on a Saturday night. (You speak for yourself, some of us have hangovers to think of - ed).

Newly capped Jamaican forward Rumarn Burrell is an exciting addition, aligning with our approach of signing young, hungry, developable players too. Let’s delve into what R’s fans can expect from our latest signing…

Finishing & Physicality

Burrell’s goals were a major factor in Burton Albion’s survival last season and the fact he scored 11 goals from just 39 shots is interesting. Burrell has scored from a variety of angles, but his best work is poaching in the box, using his burst of pace and smart movement to get across or round the back of defenders. The majority of those shots came from inside the box and his movement to attack the back post, often drifting away from the centre back and attacking the 6-yard box, helped him to sweep home loose balls.

For his development to continue, and to continue his trend of scoring 9+ goals a season, he’ll need to work on his ability to create separation in 1v1s and angles when shooting. At times, he’s caught taking too many touches or his touch took him away from the space which delays his shot & brings defenders into play. If he can work on that first touch to open up his body and shoot first time, he could be a real box threat in the Championship.

The biggest asset that Burrell has is his pace. When I say pace, I mean he’s RAPID. Stretching defences and being a threat in transition were a key part of his game last season, working off the shoulders of defenders to beat offside traps & cracking high defensive lines. His pace is a major asset in open field, but I’d question how much space he’ll be given in the Championship and the speed at which defenders will close him down if he does break through. Furthermore, he’s effective at using a change of pace to beat defenders when he’s isolated in 1v1s and he seemingly enjoys baiting defenders to tackle him before skipping past. His ability to change direction is effective at wrong-footing defenders in the final third, often chopping back to beat his man. Personally, I think he could develop better decision-making and problem-solving when he is isolated in the final third to enable his teammates to support or to increase his success in 1v1s.

Linking Play

Burrell’s pace will be a superb asset to this exciting attacking unit at QPR, but his ability to find teammates in cut-back spaces is what excites me. Anyone one of our midfielders will be licking their lips seeing the chances he provided at Burton last season, exposing teams that transitioned poorly and finding teammates in cut-back zones. Whilst his main threat comes from running in-behind defences, he is confident enough to drop off the top line to receive to his feet as well. Not the strongest of forwards and there’s improvement to be made in his consistency of his body positioning to fend off defenders & retain possession when receiving to feet.

The Jamaican forward looked most effective at linking play when playing with one touch, often setting for a midfielder before spinning in-behind the defence. A few instances of Burton Albion using the ‘up-back-through’ sequence that I’m a fan of has got me excited to see if Stéphan and the coaching staff emphasis this when utilising Burrell too. Overall, he’s just a top athlete. Someone that is nimble, agile and will run the channels all day which is a real asset for testing defences & creating space for our other attacking assets to get on the ball and drive forward.

Out of Possession

As mentioned in his signing post and quotes from Nourry, he’s a genuine menace out of possession. His pace allows him to cover ground quickly and cause panic when he presses – something which can be highly amusing when it causes mistakes. At Burton Albion he was often tasked to press as a lone striker which can be a tiresome, thankless task but he showed resilience, aggression and energy which is encouraging. I was most impressed by his attitude to losing the ball and how quickly he reacts and focuses on his next job – hunting the ball down and regaining quickly.

Personal Thoughts

There’s plenty to like with the signing of Rumarn Burrell, not least the much-needed addition of some pace up front. All signs are positive here and while I think the fans will really like him but would reiterate that it’s another signing that’s taking a step up so expectations should be tempered, if possible. A top attitude, a hard worker and someone that takes advantage of good service in the box, Burrell is a nice addition to the current crop of attackers. Arriving just before his peak years and off the back of a hot second half of the season, it’s a great addition and think the value for money is certainly there. This QPR team are looking rather exciting on paper, let’s hope we can piece things together on the pitch come August.

Reaction

“I'm very proud and grateful to be here. It's a great opportunity to showcase what I can do. It's a step up, but I'm ready. I feel having the experience and playing consistently, it has helped progress my game even further. I figured out areas of my game and was hell-bent on improving and trying to be the best version of me. I can stretch teams. I'm a relentless presser and I feel like with the head coach and his style of play, it really suits me.He plays very explosive, attacking football, he likes to press and that suits me to a tee. I feel like this is definitely the best place for me. I can't wait to get in front of all the fans at Loftus Road.” - Rumarn Burrell

“We are excited to welcome Rumarn to the football club. He will bring speed, guile and an engine that allows him to be as effective when we don’t have the ball as he is dangerous when we do have it.” - Christian Nourry

Context

Not often in this modern world of social media and ITK dick swinging that a signing comes completely out of the blue like this one, but QPR did a very successful job of sneaking Rumarn Burrell in under the radar. His signing announced on Saturday night to widespread surprise among the support base, and no doubt some considerable disappointment to his other suitors – Plymouth Argyle had him as their top transfer target for this summer.

Any signing is a risk, particularly when they’re stepping up levels, and especially when they’re strikers. There are as many positive signs as there are red flags with this one, but it’s impossible to predict how a player settles in a new club, new league, new city. It might click, it might not.

On the positive side, it’s more pace and strength being added to a team that was slow and weak last season. This signing, along with the capture of Mbengue and Poku, shows the club actively trying to address an obvious weak spot rather than doubling down on lots more tiny technical tens. No team likes playing against pace, and it’s long overdue we add some to our arsenal.

Another thing he has in common with Poku and Mbengue is experience of hard EFL winters and three-game weeks which our intake last summer lacked and was found wanting in. Burton had a tough season last year, only just avoiding relegation, and he was able to settle, score and impress regardless – as with Poku in struggles at Colchester and Peterborough, and Mbengue in the meltdown at Reading.

It's a player who has made a decent amount of pro appearances at a young age rather than pissing about in academy football – though three years effectively out of the game with that early move to Middlesbrough is regrettable. We’ve talked before about players willing to go to tough places to play football rather than stay in a comfort zone and this lad has already collected Scunthorpe, Grimsby, Middlesbrough, Kilmarnock, Falkirk and Cove Rangers onto his CV. Take it from me, it doesn’t come much tougher than some of those places.

He's got plenty to prove, he’s hungry, QPR is a big move for him, fans of his former clubs are very complimentary about him. There’s a lot to like. I'd recommend this Twitter thread from David Wilson-Turner at our Burton Albion equivalent site if you haven't seen it already.

There are negatives though. He’d never really scored goals for anybody anywhere until he had a good season with Cove Rangers in the depths of Scottish League One – no kind of level. Plenty of strikers bloom late – you wouldn’t have been in a rush to sign Sammi Szmodics from Colchester – but getting all hot and heavy with a seven-figure offer for a striker who’d never scored goals before in his life until the last 18 months sounds a bit Conor Washington, and unfortunately the comparisons don’t end there. Like Washington, Burrell is an extremely streaky striker – his 11 goals for Burton came after he failed to score at all in his first 12 and were largely grouped together in a hot run of six in eight after Christmas, his 24 the season before was topped up substantially by a ridiculous run of 14 in 11 over November/December and he only bagged four in 17 thereafter. Like Washington, and Zan Celar, he’s very much a penalty box striker who scores very similar types of goal – ten of his 11 last year were inside the box, seven of them were from six-yards or less.

QPR have found it nigh on impossible to recruit strikers over the last decade. Infamously, the closest they’ve come to replacing Charlie Austin was re-signing the actual Charlie Austin for a second time. People like Matt Smith and Seb Polter have been able to do a steady enough job at points, there have been flashes from Idrissa Sylla types, but the numbers speak for themselves – the last time a QPR players scored 20+ goals in a regular league season was Andy Thomson in 2001/02, we haven’t had anybody score more than 15 since Charlie in 2014/15, we haven’t even had a striker get into double figures in the last three years with the top scorers being Frey on eight, Dykes on seven and Dykes on eight.

There’s plenty of mitigation. Strikers are the most expensive position to buy, and therefore on our challenged budget the most difficult to recruit. The 20-goal-a-season striker is largely mythical, or certainly the idea that everybody in the Championship has one or needs one – nobody got 20 in this league last year, only Szmodics and Adam Armstrong did the year before, Akpom, Morris and Gyokeres the year before that and then Mitrovic, Solanke, Brereton, Piroe and Weimann in 2021/22. Not many of those would ever be on QPR’s radar.

But even a sort of Dexter Blackstock 14-goal striker would be a godsend for our team at the moment. To have nobody in double figures since Andre Gray is pathetic really and we’ve spent some reasonably good money on some absolute crap down the recent years – Macauley Bonne Offside, Lyndon Dykes, Zan Celar I’m afraid to say looks like being on this list at the moment. Teams with similar budgetary issues like Coventry, Blackburn and Plymouth have been able to recruit some terrific forwards (plural) in the same period of time.

I guess from Burrell's point of view that sets the bar nice and low for what would count as a successful first season here. You'd have to go some to be worse than Bonne, Celar etc. But from his, and our, point of view, we've got to get better at signing and developing players in this position.

We’re not, as Jim Frayling says on our Patreon podcast a lot, a striker factory. We’re not like the Scunthorpe side of old where Andy Keogh, Billy Sharp, Martin Paterson, Gary Hooper, Steven MacLean, Jermaine Beckford and others knew they could go for 18 months, score a sack load, make their name and get their big move. It’s a tough place to play up front. The goals Burrell scored against Crawley and Blackpool last season, running clear of a high line and drawing the goalkeeper, look a lot like the moves Julien Stephan has been trying to put in place this summer where we play very deep in our half drawing the opposition on and then spring a long ball over the top to exploit the new found pace in our team. But a lot of Burrell’s goals and finishes look like the sort of goals Celar was scoring for Lugano, attacking the penalty spot, scoring between the posts from sub-12 yards out, and we simply haven’t been creating those chances for Celar, or anybody else, for a long time.

Hopefully, for Burrell and for us, the arrival of Poku in particular will solve that problem of decent supply lines – he was an assists machine at Peterborough. Otherwise we’ll be setting ourselves up for another tedious exchange of message board posts about whether we’re not using/servicing/playing the striker right, or whether he’s simply not good enough.

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Pictures - Reuters Connect