Brace yourselves - Our old friend Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times today.... by
YorkRanger 17 May 2015 9:11
Doomed Rangers have only themselves to blame for failing to play fair
Joey BARTON, the captain of Queens Park Rangers, has been involved in a typically entertaining Twitter spat.
Joey is as energetic and combative on social media sites as he is on the pitch. Would that one or two other of his utterly useless teammates had showed the same level of involvement this season, QPR would surely not have been relegated and thus facing financial ruin.
Only two teams from the Premier League have seriously under-performed this season – Newcastle United and QPR, who met yesterday afternoon. A grim battle between the utterly insouciant and the entirely distrait, Barton and Jack Colback excepted. The supporters of both clubs have been seriously let down by the majority of their expensive and mercenary players.
Barton launched into a tirade against an old QPR legend, the wayward talent that was Rodney Marsh. “Let it go, mate. You peaked over 40 years ago in Division Two. You did well in the lower leagues when football was played at a walking pace,” Mr Barton observed (not entirely incorrectly, it should be noted), before describing Marsh as a “skint, washed-up player full of hatred”. Miaow, etc.
Marsh, for his part, pointed out – again, not entirely incorrectly – that when he was Barton’s age he had played for England and captained Manchester City. We should probably let the two of them slug it out — the former player who was always (to my mind) rather overrated, and the current player who has been underrated as a consequence of a somewhat querulous attitude.
I would rather have Barton in my team than Marsh. If QPR had been lucky enough to have 10 Bartons they wouldn’t be where they are now. Ten Rodney Marshes and they would probably be bankrupt already, as well as relegated.
QPR are in big trouble – and now, of course, the lawyers are involved. In the season they were promoted from the Championship they spent much, much more money on wages and transfer fees than their budget allowed under the Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules.
In other words, they cheated. And they cheated by an enormous amount of money. Subjected to a fine of £58m by the Football League upon their promotion the club decided that the best course of action would be to ignore it entirely. So they cheated, and then they defaulted, banking on the certainty that they would not be relegated the following season and therefore would be able to evade the fine. Bad, bad call. The options open to the Football League are many and varied and involve the possibility of kicking the club out of the league entirely. But the signals from the Football League have been conciliatory of late, with demotion or defenestration all but ruled out. This, I think, is a grave mistake. If the Financial Fair Play rules are not enforced with stringency then we might as well get rid of them. It is hard to imagine a greater infraction of the spirit and letter of the law – and QPR should pay heavily for it. Why should the majority of clubs bother adhering to strict budgets when QPR sail gaily through, incurring debts of more than £60m?
You can argue that the FFP stuff is an absurdity if you like. If some rich foreigner wants to waste his entire fortune on a middling west London yo-yo club, as Tony Fernandez is doing at QPR, then why should he not be allowed to do so?
Better that, you might argue, than the other sort of approach – which is to transfer money out of the club and into the rich businessman’s various other accounts and interests, as happened at poor old Blackpool. Sure, I see that. But owners have a habit of growing weary of forever forking out more and more money – and then, exhausted, skedaddling – leaving behind them an unholy mess. Financial Fair Play was one method of combatting the destruction of a football club by an overweening, over-ambitious owner, as well as ensuring that clubs strove for success in a sustainable manner. Mr Fernandez wrote off QPR’s debts of £60m, but for how much longer will he be happy to do that? And what happens when he bails out?
My guess is that QPR will just about get by, in the very short term. One assumes they will flog the talented striker Charlie Austin for somewhere in the region of ten to fifteen million quid. That will help them pay the first instalment of that whopping fine, and it may keep the Football League happy for a while. They also have parachute payments to help them along. But on current predictions, next season Rangers are looking at a loss of somewhere in the region of £100m – which, again, will be a tad above the approved limit under the FFP rules of £8m. That would mean a transfer embargo and a fine, at the very least.
It would be unfair on the other Championship clubs if Rangers were not hit with a transfer embargo immediately, until that fine is completely paid off. Otherwise, what is the point of Financial Fair Play?