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Reply | Field to Norwich
at 19:54 3 Feb 2026
But we'll also be saving big wages, Cook apparently best paid at the club. So, swings and roundabouts: we may recruit some 25/26 year-old Championship stalwarts in the RND mould with that money. I think even a "Football Manager" CEO knows you need a leadership group. I'm sure Stephan does.
Hayden's contract at Newcastle was up this summer. I imagine he held on for another year to sign at QPR, though that's a guess. We don't need him for ages. Hopefully in 18 months Edwards, Kone, maybe Burrell become part of a leadership group, Madsen if he's here. He looks like he's become part of it this season.
Hope too that the new contract allows us to sell Smyth. We need to sell all who we can, but can only sell those not perpetually injured. |
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Reply | Field to Norwich
at 16:50 3 Feb 2026
We will have Hayden though. Hayden, Dunne, Chair, possibly RND (who I wouldn't keep purely on robustness but fills the experienced head brief). Jake Clark Salter is still employed as a player.
So, lose Cook, lose Field from seniors.
Still have Dunne, Hayden, Chair. Paul Smyth is 28 and has over 100 Championship games. Possibly RND. JCS. I like teams to have an experienced keeper, so I would recruit one of those too.
I don't think the foundations of the squad collapse with Field leaving - Cook may prove a bigger miss. But there's quite a lot of experience still.
Plus all the mainstays from this season will have quite a few games under their belts now, a season wiser. |
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Reply | Field to Norwich
at 10:27 3 Feb 2026
Totally this. There was a very long thread about how imperative it was to sign Ronnie Edwards for £4.5m along with what is no doubt among the highest wage packet at the club.
We cannot then also have Sam Field, 27 going on 28, also on one of the highest wages, sitting miserably on the bench, third in line for a holding midfield slot/third in line for LB, just because he's the right sort or the glue beneath the floorboards of the club or whatever has been said here.
To sign Edwards and Obiku - a necessary one judging by the glimpse of Burrell on crutches in this week's training vid! - something has to go. I'm surprised it's not more but you can only sell/loan out what others want and you generally can do without.
Sixteen games left, that's all. If there's another bad injury in midfield we just have to make do for those games. That's why we have a Dev squad, not to have senior players kicking around miserably. |
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Reply | January transfer rumours
at 14:13 2 Feb 2026
He was being offered to other Championship clubs last summer. Club decision, and no doubt he wants to play somewhere more often too. If you wish to sign Ronnie Edwards for £4.5 million in a January window, then some other players must be sold. And to sell players, even your favourite players, there must be offers.
The one thing the club definitely is getting right in the last two windows in my opinion is recruitment, so gonna let them have this. [Post edited 2 Feb 14:14]
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Reply | RND
at 19:47 1 Feb 2026
Why do you keep saying "allow him to leave"? His contract is with Sheffield United until the summer of 2027. If we want to keep him we'll have to offer Sheffield United money. He won't be free. Maybe someone will offer Sheffield United and RND more money, maybe he'll want to go back there, maybe he wants to stay at QPR, maybe we have an option to buy. But it will be a purchase from next season's budget. Otherwise the loan ends and he goes back to Sheffield United. |
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Reply | RND
at 19:36 1 Feb 2026
Well, exactly? There are other good players we've not heard of who may represent better value than a 27-year-old who's averaged 20-odd games a season over the last seven because he's not robust enough to play many more.
I reckon we may sign him and if we do I hope it's a big success. But I'd worry about it given his and our injury record. |
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Reply | RND
at 18:02 1 Feb 2026
I think what you say is an argument for not signing players with chronic injury histories, rather than signing them. Those players you mention...
JCS has been available for 4 games this season, Chair has been available for 11 (with no return in sight for either), Kolli 11 too, Poku 8.
JCS has made 11 appearances in total since signing a new "long-term contract" in September 2024. Eleven games in 16 months. A senior player on good money: is that VFM? Perhaps that would have been spent better elsewhere, on a more robust centre back, no matter how much we like JCS.
RND is a good player, good attitude, great for the team this year, but he has a long history of ankle injuries that needs to be managed and one catastrophic hamstring too. This is his most productive season in seven (at Barrow), but it's reminiscent of the one season JCS turned in to get that new contract before disappearing again.
There are other more robust left-backs out there. Not a single person on this board was advocating signing Rhys Norrington Davies before he joined. There will be another left back we've not heard of who can do the job as well.
Generally, we should be signing more robust players, especially defenders. |
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Reply | Rest of the Championship thread 25/26
at 08:45 31 Jan 2026
Lots of established, hard-bitten pros, but also Clark is only 20 and Eames a homegrown teen - both look absolutely mustard. Good mix.
The real elephant in the room is how strong, fit and hungry Derby looked. Steamrolled a Brizzle who did appear to be trying to lose their manager, shocking performance, but still. Didn't see too many hammy stretches from Derby mid-game.
Eustace is a very smart and efficient builder of Championship teams. Incredible that we thought we'd be clever and pick Beale over him. |
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Reply | Rest of the Championship thread 25/26
at 22:26 30 Jan 2026
Certainly been eating their greens.
Interesting that their recruitment guy left in October and hasn't been replaced. Wonder if that's a battle Eustace won. Certainly still signing very good players - big shame Eustace wasn't trusted at QPR, though don't reckon he'd work as merely a first team coach who's handed a squad. He's a good judge of his own (perhaps Sanderson aside). |
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Reply | Rest of the Championship thread 25/26
at 21:53 30 Jan 2026
That Derby front four are lethal. Agyemang, Brereton, Clark and Brewster, glad we're not playing them again until the end of the season. Agyemang plays like he's playing with a younger age group.
As I write that their four replacements carve open Brizzle for a 5th. They could've had more too.
Derby look like the team who power through the play-offs...but, Sanderson and Clarke.
Just had a close-up of Rob Dickie. We've seen that look before from him. |
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Reply | Christian Nourry - Two Year Anniversary
at 19:56 29 Jan 2026
Benham was bailing them out financially for seven years. For the first two years he did so anonymously, though, and his assistance was mostly financial until he took over in 2012 and then started employing his Smartodds to run player recruitment: that same season they got in the play-offs. Two years later they were promoted, a year later they were in the Championship play-offs. Ten days after securing control of Brentford he bought the land by Kew Bridge that he said he was going to build a new stadium on.
Compared to some other clubs in the area, I'd describe that as pretty much immediate success.
I am not a Brentford fan, at all. However, it is an incredible achievement that I am very jealous of bearing in mind how many opportunities we've missed or messed up.
RE QPR in the top flight. I was there for 90%, it was often great, but it wasn't all great, and sometimes we forget that because it was so long ago:
Yes, up there 72 to 79 - though 77/78 and 78/79 were utterly miserable seasons. We won 15 league games out of 84 across both. Quarter Pound of Rubbish, ha ha ha, pretty much all I heard at primary school for two years.
Then 83 to 96, a glorious run when we were the Brentford/Bournemouth of the time. Loved it.
But that was 30 years ago.
Three seasons more than a decade ago, too, which are the now byword in what a promoted team should not do and almost bankrupted the club.
I'm not saying we should forget about it, at all. But the past distorts and comforts us in our current decade-long position as midtable second tier stalwarts.Too much glorious past of 30+ years ago in our mentality. We need some new stories. |
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Reply | Christian Nourry - Two Year Anniversary
at 15:20 29 Jan 2026
Yes, true - but only to a degree that they saw themselves as plucky underdogs whereas QPR have a somewhat over inflated opinion of ourselves that is pretty much solely rooted in one four year period 50 years ago and another longer decade that came to an end three decades ago.
But Brentford were already upwardly mobile when Benham took over. He started his trading model in 2013-14, the season they were promoted to the Championship. under his guidance. Immediate success.
In his second season, they came 5th in the Championship.
In the meantime, in his first window he signed Tarkowski for a nominal fee, in his second he signed Andre Gray for £500k who then scored 16 goals that season and then would go the season after for £9m, Jota for £1m who would go for £6m 18 months later and Scott Hogan for £650k who would go two years later for £10m...
So, yeah, maybe they had lower expectations. But when you deliver Brentford's first promotion to the second tier in decades in season one, then their highest league placing and the play-offs in season two, and buy players who immediately make the club tens of millions of profit you quickly earn that patience!
They were both making longterm decisions *and* winning immediately. They knew/know how to do both. We don't. We just say we do every year. |
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Reply | Christian Nourry - Two Year Anniversary
at 13:23 29 Jan 2026
They are incredibly good at identifying big talent at value, obviously. But having the confidence to keep selling their best performers and replacing with better, but cheaper unknowns is not really something many fanbases would put up with.
I just can't imagine the reaction if this summer we sold Burrell, Madsen, Varane, maybe Mbengue, a keeper all in one window...but that's what they were doing ten years ago. Having a half decent season and selling all the best performers. Replacing then with relative unknowns.
Also, not just selling Watkins or Konsa who go on to have even better success elsewhere, but getting the very best they can out of some players and then selling Mepham for £12m (!!) or Hogan for £10m, Ryan Woods for £7m, players who they massively inflated the true value of and who will never play as well again.
We're so far off that, it's infuriating. Let's start by selling Madsen this summer. |
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Reply | Christian Nourry - Two Year Anniversary
at 12:07 29 Jan 2026
Ten years ago, 2015-16, Brentford sold:
Will Grigg £1m
Stuart Dallas £1.3m
Moses Odubajo £3.5m
Andre Gray £9m
James Tarkowski £3m
Came 9th, about £15m up.
next summer, signed Bentley, Egan, Romaine Sawyers on frees, small fee for Canos, £1.5 Rico Henry. All future mainstays,
Sold Scott Hogan to Villa for £10 million.
Replaced Hogan with Maupay for £1.8m and Watkins for £1.8 million. Two better players and £6m profit.
2018:
Sold
Chris Mepham for £12 million
Ryan Woods for £7m
John Egan for £4m
Signed
Josh Dasilva on a free (and Odujabo back on a free!)
Ensra Konsa for £2.5m
Benhrama for £3m
These last two will go soon after around £35m...
Let's not forget replacing Watkins at huge profit with Toney then Toney with Thiago...each time making huge profits while also climbing the leagues.
This is how you do it. You have to rip out the core of your team every year for big money and replace with better but cheaper. Have to constantly sell and recycle, sell and recycle and and then, after maybe four seasons of this, you are cooking.
We are cavemen trying to make sparks with stones compared with Thomas Edison down the road at the moment. |
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Reply | Christian Nourry - Two Year Anniversary
at 11:13 29 Jan 2026
I agree with all of that about the context of the time (I was trying to be brief!). I think those first four, five LF years are massively undervalued, especially on social media where he's routinely characterised as a buffoon and Nourry as a league-on-strings genius. Neither remotely true.
To have left the club in the Championship, debt down to manageable level, new training ground and having produced Eze, Chair, Dieng etc is a decent legacy he should be proud of. Stayed a year too long, I think.
I don't think we can really compare or judge Nourry until he's done four or five years. We may be in ruins then, of course, but as you say he's spent a lot on young players so will take a few seasons to come out in the wash. It's in the balance. Has to sell one or two this year, though.
I do think it's amusing that in 2016 we were 12th and in 2026 we are 12th. After all the comings and goings, all the turmoil, the spin and so forth QPR are essentially a club that lives somewhere between 17th and 10th in England's second tier. That's alright with me, which I know is not a universal view. |
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Reply | Christian Nourry - Two Year Anniversary
at 09:33 29 Jan 2026
I thought I'd look up where QPR were a decade ago.
In 2016, 18 months after LF took over as DOF, QPR finished 12th. Exactly where we are now. Our squad was still far too old and laden down with the last of the PL refugees, but it had a lot of promising youth knocking on the door - Eze, Manning, Lumley, Shopido, Furlong, with Chair about to join: they'd beat a five-a-side of our current hopefuls - instead of Madsen, we had Luongo, a talented 8 who didn't score enough, two new players, Cherry and Polter, hit double figures, and so on...
So, a decade later, we're pretty much exactly where we were. The high water point of the Ferdinand years was five years ago, coming 9th. After those five years, he should've gone. The concrete achievements of the Ferdinand/Hoos years are the training ground, the safe standing which has reinvigorated the ground, and riding out the FFP fine without being relegated. Plus the developing of a youth product that produced the money Eze generated. All those pale next to a play-off season in the stats books, but are probably bigger for the soul of the club.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying, we can't judge Nourry for a couple of years, as he's achieved nothing out of the ordinary yet. He is par for the course. See how the club and books look in January 2028. |
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Reply | Three-game weeks
at 08:50 28 Jan 2026
I agree so much I just tried to upvote a second time.
Forgetting all the muscle injuries (sorry, no, that's a three-month 'contact' injury), we just look knackered in every game well before the end. Saturday we came out first half all guns blazing but could not maintain anything like it in the second. By the 60th minute lots of players looked cooked, particularly the wingers and midfielders, by the end we were totally scrambled - exceptions, of course, such as Dunne (who incidentally often posts pics from his insta of post-match work he does away from the club), but overall other teams appear fitter. Certainly, Wrexham grew throughout and were outrunning us in the second.
Remember how the club made a big show of posting on socials the relative running stats in the glorious defeat away at West Ham? I think the fact that's the only time they have posted that post-match tells its own story.
Incidentally, someone made mention of Amos and Willock's careers elsewhere after they left us. Well, watched the highlights of Willock's man-of-the-match performance for Cardiff last night. Ten points clear of third and he looked absolutely back to the player we had under Beale. Two goals and an assist. He's only 27. He certainly looked better than any of the wingers we currently can pick from. We'll be seeing him soon enough to judge, i suppose. |
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Reply | Christian Nourry - Two Year Anniversary
at 20:05 27 Jan 2026
The training ground was opened in June 2023, one week after Ferdinand announced he was leaving.
Nourry's audit of the club began later that summer and was based at the training ground.
Can't really credit him for the training ground "for starters". It had nothing to do with him. It existed before he was employed by QPR in any capacity. |
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