| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 21:06 - Mar 24 with 1430 views | stainrods_elbow |
Today, I don't think Hoos, Les and Warbs are doing a bad job overall, though, like most of the most interesting people on this board, I fluctuate moodily and pricklishly and maverickishly as I see fit, and felt desolate at the start of the year when I felt that all three of them should walk. Of course, the fickleness of fans (not just the ones here who seem to think they're superior to some of the FF questioners) is something to behold here, depending on how results are going. But the idea that all of them are 100% trustworthy, top professionals in their field, and somehow self-sacrificing experts who understand the game in ways we could never aspire to, is just facile, especially if it precludes legitimate criticality and scrutiny of all of their decisions. Without the fans, none of them would have their high-paid jobs in any event, and, even if they were the greatest ambassadors the club had ever had, they would still have to be held to account on their ambitions, player sales, and everything else. Transparency, though, is hilarious in modern pro football - just because a club publishes its accounts, like any business has to, means jack shit when a CEO (he's hardly alone of course) can't come clean about a fee received for a star player whose development our money has helped fund, and how much of it will be reinvested. Most clubs treat fans like mugs and charge them through the nose - you'd have to be more starry-eyed than Peter Pan to believe otherwise. Unless and until fans take over the running of clubs on a systemic basis or there is a sea change in the running of the game, we'll go on being talked down to, patronised, misled and lied to on a regular basis. Football is its own circus, and we're mostly on the outside looking in, boys and girls. Can one seriously imagine another form of cultural entertainment where grown-ups would pay to have cardboard cut-outs of themselves stuck in a seat? As Barney Ronay has brilliantly and scarily argued ('Is it too late to halt football's final descent into a dystopian digital circus?' The Guardian, 1/10/20), we may or may not even have a game to be brought back to once 'this is all over'. In many ways, football fans are like abused children - constantly told they're 'special', while mostly just getting shafted.
On the basis of Clive's interestingly toned report, my impression was of a management team who are becoming quite a smooth and well-practised machine (whatever Hoos' impersonations of a rough sleeper may have been), somewhat detached from their audience, and professionally well-defended. Overall, I don't think any of them think very highly of the fan base, or are very fan-friendly, and the evidence is pretty plentiful. That doesn't mean that I'd expect much more from different faces, but it also doesn't mean I'm going to sit back and just assume all's for the best. (It would help if Hoos didn't keep telling us he doesn't get bonuses for selling players - a bit like Tony Blair telling the British people he'd never do anything to hurt the country before taking us into an Iraq bloodbath, it comes across as a guilty tic, Lee, so maybe have a word with your unconscious!)
Meanwhile, fans are the people who get to fantasise (L. fantaticus - mad, enthusaistic, inspired by a god, from fanum = temple/consecrated place), who carry the club's soul, and who understand that football isn't and can't be just a 'business', whether in Jim Gregory's era or in this one - even if neoliberalism, FFP/FFS and the cancer of careering marketisation seem to have even better minds locked into a mental straijtacket of conformity where they often can't see the wood (building a team and club for the kids of tomorrow) for the trees (money, agents, all the game's many shades of bullshit). We're the singers (and whingers), the compass and the conscience of any club worth its salt. We're also the ones who will stand up as individuals for what we think as right , even if that sometimes mean we 'play right wrong' - the fanbase is and should be a broad church. The people who can't understand that soulful/perverse/immaterial thrust behind fandom - let's call them the ideological 'rinse and repeaters' - are in danger of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. That might be Hoos's and Les's job (as they see it), but it doesn't have to be mine. Meanwhile, it's common sense that, whatever the economic currents, if the club's hierarchy keep shouting their mouths off that everyone's for sale for decent fees or not, the club is unlikely to progress. (And don't talk to me about Brentford or I'll spit in your eye - who may well fail again this season, and at any rate don't prove a 'scientific' model of anything, as football isn't science). There will, of course, always be individual players who will have the talent, ambition and opportunity to move onto 'bigger things' and whom the club will cash in on, and that's no different in 2021 to how it was in 1977. But to say that's what football is 'about' is pitiful.
I'm unconvinced of the arguments for moving from LR, and don't need to rehearse these misgivings again - people get it or they don't. But I was gobsmacked to learn that we have 363,000+ supporters on the system. One of my questions would be how the club envisage pulling in, ooh, 1,000 more on a regular basis to help fill our beloved Family Stand, and what the strategic basis for growing the fanbase might be to justify moving to a larger ground, given that selling your best players every two years at best means young fans have no role models to identify with at an impressionable age. Such a big part of QPR down the years has been about stalwarts like Stan and Les and Macca and Magic Hat, as well as a team that played with style, panache and knew what it was about because it had 'buy-in' all over the park. If that's been steamrollered by balance sheets and shifting assets, symbolically topped off by a banker-turned-manager, the price will be paid at the turnstiles, more likely than not. It's what I believe is called false economies.
There certainly have been some heartening signs this year, though the bare facts are the likes of Charlie and Scarlet Johnansen are stop-gaps for now and the close season will be crucial. Whether the current management incumbents will finally deliver on their promises - a training ground at the eleventh time of asking, a new stadium, and, most importantly, upward-looking football ambition - remains to be seen - I probbly wouldn't bet on it, but football can deliver joyous caresses as well as kicks in the teeth. They have to prove themselves every day regardless. In the meantime, I hope at least some of us at least will hold onto our enthusaism, idealism, irrationalism and bloody-mindedness - in short, our fanaticism. I can't really think what else a fan's forum is for. [Post edited 24 Mar 2021 21:13]
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| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 21:25 - Mar 24 with 1406 views | GloryHunter |
Genuine question - does QPR get the £8.35 streaming fee for away games? IE if I had paid £10 to watch Reading away (which I didn't), who would have got my £8.35 - Reading or QPR? |  | | |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 21:42 - Mar 24 with 1373 views | daveB |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 21:25 - Mar 24 by GloryHunter |
Genuine question - does QPR get the £8.35 streaming fee for away games? IE if I had paid £10 to watch Reading away (which I didn't), who would have got my £8.35 - Reading or QPR? |
i think if you buy through QPR the money all goes to QPR |  | | |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 21:46 - Mar 24 with 1366 views | GloryHunter |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 21:42 - Mar 24 by daveB |
i think if you buy through QPR the money all goes to QPR |
But when we used to buy away paper tickets through QPR, weren't they just acting as a sales agent, and passing all the gate money to the away club? | | | |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 21:52 - Mar 24 with 1362 views | ted_hendrix |
To the best of my knowledge it used to be a 60%-40% split eg The fakes would have got 60%. |  |
| My Father had a profound influence on me, he was a lunatic. |
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| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 06:27 - Mar 25 with 1180 views | Northernr |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 21:46 - Mar 24 by GloryHunter |
But when we used to buy away paper tickets through QPR, weren't they just acting as a sales agent, and passing all the gate money to the away club? |
Yeh it’s different for the streaming though. The Accrington chairman has been bitching about this because obviously when they play Sunderland/ipswich/Pompey at home the away team are selling thousands of streaming passes and the home team doesn’t get any of it. |  | | |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 06:56 - Mar 25 with 1168 views | Northernr |
This is fair.  | | | |
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| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 07:30 - Mar 25 with 1132 views | distortR |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 06:27 - Mar 25 by Northernr |
Yeh it’s different for the streaming though. The Accrington chairman has been bitching about this because obviously when they play Sunderland/ipswich/Pompey at home the away team are selling thousands of streaming passes and the home team doesn’t get any of it. |
the importance of maintaining the differential |  | | |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 09:48 - Mar 25 with 1018 views | GloryHunter |
If I'd known Rangers get the money, I might have paid for a couple of Saturday away streams. | | | |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 12:18 - Mar 25 with 909 views | francisbowles |
A useful exercise when you separate the 'wheat from the chaffe' and thanks to Clive for doing that for us.
Difficult to understand accusations of false economies, when the club is desperate to keep it's 'head above water' and players simply have to be sold or we will fold.
With regard to the stadium, patience needed not only with the LC stadium but also with an eye on the London property market. The current market may change as more people want to move out, shopping centres become redundant and companies like Santander and BA announce they are carrying on with home working and looking to sell their buildings. The likelihood of other sites large enough in the right area though, is hard to envisage. | | | |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 12:36 - Mar 25 with 902 views | Esox_Lucius |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 12:18 - Mar 25 by francisbowles |
A useful exercise when you separate the 'wheat from the chaffe' and thanks to Clive for doing that for us.
Difficult to understand accusations of false economies, when the club is desperate to keep it's 'head above water' and players simply have to be sold or we will fold.
With regard to the stadium, patience needed not only with the LC stadium but also with an eye on the London property market. The current market may change as more people want to move out, shopping centres become redundant and companies like Santander and BA announce they are carrying on with home working and looking to sell their buildings. The likelihood of other sites large enough in the right area though, is hard to envisage. |
Announced today that Santander are pulling out of London & Bootle to set up in Milton Keynes. |  |
| The grass is always greener. |
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| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 12:57 - Mar 25 with 875 views | TheChef |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 12:36 - Mar 25 by Esox_Lucius |
Announced today that Santander are pulling out of London & Bootle to set up in Milton Keynes. |
New York London Paris Bootle |  |
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| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 16:47 - Mar 25 with 771 views | PinnerPaul |
I think its a difficult line to tread between the banal and the private - much of which we want to know, but can't!
Like,
How much is Charlie on, how much more is that than our maximum and therefore is it REALLY possible he will stay?
Do you think you will have to replace/supplement Dykes/Bonne next season?
What was our target this season, what is it now (League Position)
Otherwise it was really poor old Lee repeating that we can't reduce income - eg make everything cheaper and still want a better (ie more expensive) team. | | | |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 19:16 - Mar 25 with 720 views | derbyhoop |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 21:06 - Mar 24 by stainrods_elbow |
Today, I don't think Hoos, Les and Warbs are doing a bad job overall, though, like most of the most interesting people on this board, I fluctuate moodily and pricklishly and maverickishly as I see fit, and felt desolate at the start of the year when I felt that all three of them should walk. Of course, the fickleness of fans (not just the ones here who seem to think they're superior to some of the FF questioners) is something to behold here, depending on how results are going. But the idea that all of them are 100% trustworthy, top professionals in their field, and somehow self-sacrificing experts who understand the game in ways we could never aspire to, is just facile, especially if it precludes legitimate criticality and scrutiny of all of their decisions. Without the fans, none of them would have their high-paid jobs in any event, and, even if they were the greatest ambassadors the club had ever had, they would still have to be held to account on their ambitions, player sales, and everything else. Transparency, though, is hilarious in modern pro football - just because a club publishes its accounts, like any business has to, means jack shit when a CEO (he's hardly alone of course) can't come clean about a fee received for a star player whose development our money has helped fund, and how much of it will be reinvested. Most clubs treat fans like mugs and charge them through the nose - you'd have to be more starry-eyed than Peter Pan to believe otherwise. Unless and until fans take over the running of clubs on a systemic basis or there is a sea change in the running of the game, we'll go on being talked down to, patronised, misled and lied to on a regular basis. Football is its own circus, and we're mostly on the outside looking in, boys and girls. Can one seriously imagine another form of cultural entertainment where grown-ups would pay to have cardboard cut-outs of themselves stuck in a seat? As Barney Ronay has brilliantly and scarily argued ('Is it too late to halt football's final descent into a dystopian digital circus?' The Guardian, 1/10/20), we may or may not even have a game to be brought back to once 'this is all over'. In many ways, football fans are like abused children - constantly told they're 'special', while mostly just getting shafted.
On the basis of Clive's interestingly toned report, my impression was of a management team who are becoming quite a smooth and well-practised machine (whatever Hoos' impersonations of a rough sleeper may have been), somewhat detached from their audience, and professionally well-defended. Overall, I don't think any of them think very highly of the fan base, or are very fan-friendly, and the evidence is pretty plentiful. That doesn't mean that I'd expect much more from different faces, but it also doesn't mean I'm going to sit back and just assume all's for the best. (It would help if Hoos didn't keep telling us he doesn't get bonuses for selling players - a bit like Tony Blair telling the British people he'd never do anything to hurt the country before taking us into an Iraq bloodbath, it comes across as a guilty tic, Lee, so maybe have a word with your unconscious!)
Meanwhile, fans are the people who get to fantasise (L. fantaticus - mad, enthusaistic, inspired by a god, from fanum = temple/consecrated place), who carry the club's soul, and who understand that football isn't and can't be just a 'business', whether in Jim Gregory's era or in this one - even if neoliberalism, FFP/FFS and the cancer of careering marketisation seem to have even better minds locked into a mental straijtacket of conformity where they often can't see the wood (building a team and club for the kids of tomorrow) for the trees (money, agents, all the game's many shades of bullshit). We're the singers (and whingers), the compass and the conscience of any club worth its salt. We're also the ones who will stand up as individuals for what we think as right , even if that sometimes mean we 'play right wrong' - the fanbase is and should be a broad church. The people who can't understand that soulful/perverse/immaterial thrust behind fandom - let's call them the ideological 'rinse and repeaters' - are in danger of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. That might be Hoos's and Les's job (as they see it), but it doesn't have to be mine. Meanwhile, it's common sense that, whatever the economic currents, if the club's hierarchy keep shouting their mouths off that everyone's for sale for decent fees or not, the club is unlikely to progress. (And don't talk to me about Brentford or I'll spit in your eye - who may well fail again this season, and at any rate don't prove a 'scientific' model of anything, as football isn't science). There will, of course, always be individual players who will have the talent, ambition and opportunity to move onto 'bigger things' and whom the club will cash in on, and that's no different in 2021 to how it was in 1977. But to say that's what football is 'about' is pitiful.
I'm unconvinced of the arguments for moving from LR, and don't need to rehearse these misgivings again - people get it or they don't. But I was gobsmacked to learn that we have 363,000+ supporters on the system. One of my questions would be how the club envisage pulling in, ooh, 1,000 more on a regular basis to help fill our beloved Family Stand, and what the strategic basis for growing the fanbase might be to justify moving to a larger ground, given that selling your best players every two years at best means young fans have no role models to identify with at an impressionable age. Such a big part of QPR down the years has been about stalwarts like Stan and Les and Macca and Magic Hat, as well as a team that played with style, panache and knew what it was about because it had 'buy-in' all over the park. If that's been steamrollered by balance sheets and shifting assets, symbolically topped off by a banker-turned-manager, the price will be paid at the turnstiles, more likely than not. It's what I believe is called false economies.
There certainly have been some heartening signs this year, though the bare facts are the likes of Charlie and Scarlet Johnansen are stop-gaps for now and the close season will be crucial. Whether the current management incumbents will finally deliver on their promises - a training ground at the eleventh time of asking, a new stadium, and, most importantly, upward-looking football ambition - remains to be seen - I probbly wouldn't bet on it, but football can deliver joyous caresses as well as kicks in the teeth. They have to prove themselves every day regardless. In the meantime, I hope at least some of us at least will hold onto our enthusaism, idealism, irrationalism and bloody-mindedness - in short, our fanaticism. I can't really think what else a fan's forum is for. [Post edited 24 Mar 2021 21:13]
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That was a long ramble.
I think the 3 officials are as good a team as we are likely to get. I'm impressed they manage to get all the way through without losing their rag with some of the banal questions. Patience of Job.
It's standard practise these days not to reveal any detailed financial information like wages, or transfer fees. For good reasons.
The need to move from LR is paramount. We cannot make money except on match days and matchday income doesn't begin to cover the running costs. So the utopian hope of fans' ownership is a non-starter. Unless those fans are prepared to pump in at least £1m per month.
A combination of a bigger capacity new ground which would, hopefully, lead to more success on the pitch would attract new fans and, I believe, we could easily get 25,000+ crowds. |  |
| Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the Earth all one’s lifetime. (Mark Twain)
Find me on twitter @derbyhoop |
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| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 20:36 - Mar 25 with 684 views | stainrods_elbow |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 19:16 - Mar 25 by derbyhoop |
That was a long ramble.
I think the 3 officials are as good a team as we are likely to get. I'm impressed they manage to get all the way through without losing their rag with some of the banal questions. Patience of Job.
It's standard practise these days not to reveal any detailed financial information like wages, or transfer fees. For good reasons.
The need to move from LR is paramount. We cannot make money except on match days and matchday income doesn't begin to cover the running costs. So the utopian hope of fans' ownership is a non-starter. Unless those fans are prepared to pump in at least £1m per month.
A combination of a bigger capacity new ground which would, hopefully, lead to more success on the pitch would attract new fans and, I believe, we could easily get 25,000+ crowds. |
Neither particularly 'long', I don't think, nor 'rambling', compared to some of the think pieces, reports etc. on the site. Anyway, I'd like to think it's quality, not quantity! :-) I also agree/d with you to the extent that I said I wouldn't expect much more from any management team right now and give credit where it's due for the enhancements to the team this year etc. Which certainly doesn't mean I swallow official narratives hook, line and sinker, nor should I.
I liked the thrust of the question at the FF about 'giving fans something to hope for' by asking the board what THEIR ambitions were. That's a fair question for any fan who's worth his salt - in fact, it may be the quintessential question of being a fan at all - whether it's dismissed as somehow 'unworthy' or not in the conversational scheme of things. It's what any kid following QPR would want to know, which means the future of the fanbase. I also find this attitude of writing off some fans/questions as banal or trivial or whatever as pretty distasteful to be honest, even if they are not always marvellously articulated. LH, LF and MW all make great livings out of QPR and the money the fanbase puts in (which Hoos insists is our main income, though it definitely wouldn't be in the Prem), and the self-serving confidentiality/politicking/
lack of transparency around football (there's no good reason why we can't know how much Eze sold for, and how much is being reinivested) makes our awkward questions all the more needful.
As for fantasies of 25k crowds, give me strength! Even in our near Div 1 Championship-winning season with a ground capacity of 30k-35k, we weren't achieving that most of the time. There's simply no basis for it, and just another sign of some fans falling in for Hoos'/the club's marketing spin with not even a soupcon of critical thinking. Building a football ground isn't like building a supermarket - stack 'em high and the customers will magically come rolling in - because football clubs aren't 'brands', they're more like churches. Does this really need explaining? For those fans who have explicitly said they'd rather we stayed in the Champ anyway (not so much reaching for the stars as for the safe and familiar), moving makes even less sense. The club could, in my opinion, do a lot more to maximise sponsorship/non match revenue, but, because Hoos is not committed to making the best of staying at LR, they don't. [Post edited 25 Mar 2021 20:37]
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| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 10:15 - Mar 26 with 584 views | francisbowles |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 20:36 - Mar 25 by stainrods_elbow |
Neither particularly 'long', I don't think, nor 'rambling', compared to some of the think pieces, reports etc. on the site. Anyway, I'd like to think it's quality, not quantity! :-) I also agree/d with you to the extent that I said I wouldn't expect much more from any management team right now and give credit where it's due for the enhancements to the team this year etc. Which certainly doesn't mean I swallow official narratives hook, line and sinker, nor should I.
I liked the thrust of the question at the FF about 'giving fans something to hope for' by asking the board what THEIR ambitions were. That's a fair question for any fan who's worth his salt - in fact, it may be the quintessential question of being a fan at all - whether it's dismissed as somehow 'unworthy' or not in the conversational scheme of things. It's what any kid following QPR would want to know, which means the future of the fanbase. I also find this attitude of writing off some fans/questions as banal or trivial or whatever as pretty distasteful to be honest, even if they are not always marvellously articulated. LH, LF and MW all make great livings out of QPR and the money the fanbase puts in (which Hoos insists is our main income, though it definitely wouldn't be in the Prem), and the self-serving confidentiality/politicking/
lack of transparency around football (there's no good reason why we can't know how much Eze sold for, and how much is being reinivested) makes our awkward questions all the more needful.
As for fantasies of 25k crowds, give me strength! Even in our near Div 1 Championship-winning season with a ground capacity of 30k-35k, we weren't achieving that most of the time. There's simply no basis for it, and just another sign of some fans falling in for Hoos'/the club's marketing spin with not even a soupcon of critical thinking. Building a football ground isn't like building a supermarket - stack 'em high and the customers will magically come rolling in - because football clubs aren't 'brands', they're more like churches. Does this really need explaining? For those fans who have explicitly said they'd rather we stayed in the Champ anyway (not so much reaching for the stars as for the safe and familiar), moving makes even less sense. The club could, in my opinion, do a lot more to maximise sponsorship/non match revenue, but, because Hoos is not committed to making the best of staying at LR, they don't. [Post edited 25 Mar 2021 20:37]
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So on the last point, what do you suggest? | | | |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 10:28 - Mar 26 with 565 views | nix |
| How's that water pressure holding up? - Fans Forum on 10:15 - Mar 26 by francisbowles |
So on the last point, what do you suggest? |
Well it's nonsense, isn't it? All the other clubs that are making big losses are also not doing all they could to maximise sponsorship or improve non-match day revenue? Or could it be the much more plausible explanation than some conspiracy about evil LH that its actually v tough out there to balance the books, and having a more sustainable stadium that can bring in its own income through conferences, events etc is the way ahead. |  | | |
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