Four Minute Plan

QPR's Four Year Plan comes together, 2 years later than it could have been.

If you didn't see it, QPR: The Four Year Plan (click the link to watch it on iPlayer) aired last night on BBC2 after Match of the Day 2. It gave an incredible insight into the boardroom level of a football club, one you don't see often, especially with the complex set ups and foreign ownership we've become accustomed to in modern football. 


As I say, the focus was on the very top of QPR, with little in the way of manager/dressing room action but it still made very interesting viewing. When within the first two minutes of the documentary, Flavio Briatore (then part owner) of The R's blurts out "I hate this f**king forward, I'm going to sell him!" you knew it was going to be a little bit different to the match-by-match textbook answers trotted out by players and managers alike. 

Briatore explains to Ecclestone where he'd have passed the ball...

It also highlighted other things so evident football now. Fickle fans are everywhere, and I mean everywhere. From top to bottom, from loyal to armchair fans. When things are going well the same people who want rid of the board one minute, are the ones who are are telling the owners they are the best thing since sliced bread as they walk into the plush executive suites. QPR fans were outside Loftus Road singing songs about Briatore being a w**ker and "4 year plan, you're having a laugh!". But look at where they are now, inside 4 years they had the promotion to the Premiership they all wanted. Leaving all those fans with egg on their face. Mind they're probably at Loftus Road now singing something completely different. That's if they can afford the £60 for a ticket!!

Time runs out for AVB; either that or AVB is crouched down again!

The other, and most relevant point was the revolving door managers have to endure with owners who think they are playing a game of Football Manager. On the same day Andre Villas-Boas was sacked by Abramovich, his 7th manager since taking over Chelsea, Briatore underlined first hand the crazy tactics some owners employ. The programme shows him at a reserve's game, telling Iain Dowie to tell the reserve manager which subs to make and to tell them to get the ball to a certain player, because he wanted to see what they are like. He might as well have had the tracksuit on himself, and stood in the technical area he made that many commands. It's not what you'd think John W Henry does with Kenny Dalglish or The Glazers do with Fergie! 


Unsurprisingly, their best success came when they got a manager, Neil Warnock, and stuck with him. They had employed Dowie, Paul Hart, Paulo Sousa and Jim Magilton, with caretakers in between, before Warnock took command of the sinking ship. Maybe a lesson Chelsea could learn from this programme was to stick with a manager for a while, rather than chopping and changing and ending back at square one over and over again. 


While QPR had that in common with their London neighbours Chelsea, how they flashed the cash didn't. Briatore, Bernie Ecclestone and Lakshmi Mittal, all multi-billionaire's and joint owners of QPR refused to spend the cash they could clearly afford to. Instead it showed them scrimping and saving cash wherever possible, cutting the money they spent on sandwiches and flowers on a match day. That was all to fund investment in players, players which would eventually get them promoted to the Premier League. With so much money in their pockets, these men could have done that without saving a few hundred quid here and there. 

A typically passionate Warnock while at QPR.

Whether the success was down to the board changing their approach to their manager and sticking with Warnock, or whether it was Warnock's managerial prowess that engineered QPR's promotion, it may even have been a combination of the two, it worked, in the end. Having seen the approach from the owners in the beginning, and my bias to Warnock having got Scarborough promoted to the old money Division 3, I know where I'd have had my money on the influencing factor. Eventually they got there, but at times the four year plan, looked like a four minute plan, and would have been a 2 year plan if they'd have played it right from the start, rather than 2 years in!