The Best-Paid Plans Can Go Awry...

QPR, be warned: money has never guaranteed success, it merely offers an advantage - human intervention is still very much capable of cocking up the all those plans...

Last Updated: 25/10/12 at 17:23 Post Comment

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This is a preview of The Secret Footballer's weekly column. The full version will appear on his website - The Secret Footballer.com - on Saturday...

On the list of potential clubs to invest in, Queens Park Rangers must have been fairly high up for those people wealthy (or stupid) enough that were looking to get involved in football.

Working on the tried and never to be trusted method of 'build it and they will come', QPR are probably a decent stadium away from becoming a club that could one day make a lot of noise, and not just in the capital.

It has a huge training ground near Heathrow (handy for the foreign players), it is paying out ridiculously huge salaries (handy for all the players) and it is obviously a London club (handy for infinitely wealthy owners).

But before the club gets ahead of itself there is the thorny business of steadying the ship. The club's future needs to be secured as a fully-fledged member of the Premier League indefinitely, rather than for just one or two years.

QPR's owners certainly have the money to do it but money has never guaranteed success, it merely offers an advantage - human intervention is still very much capable of cocking up even the most watertight of business plans. I've seen it a million times, and also seen the damage it can cause.

What always interests me is seeing which way a team will go once it arrives in the 'promised land'. Some clubs remain loyal to the players that delivered success while other clubs can't wait to get the chequebook out. Rangers have already had a season in the Premier League and I am only just beginning to work out what the plan is.

Players seem to have arrived to take the places of those that you might think are capable of playing in the Premier League providing the team is strengthened elsewhere, such as Jamie Mackie. And some players are eased out such as Paddy Kenny, who rejoined Neil Warnock at Championship side Leeds United. His replacement from Inter Milan, Julio Cesar, will probably be on a king's ransom and isn't, in my opinion, any better than Kenny.

All of this starts to hint at the possibility of a plan; rather than buying football players to ensure the club's Premier League survival, QPR have instead opted to spend millions of pounds on nothing more than reputations.

I have been in this position very recently and believe me it can go spectacularly wrong, and on Saturday on www.thesecretfootballer.com I will be opening up about that exact experience.

You can follow The Secret Footballer on Twitter here, or buy his book here, which we reviewed here

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