This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Fortunes can change quickly in the English Football League. At the beginning of the 24–25 season, QPR looked like one of the better teams in the Championship. Our new manager, a young Spaniard called Martí Cifuentes, had saved us from what looked like certain relegation in 23–24, and we’d brought in some decent players over the summer, including a much-need striker.

None of the pundits picked us as a team likely to go down, whereas nearly all of them had the previous year. I was confident we’d end the season in the top half of the table, maybe even make it to the play-offs. The Young family’s dogged support was finally going to pay off.

I should have known better. As I write, we’re 15 games into the 24–25 season and we’re marooned at the foot of the table, five points from safety. We haven’t won a game at Loftus Road since April and we’ve lost the first eight home games of the season, a new club record. Our £3 million new striker — the most we’ve spent on a player in years — has yet to score a goal and Martí, whom the QPR faithful treated as the Second Coming 12 months ago, is now on resignation watch. By the time you read this, he may well be gone.

It’s particularly depressing as we’re about to embark on the glut of games over Christmas and New Year — ten between 23 November and 1 January — that I usually look forward to as the highlight of the year. Going to see QPR, particularly at Loftus Road, has become an essential part of the whole Christmas experience for me.

I prefer going to football matches in winter — under the lights, wrapped up warm, seeing the breath in front of you — and midwinter is best of all. There’s no better present than a win at home in the third week of December. Just give me that and I could dispense with everything else, including the 2009 Grand-Puy-Lacoste on Christmas day.

The chances of that happening aren’t zero. We’ve got Preston North End at home on 21 December, and the last time we played them at Loftus Road we beat them 1-0. But the odds aren’t that great either. We’re in a pickle and it’s not obvious what Martí, or his successor, if he’s been replaced by then, can do about it.

So, what’s gone wrong?

To begin with, the new recruits aren’t that good. Shortly after appointing Martí in October 2023, the owners made Christian Nourry, a 26-year-old Frenchman, the CEO. That was a bold choice, to put it mildly. Before that, he’d worked at a football data analytics company called RETEXO and he played a big part in choosing which players to bring in during the summer window, basing his decisions on data rather than watching prospective recruits in action.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that approach. It was made famous by Billy Beane, the baseball manager, who used it to transform the fortunes of the Oakland Athletics in the early 2000s, a feat documented by Michael Lewis in Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003). But it’s easier to evaluate baseball players using statistical analysis than it is footballers, and a typical baseball game generates more usable data than a soccer match.

Which isn’t to say it can’t be done — the owners of some of the most successful football teams in the country swear by the “Moneyball” approach — but it’s more of an art than a science, leaving scope for less tangible qualities like “look” and “feel” when scouting players. Billy Beane is now a part owner of Barnsley, who got relegated from the Championship to League One shortly after he acquired his stake. They bounced back up and made it to the play-offs in the 20-21 season, but were relegated again the following year and have remained in League One since.

Nourry’s picks have, for the most part, turned out to be duds. One of them — a Danish midfielder called Nicolas Madsen — distinguished himself in our recent 1-4 defeat to Middlesbrough by not attempting a single tackle. Part of the problem is that nearly all the players Nourry brought in are from overseas and have no experience of playing in the Championship, which is a notoriously aggressive, physical league.

We’ve also been unlucky when it comes to injuries, with seven of our first team players currently unavailable. That was a problem for the R’s in the 22-23 season, but we fixed it by recruiting a remarkable director of performance called Ben Williams in July 2023 to oversee the club’s sports science, medical, physio and nutrition departments.

By the end of last season, we had more first team players available than any other team in the Championship, which helped us stay up, but we’re now sharing him with several other sports clubs, including the New York basketball team the Brooklyn Nets, and the players have been falling like flies.

For fans like me, who’ve been watching QPR struggle for the past two decades, it feels like the club is cursed. The light you think you can see at the end of the tunnel always turns out to be a mirage. Sacking Martí would be a terrible mistake — he’s the best manager we’ve had in years — but whenever we face a fork in the road we invariably take the wrong turning.

I’ll stick with the R’s till my dying day, but it would be nice to get the occasional win.