This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

My passion for football came relatively late in life. As a child, I was a Chelsea fan, God help me, but rarely went to games and lost interest in my teens. The first time I got properly into it was in my late twenties when England did surprisingly well in Italia 90. On holiday in France, I watched the games on a portable black-and-white television. As the national side progressed the players seemed to grow in size until, by the time we reached the quarter-finals, it was like watching a team of giants. I remember talking to my late father about this, and he told me he’d had the same sensation about Churchill during the Second World War.

That made me an England fan, but I didn’t develop an interest in club football until 2003, when my wife Caroline gave birth to Sasha, our first child. Suddenly, the house filled up with women and their babies, and I found all that oestrogen a bit suffocating. We were living in Shepherd’s Bush, just round the corner from Queens Park Rangers, and football seemed a good antidote. So off I went. A year later I bought my first season ticket and have been a regular ever since.

It turned out to be a poor way of shirking parental duties. The following season, Caroline insisted I take Sasha with me and before long, she was joined by Ludo, Freddie and Charlie. So much for a few hours off on a Saturday afternoon.

The upshot is we’ve become a QPR family. It’s even reached the point where we can’t go away at Christmas because we don’t want to miss going to any home games over the holidays. The closest we got was renting an Airbnb in Cardiff after Christmas one year because the Rangers were playing Cardiff City on Boxing Day (a dismal 0-0 draw). We made it back in time to see us lose 0-3 to Luton on 29 December.

Disappointing results aren’t uncommon. QPR were founder members of the Premier League in 1992 and finished fifth the following season, above every other London club. Since then our fortunes have declined. In August we embarked on our ninth consecutive season in the second tier after avoiding demotion by the skin of our teeth. The trouble began in the summer of 2022, when we parted company with Mark Warburton, a journeyman manager who’d kept us up for three seasons, and replaced him with Michael Beale, an unknown quantity.

Beale started well, made a big song and dance about rejecting an offer from Wolverhampton Wanderers — “Integrity is a real big thing for me and loyalty” — and then buggered off to Glasgow to manage Rangers a month later. That left us with a big hole to fill in the middle of our season.

The CEO and director of football did their best, first appointing Neil Critchley, who only managed to win once during his 12-game tenure, then Gareth Ainsworth, a former QPR player who’d enjoyed some success as the manager of Wycombe Wanderers. Unfortunately, Ainsworth was no better: he won just five of his 28 matches in charge. When he got the boot last October, he’d lost six games on the trot, leaving us in the relegation zone. A return to League One looked inevitable.

At this point, my kids began to lash out, asking why we hadn’t transferred our loyalty to a Premier League club when we’d moved out of Shepherd’s Bush. I tried to persuade them of the benefits of supporting a struggling team — rare wins produced feelings of euphoria unknown to Arsenal or Man City fans. Not only that, but when our luck changed, as it inevitably would, we could congratulate ourselves on having stuck with the Rs through thick and thin.

Then, a miracle arrived in the diminutive form of Spaniard Martí Cifuentes. Formerly the head coach of Swedish club Hammarby, he wasn’t on anybody’s bingo card, but was recommended by Christian Nourry, a 26 year-old employee of a football analytics company hired to carry out an audit of QPR. The owners must have liked the cut of his jib, because three months later they made him CEO.

Cifuentes immediately began to turn things around, winning three and drawing three of his first seven games in charge. He saved us from relegation with a 4-0 victory over Leeds in the penultimate game of the season. In the transfer windows, he and Nourry have taken a more unsentimental, data-driven approach than their predecessors and brought in several talented players.

So, fortune is smiling again on QPR. We have one of the most “progressive” managers in the league (a term of approbation in football), a wunderkind CEO and a decent striker. More importantly, it’s as if a cloud has been lifted from the Young family. We’re looking forward to the glut of games around Christmas and may even rent an Airbnb in Swansea so we can go to the away fixture on Boxing Day. With a bit of luck, it won’t be a dismal 0-0 draw.