This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
QPR didn’t make it into the play-offs — shock! — so our season is at an end. We secured a total of 56 points, the same as in 23-24, but finished in 15th place, three higher than last time.
A marginal improvement, but not enough to save our manager, Martí Cifuentes, who at the time of writing is on gardening leave and expected to depart imminently.
That was partly his choice, having entered into talks to move to West Bromwich Albion when we still had a game left to play. West Brom, who finished ninth, are one of five (at the time of writing) Championship clubs currently without a manager, with several more likely to be in the same boat. That’s par for the course. The average tenure of a Championship boss is about eleven months. By that measure, Cifuentes has beaten the odds by being at the helm for 17 months.
Managers are usually forced out when their teams underperform, but that’s not really true of QPR this season. Given our wage bill and injury problems, Martí has done okay; well enough to be in contention to manage at a bigger club. Not a Premiership team and not West Brom, we have since been informed but perhaps one of the sides relegated from the top tier, such as Southampton. With a £49 million parachute payment, the Saints will probably push to go straight back up, which makes them an attractive prospect for an ambitious manager.
The fact that Cifuentes may be able to get that job in spite of QPR’s mediocre season is a good illustration of why gaffers last such a short time in this league. If you fail, you’re sacked; if you succeed, you get poached. And if you do neither, you still might be headhunted. Hence why promotion is the dream for most Championship head coaches. That way, they get to stay at the helm and end up managing a Premiership club.
I imagine that’s why Martí has got itchy feet. The Hoops made a bid for promotion in 21-22, probably because it was the only way to retain the services of our then manager, Mark Warburton, who’d been in charge for two years and finished the 20-21 season in ninth place, our best performance since being relegated from the Prem in 2015. That meant spending money we couldn’t afford on players in the hope that our share of the Premier League TV money would more than make up for it. But the plan didn’t work — we finished 11th — and the upshot was we had to cut costs in the following two seasons to avoid being penalised for overspending. That, in turn, meant almost getting relegated, finishing 20th in 22-23 and 18th in 23-24.
The club now has a new CEO in the form of 27 year-old Christian Nourry, and he’s been keeping the purse strings tight, preferring to inch his way up the table rather than gamble on promotion. Before hopping on a train to the Midlands, Cifuentes will have given Nourry the chance to make him an offer: stick around and you can have £25 million to spend on signings over the summer, enabling you to make a promotion push. But Nourry wouldn’t play ball, so Martí is on his bike.
Given that it didn’t end well the last time the club gave in to a manager’s demands, I think our CEO is right to stick to his guns. Yes, the amount you spend on players is the best predictor of where you’ll end up in the table, but spending big is no guarantee of success. A case in point is Luton, which has just suffered the ignominy of back-to-back relegations after finishing in the bottom three of the second tier this season.
How it managed that after receiving a parachute payment of £49 million, and with the fifth highest wage bill in the division, is a matter for speculation. Their manager, Rob Edwards, had built up a lot of goodwill by getting Luton promoted, but that began to ebb away after they were relegated and still struggled to win — even QPR managed to do the double over them.
Edwards was replaced in January by Matt Bloomfield, but it took a while for him to impose his style of play. Even though the club won five of its last 10 games, it wasn’t enough to keep them up. The Hatters’ only consolation is that they used some of their Premier League riches to develop a new stadium, which they’re due to move into in the 28-29 season. Let’s hope they can stay in the EFL between now and then.
Though I think Nourry is right to be cautious, his strategy of using data analytics to identify and buy undervalued players, develop them and sell them on for a profit is a bit hit-and-miss, judging by the players he brought in last season. Our best hope of doing better next season is if Nourry gets better at picking winners, including a replacement for Cifuentes.
