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Reply | QPR Women
at 13:08 30 May 2025
"Why all of a sudden the push" is a question with two answers.
Yes, part of it is the social agenda. This stuff isn't nefarious. Women have played football pretty much as long as men have, but that doesn't mean they've been equally treated. Men's football is a gigantic global product with squillions invested in it; on the grassroots side, there's boys teams at every conceivable youth level. When I was growing up there was nothing like that for girls; we played mixed up to under 11s, but after that the leagues were segregated. That worked fine for the boys who could play youth leagues all the way through to adulthood. The girls were told to find another club.
It's easy to shrug and say well, women don't want to play football anyway, but that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Plenty of women like sports and plenty of them participate in sports that have structures that welcome them. There's no reason that women should play netball and hockey and tennis but not football or rugby or cricket, except that they're treated well in the former and not in the latter.
All that's changed now is that people are actively trying to create for women the kind of structures - the clubs, the leagues, the youth coaching - that already exist for men, and are treating women's success as being valid in its own right. Active work takes effort, and creates noise, which is what you notice.
"Love for the game" is a red herring; people don't love what doesn't exist. There has to be a game to love first. That stuff has been growing, but it's not like millions of people in their 40s and 50s and 60s are going to all have Damascene conversions to follow the women's game; it's the kids today who'll grow up with a world where women's football is taken seriously who'll be the ones who have a lifelong passion for it.
Putting that stuff aside, the second point is a commercial one. Women's football is a much smaller market than men's. It's much cheaper to get into and much cheaper to get the TV rights and all of that kind of thing. The last round of PL rights went for £4.5bn; the recent WSL rights cost £65m. For a tiny fraction of the cost you can get more games to show; once you've got the product, you're damn well going to promote it to get a return on that investment.
From an investor point of view, I'm surprised more of them aren't putting money into the women's game. Look at QPR. Our owners are more or less stuck on the men's side; PSR prevents them splashing cash to get promoted, and working within its bounds traps us in the lower reaches of the Championship. Clubs can, over the long haul, dig themselves out of that, but they need to be smart and lucky, and even then you can be Bristol City and find gems at youth level and sell them for £20m each and finally squeak into the playoffs and then get blown out 6-0 on aggregate by a club with parachute payments. If you're lighting money on fire either way, why not spend some of it on the women's side where you'll get a lot more for the cash and might actually win something? |
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Reply | Question about Eze sell-on clause
at 13:21 21 May 2025
That isn't quite the same thing. The classic 'swap deal' is just that, an actual swap - you've got this player, we've got this player, let's change them around. There'll be accounting off the back of it, but it wouldn't help us, because no money would change hands. They also just don't really happen much, even though the press loves suggesting them as rumours; it's rare that two clubs have exactly the player that the other needs and values them as being much the same. Even the Zlatan/Eto'o swap involved Barca paying €40m on top.
What these clubs were doing (as the article outlines) is two separate deals. You buy my player for the amount I need to show a profit today, and I'll buy your player for what you need to show a profit tomorrow. It relies on quirks of financial reporting standards - because academy players have little or nil value, the sale value is basically all profit, and you can book it immediately, while your cost for the player coming the other way is amortised over the contract length so it has a much smaller impact. You also don't have to pay them much by way of actual wages, because they're academy kids with no track record; they're on stupid money for 22 year olds with no real experience, but they're cheap in terms of the wage structure of these clubs.
Neither City nor Palace have the same incentives here; these are both players they paid fees for, and while they're probably amortised down a fair bit now, they're not worth nothing. Palace don't have PSR issues, so they have no need to try and get a quick hit of paper profits; they'd also be picking up twin burdens in the other direction because Grealish will want the kind of wages he's on at City. £15m of pure profit for a player you don't rate in return for having to take on a low-wage player that you also don't rate on a five-year deal is a nice way to fiddle the figures if you're riding the line; £100m for a high-wage player does you no PSR favours in the short term and locks you into a long and expensive contract in the future. Grealish is 29; do you think a club as astute with transfers as Palace is going to give him a five-year deal to do City a favour? |
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Reply | End of Term Report 24/25 – Goalkeepers
at 11:06 19 May 2025
It's very QPR that we're deficient all across the pitch but the one area that you really want a single unquestioned #1 who plays every week and never rotates we've got three strong choices and a handful of youth players that also look good.
E: after listening to the Patreon pod, one minor correction, we do know about the JCS injury - it was the hip injury that he had surgery on. [Post edited 19 May 13:06]
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Reply | Rest of the Championship thread
at 14:48 16 May 2025
Per Companies House, their turnover in 2023/24 was basically the same as ours, with them playing in League Two. A loss of £2m compared to our £13m. Very likely that's gone up in the meantime.
The celebrity owners are throwing money at it, but as you say, it also helps with the kind of income generation from sponsorships and shirt sales that QPR could only dream of. Can't see United Airlines and Meta/Facebook queueing up to sponsor us. |
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Reply | How the other half lives
at 11:13 13 May 2025
The food poisoning will match the vibe of our latest 3-0 home loss. |
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Reply | A couple of your favourite games 24/25
at 13:44 7 May 2025
Norwich 3-0 because I had to watch it on my phone being an unsociable twt at a kids birthday party, so it was nice to be justified by watching them lose their heads as we beat them comfortably.
Luton 2-1 as others have said.
Honourable mention for the Bristol City game since I was able to go to that one and while it was rubbish most of the way through that Smyth goal was unbelievable. |
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Reply | The Madsen rehabilitation thread
at 16:20 4 May 2025
On the subject of Dozzell, Madsen already has more goal involvements (3 goals, 3 assists) from 34 games than Andre managed in two and a half seasons here. |
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Reply | Off-season Business
at 16:58 19 Apr 2025
The question is whether we could get a similar type of striker with no injury issues for the same as what we'd be paying Frey. You'd imagine someone who offers what he does and is always available is going to cost a lot more. |
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Reply | The Madsen rehabilitation thread
at 16:48 19 Apr 2025
To be fair to him two of those second halves have been Oxford where Field got injured and the shape had to change and Preston where he moved out to the left to cover Saito being injured. As he said himself after the Oxford game, everyone knows he's not a winger.
I thought he was done after that FA Cup game in January so I'm glad he's come back and started showing more of what we bought him for. With any luck he can get some more minutes in and have a good end of the season and work on stamina/physicality over the summer to go with the vision and passing ability. |
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Reply | Easter Bunny PNE Match Thread
at 14:10 19 Apr 2025
It was a little bit later on when Ashby went off for Frey. We went to 3 at the back with Dunne/Morrison/Edwards; Andersen described it as a 3-4-3, something like:
Dunne/Morrison/Edwards
Smyth/Varane/Colback/Paal
Andersen/Frey/Kolli |
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Reply | Edwards just makes it look Eze
at 15:15 16 Apr 2025
Sure, but the point is that you don't compete with Southampton in the summer of 2024 to sign him when he's got 100 league games under his belt, you look at picking him up in 2022 when Peterborough have just got relegated and he'd probably love a move back into the Championship, or in 2023 when he's played nearly every game for them and they've made the play-offs.
Obviously there's loads of caveats. Maybe we did try and he wasn't interested, or Peterborough wanted more money than we were willing to pay, or we had other priorities and targets - in 2021-22 the club probably thought they had their centre-backs for the next few years lined up with Dunne and Dickie. One club is never going to spot every player and be able to get them, especially one with a budget towards the bottom end of the Championship; there'll be loads of near-misses and players you wonder why we never signed them and that's just football. With Edwards specifically though it's that extra dimension - fairly local boy, played non-league near us, played against us 3 times in a season in a team we couldn't lay a glove on, and you can see how bloody good he is immediately. As Clive said, the fact this seems to happen so often to us doesn't encourage you to think our scouting and recruitment is as good as it might be. |
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Reply | Satio.
at 14:31 15 Apr 2025
W12 pod suggested that Lommel have an option to extend and we've basically got an option to buy that which all seems bloody mad but then this is football. |
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Reply | The season 25-26 squad thread
at 09:59 15 Apr 2025
Surely we're safer if they go up? They'll be looking to spend more money on better players than Chair. Same with Dunne at Sheffield Utd; they wanted him as an option for a couple of dozen games at the sharp end of a Championship season, but they'd surely not be looking to bring him in for the PL, especially not at right back where he's played almost all of his games for the last 18 months. We're more likely to be in danger from a Southampton or Ipswich coming the other way and looking for bargains to replace players that don't fancy slogging it out down here for a season. |
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Reply | Edwards just makes it look Eze
at 09:53 15 Apr 2025
He started playing league games at Peterborough when he was 17 and was doing 40+ games a season at 18. Played at Wembley and won a cup 10 days after turning 21. Liam Morrison, nearly identical in age and a player I think we all rate, was playing every other game in the German fourth tier when Edwards had already done 78 league games including 34 in the Championship; if Ronnie had sat on his arse and stopped playing football at the end of 2022/23 he'd still now have more league appearances than Morrison does and nearly double if you discount playing for Bayern II against pub teams. I'm convinced the only reason he's not playing in the PL is that Southampton have three older players in his position and they'll sell one of those first before doing the same with Ronnie in about 2027.
Even putting aside physical scouting, Peterborough beat us 3 times in one season in that period and Edwards started every game. All that development model stuff and nobody at the club looked at the teenager playing as starting centre back at a team that beat us every time we played them and thought we ought to have more of a look?
Love everything about him except that those surging runs out of defence will be going in the other direction next year as he helps Southampton smash their way back out of the Championship. [Post edited 15 Apr 9:53]
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Reply | 2030 World Cup
at 12:21 11 Apr 2025
That's not fair, they had an open and competitive selection process and it's pure coincidence that they sprang it on everyone with no notice and a tight deadline and the Saudis had a bid ready to go and nobody else did. These things just happen and we shouldn't trouble ourselves asking questions like "doesn't this all look very, very corrupt?" |
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Reply | And breathe – Report
at 12:16 11 Apr 2025
The thing that gets me is that in practical terms the 4-2-3-1 and 4-3-3 just aren't all that different. You swap a Field/Morgan for a Chair/Dembele (or Andersen in a pinch) and the latter starts five yards further up the pitch. Theoretically it enables you to get another 'creative' player on, but look at Sam rampaging around on Wednesday. All of Colback, Varane and Morgan are technically able too, and the gulf between them and the little '10s' isn't that vast. Our choices aren't "agricultural football played by 6'4" lumps" vs. "2010 Barcelona," we're slightly tweaking the position and profile of one player, accepting a significant decrease in legs/engine/strength in return, and watching results drop every time we do it. Who does this matter so much to that we keep trying? |
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Reply | Is Nourry that bad?
at 13:46 10 Apr 2025
Bit of a mixed bag. There's been a lot of good changes since he came in - cutting down the overloaded academy set-up, setting standards for the youth/dev squads that expect players to be progressing fast. The comms was absolutely dreadful over the summer, but he does seem to have taken some of that on board with things like the injury updates. He seems to have been decisive in a lot of areas and pushed to do things that Hoos just couldn't be bothered with by the end, but that's married to having some very strong ideas on things like the contract lengths that just don't make any sense and contribute to feeling like the club is actively walling itself off from the fans.
On the recruitment side I think the misses are very big, but the overall trend is mostly of successes. Just looking at this season:
Nardi, Saito, Morrison, Edwards, Varane are all proper first-team players. Edwards obviously not ours, but managing to get a player as good as that at short notice in an injury crisis is impressive. Saito may or may not be here next year, but at the very least he's been a key member of the squad, especially with Chair being out so much. Whatever else you want to say about players we own vs. players we've loaned I think Yang also has looked decent in the minutes he's done; mistakes made, but would you rather have done the back half of the season without him?
Dembele looked good initially but has struggled to make an impact since coming back from injury. He set up the third goal really well last night though and may just be a case that as he gets back to full match fitness he shows more of the potential that was there. Santos looked overwhelmed by the league, but we got him in cheap and shifted him quickly; any recruitment model looking for value in foreign leagues is going to turn up players like that who just don't cut it in the Championship and at least he was in and out in short order instead of rotting in the reserves for three years. Bennie and Morgan were cheap dev squad prospects who've ended up with more first team minutes than I imagine either of them was expecting; Morgan arguably saved our season in the middle, and while Bennie hasn't done anything spectacular he's at least been a willing body and not made anything worse. For their age/experience you'd not ask much more.
Ashby, not good enough, and it sounds like we decided against Hayden (who would have been a bloody useful player to settle our midfield when we were bedding in lots of inexperienced new recruits!) to get him instead. He did a job at left back when we desperately needed it; hopefully he was cheapish and we can say thanks but off you go back to Newcastle now and try your luck elsewhere. Again, we'll get some of these every year, and at least Ashby has always looked like he wants to play when given the chance, unlike say Ethan Laird.
Celar and Madsen are the two big misses. Celar a bit hard to judge for me; he struggled badly for the first part of the season and I think he does demonstrate a big flaw in our model in that he simply is not the kind of player who thrives in the system we want to play, but the two goals against Cardiff were really well-taken and he looked much more like the striker we were hoping for against Watford before the injury took him out for the season. Maybe Cardiff was just a dog having its day, maybe he would have kicked on from there. Madsen on the other hand has continually looked like he's just not suited to the league, and is the biggest miss for looking solely at stats and data. Last night looked like he could be coached into filling his role after all, and he can't help what the club paid for him, but spending that much money on a budget like ours and getting a player who needs to get 40 games into the season to look like he can cope with the physicality of one of the poorer teams in the division isn't great.
If we end the season and 12 signings turns into 4 starters that we own (assuming Saito ends up bought), a loan that goes back having excelled (Edwards), another that was fine (Yang), one that didn't work out (Ashby), a handful of prospects for the dev squad who are already playing a role in the matchday squad, and a couple of players that weren't good enough, that's a reasonable hit rate.
The big one for me is will any lessons be learned? It does seem like there's been changes in approach during the course of the season, and some climbdowns on some things. If the summer involves us buying another 10 lads out of the Czech league who're all 5'6" waifs who want to play at 10 then clearly not, but if we're a little more pragmatic about physicality and experience then I'll be cautiously optimistic. |
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Reply | Nardi booking
at 13:08 10 Apr 2025
We'd done the same routine (outfield player stands over the ball then Nardi wonders over to take it like he's out for a nice stroll in the park) a few times, and I guess the ref decided he was going to just book the common denominator and send a clear message that he was tired of it. |
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