People of Shepherds Bush, rejoice! Flavio Briatore waddles away from Loftus Road for the final time as chairman, and I can once again come out as a QPR fan without blushing.
Signore Briatore fitted my club as comfortably as I fit my wife’s jeans. His awkward tenure summed up much of the ills of modern football ownership: a rich foreigner with no appreciation of the soul of British football, and particularly not at a level below the summit, lumbers in to conjure a revolution in the fortunes of the team, promising to heal a variety of ailments we didn’t know we were suffering from. Heavy on ambitious bluster (“Champions League within four years…”), but low on patience and humility. Flabbio talked the talk, but in such a rich accent that we couldn’t understand what he was saying. And he certainly didn’t understand anything we said.
His bizarre vision was to create some sort of glamorous oasis in the desert of the White City Estate. He must have dreamed of the luxuriously warm sirocco blowing through the Bush, but all he got was an icy economic mistral to chill his shrivelling knackers.
Briatore appears to be a successful businessman. God knows how that came about. His regime at QPR was studded with bad decisions.
Like hiring the out-of-touch Ali Russell as Marketing supremo: another man whose understanding of QPR could have been written with a magic marker in the margins of a Panini sticker. We have got used to Russell’s unique marketing skills. Apart from having the crass idea of sellotaping the names of season ticket holders to the back of their seat, his main achievement seems to have been to price much of the fanbase out its allegiance. The cost of attending a game has soared, while attendances have fallen. The assumption underlying the staggering price hikes seemed to be that fans are too stupid to notice; or if they did notice, too addicted to stop going.
Wrong.
Another Briatore masterstroke was to close down one of the popular stadium bars to turn it into an exclusive, invitation-only Italian restaurant. The club mascot, Jude the Cat, was exterminated, on the grounds that it was a symbol of bad luck in Italy. Don’t mind the kids, Fatty. The much-loved club badge was thrown in the bin and replaced with some weirdly over-designed nonsense with wispy bits that some claimed were there to make the badge look like him. Among the places this ghastly new icon appeared was on the £200 slippers he introduced. I wonder how many pairs of these were sold?
Actually, no. I don’t wonder how many pairs of these were sold. I can guess.
But the fat man’s worst sin was simply to pretend that the true supporters of the club didn’t exist. Not only did he refuse to address us directly, or even in the programme, or on the club website, but on two separate occasions, in on-the-record media interviews, asked rhetorically why he should listen to people who paid “only £20” to watch a game, when he had paid so much more to buy the club.
It’s puzzling how Briatore could have got it so wrong. Did he really think he could succeed in English football by insulting the supporters of the club?
A further blow came when his grand expansion plans for corporate hospitality wiped out much of the seating for ordinary folk around the halfway line. People who had sat there for generations were informed that their seats were no longer available. I had sat in this area myself for the last two or three seasons, and had come to enjoy the company of the more… mature followers who congregated here.
If I wanted to take up a seat in this new area, pretentiously called the C Club, it would have set me back £3,000. Instead, I was shifted away from the centre to the so-called ‘platinum’ seats. There was still no leg-room, and I now had a pillar to admire between me and the penalty area. Not only was it a far worse seat, but instead of paying £450 to be right on the halfway line, I was now expected to cough up £700.
Alas, it was enough to stop me renewing my season ticket, and unless I decide to catch a game in the next few months, this will be the first season since 1967 that I’ve not attended a single QPR match. Even while exiled in Yorkshire for more than a decade, I got along to many of the northern away games, as well as making regular trips to London for a slurp on a beaker full of the warm south. A combination of Briatore’s notoriety, and the ever-increasing cost, turned me into a refusenik. £700 to bear fortnightly witness to the steady decline of this once fine footballing academy, is way too high a price. It’s bad enough seeing one’s family in distress, but to have to pay a rogue like this for the experience?
There are still unpleasant elements present at the top of the club, notably Gianni Paladini, a shifty football agent whose intrinsic greasiness has lubricated the transfer dealings at QPR for several years now. We’ve acquired some decent players in this period: Buzsacky, Gorkks, Connolly, Routledge… but every gem seems to be accompanied by half a dozen extremely expensive lemons. You wonder why these deals were made. Or do you?
Even worse is his crude politicking. His modus operandi seems to be to ingratiate himself with small pockets of impressionable fans eager to suck up the froth of minor celebrity. In return, his ill-disciplined views filter down through the messageboards.
We are still stuck with Paladini, but at least his disreputable compatriot is out of our lives. For Briatore, we were just another business acquired cheaply, though after turning us, and himself, into a laughing stock, he may eventually concede that the bargain wasn’t quite so cheap after all.
Ultimately, we were nothing more than an appendage to his ego; the football club that dangled from his chunky corporate charm bracelet. Sadly, it failed to bestow any charm on him, and he sprinkled none on us.
