Charlie, my 17-year-old son, was hopeful about QPR’s chances this season. True, we managed to avoid relegation only by the skin of our teeth in 2024-25, but we’ve just appointed a new manager: a Frenchman called Julien Stéphan, who won the Coupe de France in 2019 with Rennes, beating Paris Saint-Germain in the final, and getting into the last eight of the Europa League. In addition, we’ve had what football fans call a ‘good window’, recruiting several promising young players in the summer transfer period, including a much needed striker in the form of Richard Kone, a 22-year-old Ivorian who scored 21 goals for Wycombe Wanders last season. ‘I think we’re looking at a top six finish,’ said Charlie.
Fast-forward to last Saturday, when he and I travelled to the Coventry Building Society Arena to see the Hoops take on the Sky Blues, and he wasn’t feeling so optimistic. We shipped five goals in the first 45 minutes, our worst first half performance since 2004 – going on to lose 7-1. And Coventry could have scored more if they hadn’t taken their foot off the gas in the second half. The one consolation, and you can hardly call it that, was that Kone netted in the 91st minute. ‘Kone heads home,’ said the official QPR account on X, to which one fan replied: ‘Don’t blame him.’
Stéphan has yet to chalk up a win, having drawn his first game and lost the following three. Given his pedigree, Charlie and I had him down as a tournament specialist and thought we might go on a cup run under him. That would be a morale booster for QPR’s beleaguered supporters who have seen the team win only two FA Cup games in the past 17 years. But one of Stéphan’s losses was to Plymouth in the first round of the Carabao Cup. It’s an inauspicious start and a reminder of last season in which we won two of our first 17 games. Is 2025-26 going to be the year in which we go down to League One, the third tier of English football?
It’s early days and last Saturday’s drubbing was partly down to Christian Nourry, the club’s 27-year-old CEO. He fell out with our last manager, Marti Cifuentes, because the Spaniard wouldn’t do as he was told, so it’s a safe bet that Nourry has been involved in selecting the team. That might explain why we’ve benched Cifuentes’s first-choice goalkeeper, Paul Nardi, and replaced him with Joe Walsh, who’s much less experienced.
We shipped five goals in the first 45 minutes, our worst first half performance since 2004
Nourry is wedded to the ‘development model’, whereby you buy young players on the cheap, hone their skills then sell them for a profit; and the one thing Walsh has going for him is that he’s 23 whereas Nardi is 31. With a good season or two under his belt, he could be worth several million – James Trafford, a keeper who played in the Championship last season, has just been sold to Manchester City for £27 million – whereas Nardi, with fewer playing years ahead of him, is unlikely to fetch very much.
Walsh had a nightmare last weekend, failing to stop a single shot in the first half and, by my reckoning, making just one save in the second. Indeed, the low statistical likelihood of the Sky Blues scoring seven, given the distance of the players from the goal when they struck the ball, the angle, the type of shot, etc., has provoked a heated debate about a performance metric known as ‘expected goals’ (xG), which takes those factors into account. It assigns a probabilistic value to each strike based on how often similar shots have found the net in the past and the average xG for each of Coventry’s seven goals was just 0.07. This means that, statistically, only one in 14 comparable shots have resulted in goals before now. Critics of the metric say the gap between expected goals and actual goals in the Coventry game proves how unreliable it is, while defenders point to Walsh’s ineptitude. Regardless, it’s not the kind of debate any keeper wants to be at the heart of.
Our next game is against Charlton, a newly promoted side, and Stéphan has promised a very different performance. I suspect Nardi may be back in goal, not least because there are signs Nourry is becoming more flexible. Last Monday we signed two new players, including a 30 year-old defensive midfielder called Isaac Hayden. We had him on loan last year and I thought he was excellent – great at breaking up attacks and moving the ball forward. But, crucially, he’s only a year younger than Nardi, so not a good investment if your sole focus is selling on players at a profit. Let’s hope it’s dawned on the CEO that the development model is unlikely to succeed if you end up getting relegated.
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