QPR fans will remember January well: as Harry Redknapp scrambled to keep the club in the Premier League, and sprayed Tony Fernandes’ money all the way across Europe in doing so, all the talk was of how this club was another Portsmouth in the making and how the outlay was completely unsustainable.
…and right at the heart of that argument, was the acquisition of Christopher Samba.
“Fernandes is being naive! QPR will never recover from this! He’ll walk away from the club if they’re relegated!”
Really, it was the press at their worst: a group of journalists offering sneery criticism of how a very successful businessman should be running what is, essentially, a business.
Rangers may well have dropped-out of the Premier League, but the evidence supporting the fashionable doom-prophecy is becoming rather thin on the ground: Christoper Samba has this morning been sold back to Anzhi for £12m, and Fernandes has recouped his fee on the player within six months – yes, there’s a deadweight loss in the sense of the wage spend, but Loftus Road is looking nothing like the financial black-hole it was projected to be six months ago.
He spent big, but give him his dues: he clearly had safety nets in place to counter the financial detriment of demotion.
At the core of this, is the tangible animosity and distrust we have for foreign owners – one suspects that, had Fernandes grown-up on the South Africa road estate, he would have been cast as a local boy doing his very best for a London club. It’s all in the Malaysian passport though: he’s foreign, so he’s actually an ego-driven vulture putting one of ‘our’ clubs at risk for the sake of his own ambition.
Fernandes equipped a succession of British managers with enough money to potentially do very well in the Premier League, and he got his fingers burnt – but maybe we can without the overwhelming sense of joy at that failure, or without the melodrama which accompanied his attempts to put a competitive side on the pitch.
