A quick glance at Tony Fernandes’s
twitter bio sees the internationally renowned entrepreneur and Queens Park
Rangers chairman describe himself as a dreamer.
Scroll a little further down and you will find him once again urging QPR
supporters for patience; the message: “keep calm, we will come good.” It will seem all too familiar to
fans, who, with more than a quarter of the season played and still no wins, are
left wondering when Fernandes will wake up and bring the nightmare reign of
Mark Hughes to an end.
The problem with the influx of
wealthy outsiders into the game’s highest positions is that they are not
footballing men, they do not have the knowledge and understanding of the sport that
past owners had, and rely heavily on advisers whose motives do not always match
up with their own or those of the fans.
Despite spending the summer
assembling a team of mercenaries akin to the latest Expendables blockbuster,
Fernandes finds his team 7 league positions worse off than at this stage last
season, and must be scratching his head as to where he has gone wrong.
Fernandes is just the latest in a
line of foreign owners to be disappointed by Hughes, and it is hard not to feel
a tinge of sympathy towards him (as much sympathy as one can have for a
multimillionaire).
