Looking back, we never had a pause to build a stable squad. From the second I took over, we were fighting relegation, survived, bought players to stay up but got relegated, fought to get back up and then were fighting to stay up again. There was no stability. And at the end of that season, the average age of the squad was nearly thirty-one – we had a lot of older players on big contracts who weren’t putting enough in to justify their wages. It was the wrong way forward – just as Joey had been saying.
Although Chris Ramsey did well, he wasn’t quite right for the job and we let him go back to managing the youth squad at the beginning of November. Neil Warnock helped us out for a month while we hunted down our next manager. I actually wanted Neil to stay on – we got some good results under him and it was impressive to see what he achieved in such a short space of time. But the longer view prevailed: we needed someone younger who could rebuild the side.
We hired Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, Chelsea’s former striker and twice winner of the Premier League Golden Boot. Since retiring, Jimmy had been working at his managerial career and had been successful. When we got him in, he’d secured promotion for Burton Albion from League One to the Championship – the first time the club had reached that level of competition. We thought Jimmy had everything: he was young, strong and a striker so we assumed he’d want to play attacking football. In fact, we played ugly football and looked like a struggling side under Jimmy.
As the 2015–16 season progressed, Jimmy couldn’t make his mark on the club and our results were poor. We ended up a mediocre twelfth but hoped that the summer and the new season would start better.
I was, in the end, the person to say that we had to let Jimmy go because I was so frustrated by the way we were playing. We ended up drawing more games than we won or lost and the side to me felt like it lacked ambition. Jimmy had some strange ideas – playing without a striker sometimes – and I thought we were going to struggle because he was obsessed with one player, Tjaronn Chery, whom he built the team around, and wasn’t giving other players like Conor Washington a chance. So eventually we decided we should let him go after we lost to Brentford 2–0. Les did the deed on 5 November 2016 and I went home to Kuala Lumpur.
Results on the pitch were the problem during Jimmy’s spell as the manager, but to give him his due, he – along with Chris Ramsey – had started cleaning up the club. He did a great job of moving the older players on, changing the culture and taking the academy more seriously. Finally our development programmes were getting the focus they deserved. One statistic shows the effect of their work: at the start of the 2016–17 season, the average age of the first team squad was down to around twenty-four.
Less tangibly but just as importantly, the culture was starting to become more like AirAsia – where players come through the ranks and find their best position. Up to that point, I don’t think QPR had had a player come up through the academy to the first team. Now we’ve got five or six players who’ve all ‘graduated’ and are either on the bench in the squad or in the team.
After we let Jimmy go, we looked at all kinds of managers. Then our head of communications, Ian Taylor, who’s a sounding board for me, said: ‘Why don’t you try Ian Holloway?’ On the other hand, Lee Hoos, our new CEO, and Les Ferdinand, director of football, were a bit unsure. Their view was that although he was a former player and probably one of the most energetic managers around, Holly might not be strategic enough to move the club in the direction we all agreed was needed. We wanted a new manager to develop the academy and to have a more organic approach to the way the whole club functioned, training players through the academy into the first team.
I just called Ian up and we started to talk. I was blown away. Here was a manager who loved the club so much he didn’t even ask about the salary! Ian’s focus was on the job alone and doing the best for QPR. His attitude rose above even the most dedicated people I’d met.
I spoke to Ruben and said, ‘This guy’s unreal; he’s not interested in money or the deal, he just wants to be QPR manager.’
I felt it was the right fit for the club. So I pushed for him and we got him.
Holly’s first game was at home against Norwich. Norwich got a player sent off in the second minute. We went 2–0 up, Norwich got one back and the last fifteen minutes were really edgy. We held on for 2–1.
The season ended OK. We’re finally rebuilding. After five years I feel that we’ve got what I’ve always dreamed about: a QPR team that really are a QPR team through and through. Les Ferdinand, Ian Holloway and Marc Bircham, all former QPR players, are now at the heart of running the club.
Holly has been picking academy players – two are now starting for the first team and there are five or six hovering on the fringes. That hadn’t happened in my five years as chairman.
Other aspects of the club have started to flourish. We’ve got a robust scouting system in place after Les Ferdinand brought in Gary Penrice, who played at QPR with Holloway as it happens. The investment in the academy is paying off. I always said I wanted players with blue in their blood – that was what I was all about – and we never had it. Most of the managers we had didn’t want to look at the youth set-up as a source of players; even Jimmy had talked repeatedly about the quality of the academy but never followed that through with his team selection.
I’m more optimistic about QPR than ever now. We have the right team, the right culture, and we are starting to get the right players. It’s a long-term strategy but it’ll pay off.
11. The Beautiful Game
Soundtrack: It’s Like This by Rickie Lee Jones
AirAsia has been the spine of my working life. Without it, I wouldn’t have been on the starting grid at the Malaysian Grand Prix or on the Wembley pitch being lifted on Joey Barton’s shoulders. But even before aviation, football had always been my passion – it’s the thread running through my life.
The difference between running most other businesses and running a football business comes down to one word: control. While I can control a lot of what happens at AirAsia, when I’m watching a football match I can’t do anything. The manager picks the team and the players go out on the pitch and that’s it. It’s a very strange experience for me because all I can really do is cross my fingers, sit in the stand and talk to Les Ferdinand.
And you never know what you’re going to get. Some days the team play unbelievably and then when you expect them to do well, they don’t turn up. That’s what makes it exciting and terrifying – you genuinely never know what’s going to happen.
So, I’m in football because I love it. It’s not a business you make money at. There are always buyers knocking on the door for QPR because a football club is a scarce asset. But I’m not selling because I love it so much.
There are lessons I have learned about football, management and leadership which I apply to my other businesses; and then, after watching football up close for five years, there are things about the game itself which I feel need to be said.
As a chairman, the first thing you have to do is to use your head all the time rather than your heart. Passion is important – you’ve got to have passion on the pitch – but that passion is quite different from using passion to make decisions. And I think you’ve always got to take a deep breath before you make a decision. Faced with a big decision, I always take a couple of days because it’s too easy to react on the basis of a strong feeling.
A lot of the problems I faced early on at QPR were because I didn’t question enough and I wasn’t there. I thought that the people in place knew what to do and had good reasons for making the decisions they did. That’s by no means always the case. It’s taken me a few seasons but I now have a team that I trust running the club. This is so important because I can’t be there all the time but now the decisions made when I’m away more truly reflect how I think the club should be run. On the flip side, I did learn one thing about being a leader: the necessity of focusing. When I was involved with Formula One, I was also trying to run QP
R and AirAsia. None of them flourished. AirAsia in particular started to slide and that was something Din and I had built from the bottom up; I felt it should be able to continue to flourish without our exclusive attention. But it didn’t. And QPR and Caterham F1 weren’t working as well as they should have either. Focus, being present, watching, listening and talking to people on the ground are vital to understanding what’s happening throughout a business because only that way can you a) motivate and b) catch problems before they become infectious. To be successful you have to focus. Without that, I simply couldn’t give each business the attention they needed.
I’ve learned that the chairman’s role is agreeing on the budget, sticking to the budget and getting the right backroom staff in, and then letting them run the club. You act as a check and balance, and you see things that they don’t because you’re not there every day. By having the right team in place your observations should help them develop the club in the way you all want.
The board should be professionally run; the money involved in football is ridiculous so you need to take emotion out of the decisions that have to be made at that level. Then if you have a good board, a good academy, a decent squad, a decent scouting system and a good medical system, you have all the elements of a good football club. The board sets the budgets and monitors the health of the business; the academy feeds new loyal players to the squad with the club culture ingrained deep within them; the squad performs on the pitch; the scouting system brings new but appropriate players in, and by ‘appropriate’ I don’t just mean ‘successful’, I mean players who have the same values and outlook as the club; and the medical staff keep the players fit and healthy. It’s not a sophisticated view but simplicity is a strength. Always.
It really surprised me when I took over that the club wasn’t professional in all of those respects. I didn’t do anything about it – in fact, I may have made it worse – because I thought that was the way things were done. It was only after a few years that I realized it had to be run properly, like a real business. My business ideas are based on passion. I think everyone who works needs to feel passionate about the job they do. Sport, too, is all about passion and sometimes that passion can obscure the business decisions you have to make. I was guilty early on of being too passionate and of letting that cloud my judgement. The team now at QPR have the passion but are also making smart decisions for the club. Ruben and I only step in when we’re needed.
I’ve also learned that footballers in this day and age come in two types: guys who really want to play, and guys who just take the salary and bank it. And that was something I hadn’t experienced in life before QPR: a guy who was being paid £50,000 per week and still doesn’t perform.
More generally, it is amazing to me that in such a big-money sport, agents are so unregulated. There should be more control and standards for agents. There are good agents out there but there are others who just destroy people’s careers by putting themselves ahead of their clients’ best interests. Young players can be earning a fortune without understanding anything about the real world. Their agent is often the one person they go to and trust. These agents have got to repay that trust by looking after their players properly. Regulation of agents is essential.
And I don’t think clubs should pay agents, I think players should pay agents. Agents are invariably the corrupters of the game because they will influence a manager to take a player. And that’s bad for the player, the manager, the club, the supporters and the game itself.
I think that the Premier League is well run at the moment. Financial Fair Play was an important step. I was actually the final vote in that decision when it was split 50/50. I think I upset a lot of the richer clubs, but I felt it was wrong for clubs to be unaccountable for their finances. Ironically, of course, QPR were done for breaking the terms of Financial Fair Play – an incorrect decision in my view, and the rules have been changed since then.
The Premier League is well run but there are a lot of problems elsewhere. There are too many games in the Championship: the league should be smaller. This fixture crush doesn’t do anything for English football, yet it is an important league for the development of young English players who don’t get much of a chance in the Premier League. Something has been wrong in the England team set-up for years, because when you look at the team going out to play, they look strong on paper but they never do well.
One way forward is to combine the Premier League and Championship into eastern and western leagues as they do in the US, then have a final between the winners of the leagues to decide who becomes champion. I think this would make it a more exciting season. Football, while not as bad as Formula One, has become predictable in the last twenty years. Since the Premier League started in 1992–3 only six teams have won the title – including Leicester’s freakish win in 2015–16. So I think a shake-up would be good and regional leagues, followed by play-offs and then an FA Cup-style final might be interesting. These leagues wouldn’t be fixed: there would be relegation from them and promotion from lower leagues so there would still be movement. This system would bridge the financial gap between Premier League and Championship clubs, which at the moment makes for an almost impossible transition. We should also add the strongest Scottish clubs into the leagues. It’d be great to have Rangers and Celtic and some of the others playing in our leagues – not that increasing the quality of the competition would help QPR but it makes sense to me to strengthen the leagues however we can. It’s a pretty radical idea but I think its time has come. To my mind, it’ll increase the quality of the home-grown players and the competition between teams overall.
That’s a long-term plan but on a shorter time scale we need to address the fact that too many games are lost by bad decisions. And you really can’t blame the referees – they’re only human and the game moves at a million miles an hour, so they need all the help they can get. But the money riding on their decisions is huge. Look at rugby and cricket, which both have instant replays on key decisions. Cricket! Even the most traditional, conservative and stuffy sport has embraced new technology; it’s time for football to do the same.
The live broadcasts show every decision from three different angles so the technology is definitely there. It’s just the FA and the Premier League who are holding the game back. What should happen is that if the referee misses a penalty claim, an offside or a bad foul, he should be able to call on instant replay and make a decision. At least his view will be the same as the TV viewers. Sepp Blatter may have argued that it interrupts the flow of the game but, let’s be honest, there are so many stoppages in football anyway that getting key decisions right is only going to improve the game. I would give teams three opportunities per game to challenge decisions and otherwise allow the referee to get on with it.
I left Warner Music because they didn’t want to embrace new technology. In the same way, football is going to be damaged if the FA or FIFA don’t adapt and use technology. I’d also take the Sin Bin idea from rugby. It’s a fair punishment – a ten-minute sin bin wouldn’t do any harm.
Finally, I have to talk about the fans. My whole life is about passion. And the passion of football fans is something remarkable. Fans get a lot of criticism because they abuse and shout at players and referees, but it’s because they care so much; they love the game, they love their club and they feel every decision, defeat and victory intensely. I love that about football. Give me an example of another sport where you get 400 or 500 fans driving to Hull or Doncaster from west London on a winter mid-week night to watch their team; even if they’re losing, the fans are still chanting and singing. I was looking at some posts by American sports fans; those who had been to a football match in England (and parts of Europe) couldn’t believe the intensity and the atmosphere. It was unlike anything they’d ever seen in the US or anywhere else.
Football has everything: unbelievable skills, centuries-old rivalries and traditions, amazing stadiums with atmospheres that can bring tears to your eyes, a langua
ge understood throughout the world and a following whose commitment is unmatched and lasts a lifetime. Football is the best game in the world. That’s why we have to protect it from being left behind.
12. Tuning Up
Soundtrack: ‘We Belong Together’ by Rickie Lee Jones
The mission of the Tune Group – which is the umbrella company for my business ventures with Din – is ‘To Serve the Under-Served’. That feels as relevant today as it did sixteen years ago.
We created Tune in the days when we had just acquired AirAsia; our airline has now been joined by Caterham, QPR, Mirus and a scattering of Tune-branded companies that includes Tune Hotels, Tune Talk and Tune Protect. The name came from my love of music, and the plan has always been to create a lifestyle brand with the slogan ‘In Tune with Life’ to complement the mission.
Din and I share a basic philosophy of trying to provide value at low cost. Each of the Tune-branded companies addresses a particular sector in that way. Underpinning this is brand extension: whether it was flying, insurance, mobile internet access or hotel rooms, the idea was that Tune would be a signpost to great value services and products. Ultimately these will be linked with a loyalty card that provides discounts and short-cuts to the things customers need.
The Tune company started with AirAsia, which I had at first wanted to call Tune Air. In our early branding discussions, we got to the stage where a designer had developed a logo and colour scheme which we started to show around.
The reactions weren’t encouraging.
The minister of tourism said: ‘Why would you do that? AirAsia is perfect – it gives you the sense that the airline covers the whole region and allows you a geographic identity. Tune Air means nothing.’
My former colleague at Warner Music, Kathleen Tan, was just as blunt: ‘Tune Air sounds like a Chinese swear word.’
Flying High, My Story Page 17