THE JANUARY SALES?
from the Hammersmith Times 17 December 2003
by Dave Evans
QPR will be forced to listen to bids for their top young players in January unless the club can find a new investor before the transfer window opens.
While on the field Rangers are playing at the top of their game, off the field things are reaching crisis point and Chief Executive David Davies sounds a worried man.
“On the playing side things are going superbly but off it our current position is very poor”, he said this week.
“I have been having a couple of meetings a week with prospective investors but we just seem to be going round in circles.”
He continued: “There seem to be two issues holding them back, one of which is the issue of the plc. Rich men such as these want total control, they want 51 per cent of the shares and that is obviously a problem.
“I am certainly not standing in their way. I have said that if they want to bring in their own men then that is fine.”
The other stumbling block is less clear to Davies. “I don’t know what it is,” he confessed. “If it is the loan then they have not told me about it.”
He continued: “I just think that we are almost in a position where we have to think about reorganising staff structure and players structure.”
And that could mean an exodus of players from Loftus Road in the transfer window, with Martin Rowlands linked to both Spurs and West Ham, Marc Bircham to Tottenham, and Gino Padula, Chris Day and Clarke Carlisle all likely to interest bigger clubs.
Davies, though accepting that he would have to listen to any bidders, dismissed the conjecture out of hand.
“Any talk of our players being watched is absolute rubbish,” he said.
“At every game we have scouts and they come for many different reasons. Some come because we are playing them soon, others because there are their loan players playing in the game, and others just because they are bored and want to watch some football.”
“We can’t stop them coming, and if they really wanted to watch our players they could do so at away matches, but we have had no interest in anyone.
“All this talk about big money transfers makes me laugh because if you look over the last couple of seasons there has been hardly any between the Nationwide and the Premiership – it just doesn’t happen any more.”
The Chief Executive knows though that the club would find it very difficult to resist any reasonable offers for the players.
“If someone came in for Martin Rowlands for instance with a derisory offer then we would turn it down, but we are not in any position to say ‘hands off our players’.
“If someone came in with the investment we are looking for it would be a different story, but until that occurs we are in a precarious position.”