If the definition of stupidity is failing to learn from your past mistakes, Queens Park Rangers have spent a summer stressing they are not fools.
Barely had promotion been clinched at Wembley Stadium in May than their power brokers – whether manager Harry Redknapp, owner Tony Fernandes or chief executive Philip Beard – were queuing up to declare they would not repeat the errors made during the expensive and embarrassing relegation campaign of 2012/13.
Rangers were guilty of naivety, if not rank idiocy, in a financial and footballing failure.
They posted a loss of £65.4 million (Dh403.8m) for a period when they only won four league games.
The two were intrinsically connected: their disastrous ventures into the transfer market came at a vast cost and explained disjointed, dismal performances on the field.
So while every promoted club’s summer business is scrutinised, QPR’s has particular significance.
The overpaid and over-the-hill additions were many of the major culprits two years ago and, while Rio Ferdinand seems to come from the same template – taking a step down from a major club where he enjoyed more success than he could expect to emulate at Loftus Road – he is the exception, not the rule.
The only other ageing, big-name addition is on the coaching staff: former England manager Glenn Hoddle, whose arrival has prompted suggestions Redknapp will adopt a 3-5-2 formation.
He has certainly made the defence a priority: while Ferdinand is joined by Steven Caulker, the difference is that the £8.5m centre-back’s best years lie ahead of him. Jordon Mutch, a Cardiff City colleague of Caulker’s, is the antithesis of the players Rangers used to sign: no big name, the midfielder is more effective than many realise as his return of seven goals and five assists last season shows.
Mauricio Isla, outstanding for Chile in the World Cup, adds energy to a team that lacked pace.
Rangers did not play particularly well for two-thirds of last season but grit and collective determination secured a swift return to the Premier League.
Had it not, Redknapp’s managerial career might be over. Instead, at 67 years old has entered a personal form of extra time.
He spent more of his last top-flight campaign criticising his players than motivating them and, for all his achievements, has a reputation to repair after he was unable to halt the slide that began under Mark Hughes.
A manager who forever wants to sign more players has, in Fernandes’s words, a “finite budget”, a contrast to the extravagant spending two seasons ago.
Redknapp said Rangers need more firepower, though the breakdown of Loic Remy’s move to Liverpool gives him a forward who struck 14 Premier League goals last season.
The Frenchman is proof that QPR have far more Premier League pedigree than either Leicester City or Burnley, even if many of them are tainted by the failings in 2012/13.
Their added experience and ability means they are the best equipped to survive.
If, that is, they can perform as a team, justify their salaries and price tags and illustrate they want to be at Loftus Road.
It is everything the side of two years ago failed to do.
*
*
Leicester out to justify Pearson’s confidence in them
*
In 2004, after a miserable season that produced just six wins, Leicester were relegated from the Premier League. Rather than providing an opportunity for renewal and revival, it proved the start of the worst decade in their history.
This millennium has brought administration, relegation and humiliation, expensive managerial mistakes and underachievement.
Leicester dropped into the third tier for the first time in 2008.
Twelve months after that, manager Nigel Pearson secured the most professional of promotions from League One. Five years later and in his second spell at the club, the measured Pearson repeated that feat. Leicester’s longest exile from the top flight in 60 years is over.
In the year after first taking City up, Pearson steered them into the top five of the higher league. In May, their owner, Thai billionaire Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, said he would spend £180 million (Dh1.1 billion) to secure a top-five finish in the Premier League in the next three years.
Their expenditure, in fact, has been a less eye-catching £8m, all of it committed on the Argentine forward Leonardo Ulloa. He replaces Ade Akinbiyi, a striker whose unfortunate inability to find the net was a major factor in their 2002 demotion, as the club record signing.
Yet the quiet approach is in keeping with the low-profile Pearson.
Leicester were efficient in winning the Championship when others were more fancied.
Instead, a winning formula involved fewer big names and more improving young players. The recipe for success seems similar. The veteran defender Matthew Upson is the other arrival from Brighton & Hove Albion, but this remains largely a youthful team.
The former Southampton and Hull City manager is content to trust players who are largely untried at this level. Danny Drinkwater, a graduate of Manchester United’s academy, was arguably the Championship’s outstanding central midfielder last season. Riyad Mahrez, the young Algerian winger, was among its most exciting wingers.
Perhaps most intriguingly, there is Jamie Vardy, the striker whose journey from non-league to Premier League has taken a little over two years.
In Kasper Schmeichel, Pearson possesses a goalkeeper who attracted the attention of AC Milan. He will be especially important at the start of the season.
It will be difficult for Leicester.
Their first three games are against teams who finished in the top five last season.
They have the most demanding of starts before October and November could offer some respite and a greater chance to pick up points.
Leicester accumulated a club record 102 points last season. They were the ultimate Championship team: fit, organised, industrious, consistent and with enough quality to decide tight games.
As Pearson has recognised, the 4-4-2 system that served them so well may have to become a more cautious 4-2-3-1. The personnel are largely similar.
They have earned the chance to play in the Premier League but, lacking a track record at this level, they have to justify Pearson’s confidence again.
*
*
Budget may hold down Burnley a bit
*
Ross McCormack has never played for Burnley and probably never will.
They showed no interest in signing him this summer and, as he plies his trade in a different division, they will not face him.
Yet, such is the way football works, he could have a huge bearing on their season.
McCormack provides the context to Burnley’s struggle to sign at the top end of their market.
The Championship’s top scorer last season left Leeds for Fulham.
His cost – £11 million (Dh67.9m) – shows that, at a stroke, the price for a second-tier finisher has been inflated.
Burnley had hoped to buy Troy Deeney, who played for manager Sean Dyche when he was in charge at Watford in 2011/12, but McCormack has been a game changer.
Now everyone else costs more.
So Burnley, who have the smallest budget in the Premier League, find their funds will not go as far as they expected. An uphill task seems steeper.
As it is, without spending much money and while targeting players their Premier League peers do not seem to want, they have made six signings to bolster a wafer-thin squad.
Winger Michael Kightly was an integral part of their promotion-winning campaign as a loanee from Stoke City, veterans Matt Taylor and Steven Reid add experience and versatility, Matt Gilks can understudy goalkeeper Tom Heaton and Dyche has found two cheaper forwards, Lukas Jutkiewicz and another of his old Watford charges, Marvin Sordell.
Yet the probability is that Burnley’s starting 11 is weaker than the almost unchanged side that flourished for much of last season.
Sam Vokes, one half of a prolific strike partnership with Danny Ings, could be out until Christmas with a knee injury.
Dyche’s striker search is a sign he intends to play the same tactics, a high-tempo 4-4-2, notable for pressing and collective commitment.
Unity and energy were reasons why they had the best defensive record in the Championship. In itself, that provides a fundamental difference from Burnley’s last brief taste of the Premier League.
Then they were naive and porous at the back, shipping goals at an alarming rate, especially on the road.
That, in turn, made them dependent on their initially excellent home form. When that deteriorated, Burnley were in trouble.
The other major factor in their demotion last time was the mid-season departure of manager Owen Coyle to Bolton.
Burnley are confident that there will be no repeat.
Despite Dyche’s achievement in guiding a team that some tipped for relegation to League One into the top flight, they should benefit from his services for the entire season.
Continuity was a great asset for them last season.
Dyche forged an understanding in a side that was far greater than the sum of its parts.
He routinely named unchanged teams and saw them produce similar performances. It amounted to an astonishing story: having bought one player in his 18 months in charge, he took Burnley into the richest league in the world.
Their average attendance last season was just 13,719 but then Burnley’s population is a mere 87,000.
The odds were stacked against them.
Even before Ross McCormack inadvertently made their summer worse.
sports@thenational.ae
Follow us on twitter at @SprtNationalUAE
