Queens Park Rangers - Pre season 2012

Season Expectations

The minimum expectation of the board this season is that we finish in a league position to qualify for a EURO Cup place. I have however decided to be a bit more adventurous this season, telling the board we can challenge for the title. This gives me a massive £61 million to play with on the transfer market, as well as upping my wage budget to £550k per week. The maximum wage I can offer to a single key player is now £65,000. This should open up some options in the transfer market that were unavailable to us before. We should also now be a slightly more attractive club to join due to our recent successes.

This year the board expects us qualify from the group stages of the Champions Cup, which I feel we should be able to do with no problem, after our display last season.

We will be contestng the European Super Cup, which the board have expectations of us winning. If we achieve that, we will be off to World Club Championship, which we would stand a reasonable chance of winning.

The board are expecting us to reach the semi final stages of both the League and FA Cup competitions.

The board do not regard the Community Shield as important, so there is no pressure for us to win it, other than for pride.

I will be keeping our current 4-4-2 diamond formation which served us so well in the previous season, and you'll see below seems to suit my new signings very well too.

Transfer movements in

During the June I set about having possible targets scouted with my top scouts working very hard to tell me if certain players were realistic targets.

Defensively we have a slight weakness in the full back positions, in particular on the right side. I decided that if I could find a player considerably better than my current right backs, I would sign them. I attempted to first attract Alvaro Arbeloa, but was sadly turned down by him in favour of heading to AC Milan. With him lost, I tried to sign Garry Bocaly, but this time lost out to Zenit St. Peterburg. I looked at many other right backs, but could not find any that I felt would improve us, without spending insane amounts of money, with wages we couldn't afford to pay, so gave up this line of enquiry. Hopefully next year we I can sort this out properly.

My sights were next set on getting a left and right winger, and seeing if I could secure the signature of one or two more quality strikers. Even the before the season ended I'd had an eye on Oscar Cardozo, so set about the process of negotiating a deal. In the last few days before the transfer window opened, I managed to gain the signature of my first target as a winger, in the form of Alexis Sanchez, from Udinese. He looks to be a very exciting purchase, and leaves the Udinese fans very disappointed that he was sold.

I was pleased to have captured someone of this standard, who can also play as a striker, and is an accomplished left winger too, which is a bonus. While checking to see if there were any interesting players to be found on the transfer list, my eyes nearly popped out when I spotted Alberto Gilardino for sale. After having him scouted and confirmed my belief that he is top quality still, I put a bid in. I also had several scouts out checking every part of Europe, when one popped up with the name of Balazs Dzsudzsak as looking like a good target to play on the left wing, so I set about negotiating with his club.

With Alexis Sanchez already at the club, I pleased to find out that not only had our offer for Alberto Gilardino being accepted, but he'd accepted our contract offer. With this deal just being sealed I finally finished my negotiations for Oscar Cardozo and Balazs Dzsudzsak, and offered them contracts. Two days later they accepted these contracts, and arrived ready to start playing in the friendlies. The fans at all these clubs were upset about losing these players, which is usually a good sign, and hopefully they will soon become favourites with our fans.

I was delighted with this progress on the transfer market, and felt things were going superbly well. Those that have been following the blog with know that my best keeper Lung jr, has been trying to leave the club, so I was busy getting my scouts to check out different keepers, drawing lots of blanks, either wanting way too much, or were not even as good as our 2nd keeper Jason Steele. You'll also know that I decided to sell one of my central defenders, who'd not performed well, and was unhappy, so I felt I needed to find a replacement, either another star defender, or one that would be on a par with Puygrenier and Nasuti.

After such a good start to my transfer dealings, things suddenly became very hard work. It was almost getting depressing with no further progress by the start of August, when a couple of scouts came back telling me about an AC Milan central defender who was being sold, and would if he joined the club, be our second best player in that position. At £2.7M I knew I had to seal the deal, especially as other clubs were nosing around, trying to get him on a loan deal. Another scout, checking Central America came back to me recommending Guillermo Ochoa to me, a name I knew I'd heard before. There followed several days of negotiation before the deal was sealed, and then a tense wait to see if we'd be given a work permit. Eventually this went through completing my signings. The fans of Ochoa's old club were also distraught that he'd been sold, and looks like he should be a star for us.

I felt we already have a decent number of young players coming through, with some decent players arriving this year in our under 18 team, so felt I didn't need to bring in any new additions at this stage. In fact I've completely exhausted our transfer budget, through using some of the money to increase our wage budget, which I have slightly exceeded, but nothing for the board to be alarmed about.

Transfer movements out

Before the transfer window opened I set about trying to sell the players I'd already decided that needed to leave. I was pleased to be able to sell Andwele Slory and Martin Stranzl in the June, neither of whom performed well for us last season, and were not happy about lack of first team football. They just weren't good enough when they did play, so it was best they went, along with several players on free transfers, I'd tried to sell the previous year, but just couldn't shift. When an offer to loan Matteo Alberti, who I'd like to sell, came in, I decided it was worth accepting this. Damion Stewart wanted to stay, hoping I was would give him a new contract, but there's no room for sentiment with a player who is only just good enough to make a Championship side, so I released him.

I set about trying to sell Faurlin, Lung jr and Buzsaky, who for various reasons were no longer needed. I started by offering these players up for sale, with Faurlin eventually leaving to go to Nice. However Lung jr and Buzsaky were just not shifiting. It didn't seem to matter what value I tried to offer Lung jr at, noone was interested in buying him. With Buzsaky however, there was interest, but every contract he was offered he would turn down. With the deal for Ochoa almost sealed, I wanted to reduce the wage bill, by seeing both these players leave. Eventually I decided that if I kept these players, but wasn't playing them, they would start to cause trouble in the dressing room, so decided it was time to make some harsh decisions. The first was to bring about the mutual termination of the contract with Lung jr, which he accepted without hesitation. I knew that if I tried to go for mutual termination with Buzsaky, this would cause a lot of trouble, potentially upsetting players at the club. I decided with a heavy heart to release him on a free transfer. The fans are unhappy to see both of these players leave, but for the long term future of the team it was necessary. It's only a game, but it's amazing how bad I actually feel about this. The fans felt that it was the right decision to let the rest of the players go however. Hopefully our performances on the pitch will soon have the fans forgetting about this.

Pre-Season Friendlies

I decided to play 6 friendlies this season, with 3 overseas teams, and 3 teams from the Championship, two of which were clubs relegated from the Premiership last season. One of these clubs is Charlton, who are now a feeder club for us, which sees us play a friendly match each year. We won all 6 of these matches, struggling a bit in the first match, but really finding our feet after this. I really didn't expect us to demolish Velez 12-0. The players just seemed to want to keep scoring, with Fatih Yucel grabbing a hat-trick, but the real star of the day was Grenier, who scored twice and provided 4 assists. This is the first time I've ever seen a team of mine in the game score more than 7 goals, producing 11 clear cut chances. The two new strikers looked very good, always causing the opposition defence problems. The two new wingers also looked good, with them both providing a couple of assists, with Sanchez also grabbing a couple of goals.

This is our best set of friendlies so far, because even in the Wigan match where we had some players looking complacent at times, we always looked capable of scoring more if we'd really want to.

Summary

Although I'm disappointed about what happened with both Lung jr and Buzsaky, overall I'm delighted with our dealings in the transfer window. We now look a lot more dangerous going forward, with 3 strikers with excellent heading ability. Cardozo in particular should be able to cause problems being 6' 4", and Gilardino is with similar skills at 6 foot should pose a threat. Fatih Yucel has excellent heading skills, but his height was always an issue in a crowded box.

The morale of the team is very high, with all our strikers having been able to get on the scoresheet during the friendlies. We now have a much better depth to squad up front, which at times last season became a bit of an issue during the busy periods of the season, especially when we had a few injuries.

Checking through the team, it seems that most of our defensive players are pleased that Gilardino has joined the club. Most of the attacking players are pleased that Ochoa has joined the club. I'm hoping that this is a good sign that there won't be any problems with the sqaud harmony.

August sees us play 5 matches, starting with our appearance in the Community Shield against Arsenal. We then have three league fixtures, followed by the European Super Cup against AC Milan, which means it will be a fairly busy start to the season.