As Marti Cifuentes walked in to the non-descript meeting room in which Millwall hold their post-match press conferences, he wore the expression of a man who had truly come to terms with the scale of the task he was facing.
Cifuentes had been looking forward to his first experience of Boxing Day football, but his QPR players had just done little to enhance his sense of festive cheer. Rangers lost 2–0 at the Den, registering just one shot on target and conceding two soft goals as Millwall’s intense and aggressive approach overpowered their lifeless visitors.
Having previously always focused on what he and his side could have done better in previous defeats, Cifuentes trained his focus on referee Thomas Bramall. The Spaniard had been shown a yellow card after the final whistle for complaining about the decision to allow Millwall’s second goal to stand despite a player tangling with Asmir Begovic as the goalkeeper tried to clear the delivery.
This was his first and, to date, only genuine brush with an official since arriving in west London, and since then an opposition outfield player has punched a goal-bound effort off the line without punishment to deny his team victory.
A bruising afternoon in Bermondsey certainly seemed a long way from the scenes of last Friday night, where Cifuentes, finally ready to rest a mind that had been solely focused on keeping QPR in the Championship, was at the centre of the celebrations after his team swept aside promotion-chasing Leeds United 4–0 at Loftus Road to be certain that his target had been achieved.
Was it relaxation or relief though? Every time Cifuentes looked to have found a solution to the latest problem he faced along the way — a clear path to safety in what had threatened to be one of the most intense second-tier relegation battles in years — another haze of uncertainty would emerge and cloud the way forward.
From the day he arrived, Cifuentes was convinced that the group of players he had inherited was both capable of playing a style of football he would enjoy coaching and watching, but also possessed the quality to get the club out of the relegation zone and away from danger.
In the early days, with more than 30 league games still left to play, performances were deemed more important than immediate results. Cifuentes always encouraged players and supporters alike to not look at the league table. If performances improved, results would follow and the table would take care of itself.
QPR were six points from Championship safety, winless in nine and set to be unable to spend any money in January. There was talent in his squad but it had been dulled by the trauma of the previous season and its aftereffects.
Given the year that supporters in W12 had endured before his arrival — one home win in the space of 12 months included — breaking from the past always seemed Cifuentes’ best chance of success.
He prefers to leave his players to themselves ahead of kick-off on matchday, and he used that opportunity before his first home against Bristol City to perform a lap of the pitch, shaking hands and introducing himself to as many supporters as possible.
This may have looked like something of a gimmick had it not been backed up by improvements on the field, and although it took until Cifuentes’ fourth game to register his first win, the majority of fans were already convinced that the new head coach had significantly increased their chances of avoiding relegation.
“This is not a one-man job,” he explained after a run of three consecutive wins meant hopes of survival was replaced by genuine ambition. “As a club we are all doing this together. Now we are building momentum but this is like when you are in a boat and you are rowing. We need to create that trend. If you stop rowing then you get in trouble. Now is the moment we really push together to get as many points as we can.”
But it were as though that early good run stretched the squad at Cifuentes’ disposal to its maximum. He began to rotate heavily throughout the fixture-intensive festive period and results declined. Defeats to relegation rivals Sheffield Wednesday and Millwall were particularly galling, and there did not appear an obvious way to stave off danger as a 2–1 defeat to Cardiff on New Years’ Day meant that the gap to safety was back to four points.
The positive impact Cifuentes had over his first two months in charge looked like it was starting to fade. He had been adamant that he was fully aware of the situation the club was in upon his arrival, but an almost comical ability to concede at will from set-pieces began to cost points and a succession of injuries severely hampered a small squad.
That post-match display at the Den could easily have been interpreted as a sign of Cifuentes starting to lose his composure. He had made such a controlled start to overcoming the chaotic situation he had inherited at Loftus Road, taking a series of issues that had began to fester long before his arrival into his stride as he started to make it look as though it would be a case of when and not if QPR exited the relegation zone.
With chances missed to climb out of the bottom three, fans started to lose patience with the club rather than the head coach. Concerns centred on whether it would be possible to keep Cifuentes if a drop into League One became a reality. Supporters may have been prepared to concede but Cifuentes never followed suit.
According to Deloitte, the average revenue for a Championship club in the 2021/22 season was around £28million, in League One it dropped to around £9million. While QPR’s current owners have been willing to cover the club’s losses (including another £20million in the most recent financial year), it is impossible to think that dropping to the third tier would not have led to significant levels of cost-cutting.
It is now tempting for sides that are experiencing similar to QPR’s nine-year second-tier stasis to welcome relegation as an opportunity for a hard reset. Spending restrictions are less stringent in the third tier. Ipswich are now set for back-to-back promotions after they had spent 16 seasons doing little of note in the Championship.
But relegation would also have meant missing out significantly in terms of the EFL’s new broadcast rights deal with Sky. The new agreement will be worth £935million over the next five seasons — a 50% increase on the previous arrangement — and, crucially, 70 per cent of that amount will be shared among Championship teams. League One clubs will be entitled to 18 per cent between them.
This financial reality of relegation would therefore have had a significant impact on the club not only over the next few seasons but potentially the next five to ten years.
Finances were therefore a theme of the most recent January transfer window. Newly-appointed CEO Christian Nourry made clear at the start of the month that Profitability and Sustainabiliy Regulation (PSR) concerns meant spending a way out of the situation was not going to be possible.
Cifuentes began to make tweaks to his original tactical approach in lieu of new signings. Lyndon Dykes briefly became a midfielder, there was a willingness to play the ball forwards with more urgency so Ilias Chair and Chris Willock could have more space to attack once they were in possession.
For all Cifuentes’ determination to find solutions among the players at his disposal, even luck had abandoned him by the time a 2–1 defeat to Watford at Loftus Road made it eight games without a win. QPR played well, had the better chances, but were denied any points as veteran midfielder Jake Livermore scored the 21st and 22nd goals of his career in one afternoon.
What took place in the final two weeks of January was crucial to how the season eventually turned out. The considerable wage of Andre Dozzell was loaned to Birmingham and Michael Frey, Isaac Hayden, Joe Hodge and Lucas Andersen all arrived as either free transfers or on cut price loan deals.
Given how little football all four players had in their legs by the time they arrived in west London, it is perhaps no surprise that their impact has come in brief but significant moments rather than over consistent sequences of games.
But, more importantly, their arrival provided Cifuentes with a far more rounded squad. He was no longer forced to fill his bench with untested youth team players. More experienced senior pros who had not quite fit the style he was trying to implement have barely been seen since the turn of the year.
It is therefore no surprise that QPR’s best run of form throughout this troubled season soon followed. There have been just four defeats in the 18 games that followed the deflating Watford defeat that seemed to signal the situation was beyond Cifuentes and his coaching capabilities.
A greater set of options and deeper well of quality to dip into allowed Cifuentes to adapt his approach. Fielding January arrival Hayden with either Sam Field or Jack Colback in midfield provided a more solid base, allowing those in front to press more aggressively. A highly-effective 4–5–1 shape without the ball became something more akin to 4–4–2 as the team became more and more confident out of possession.
They had been willing to play direct passes forward when Dykes was in midfield, but this continued even after that experiment had been moved on from. With Willock, Chair and new signing Lucas Andersen able to collect second balls beyond opposition midfields, the previous overreliance on them to produce something spectacular single-handedly was lessened.
But underpinning all of this was the ability to field Jake Clarke-Salter and Steve Cook as his centre-back pairing. The duo shared the club’s player of the season awards last week, and their influence is laid bare by statistics. In terms of expected goals against, QPR have the second-best record in the Championship since Cifuentes’ arrival.
In the 19 games that the pair have started together this term, QPR only lost five times and conceded just 18 goals in the process. Although they are both perfectly adept at fitting in with Cifuentes’ preferred possession-heavy approach, tough tackling and brave defending in their own penalty area has been just as vital.
The team’s improvement was undeniable but that did not mean results were guaranteed to follow. Excellent performances, such as in a 2–2 draw against West Brom on a night when Loftus Road paid tribute to the late Stan Bowles, would not always bring about the results they deserved and, more worryingly, they were all too often followed by tired, lethargic displays in the fixtures that immediately followed.
After a 3–0 defeat at Hull City in the penultimate away fixture of the season on the back of a loss to relegation rivals Sheffield Wednesday the previous weekend, the Spaniard recognised that it was time for calm rather than upping the ante ahead of a crucial-looking home fixture against Preston North End.
With QPR given the late Saturday kick-off by the broadcasters, they had the chance to keep an eye on how the majority of the sides they were battling against were getting on. Results largely went their way, with Huddersfield soundly beaten by Swansea and Birmingham held to a draw by already relegated Rotherham, but it was not something Cifuentes and his players had been following closely.
Players and staff watched Boreham Wood take on Ebbsfleet United in the National League as they had their pre-match meal, and there was a soft ban on the use of mobile phones. The message was clear — the focus was on what they could control.
“Football itself is not difficult, it’s just about scoring more goals than the opponent,” Cifuentes had explained earlier in the season. “What is not easy is to change a dynamic, and all of the credit to the players and fans that are helping me.”
A fairly straightforward 1–0 win that night all but secured safety, but given the dramatic fluctuations in form and feeling the club had experienced over the previous two years, few in W12 were ready to start celebrating — particularly the QPR head coach.
And that is why the dismantling of Leeds, while a surprise to those on the outside, in fact seemed a logical, perhaps even deserved, conclusion to the dedicated approach of Cifuentes in achieving this target and the way in which he has managed to drag an entire club along with him in the process.
A team that sat second in the league, and had won 13 of 18 league games since the turn of the year, were barely given a moment to breathe in the first 20 minutes. QPR have had some incredible spells in games under Cifuentes, but they have never been rewarded as they were against Leeds by goals from Chair and Andersen.
Cifuentes still felt his side could have kept the ball better after the game — a further insight into the single-mindedness that has brought about this achievement. Begovic had to make more than one very good to save to prevent any sense of reality returning, but two second half goals coming from set-pieces felt in itself another marker of how far QPR have come since those miserable afternoons of mid-winter.
Even though the latest pre-game banner in the Lower Loft had been dedicated to Cifuentes and Cifuentes alone, he still was not keen to be the centre of the celebrations in the aftermath. No fist pumps as the fans sang his song, rather he seemed keen to get as many members of his staff as possible to share the acclaim with him.
After one defeat in early Spring, Cifuentes had insisted he was not a magician and consistent, sustained performances and results would take time. An explanation for how he turned that miserable afternoon in the grey Millwall press room into the vibrancy and colour of an unforgettable night against Leeds is still being searched for.
