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22 Years Ago: Clive Berlin Departs
QPR Official Site - September 4, 1998
CLIVE BERLIN
QPR can confirm that chief executive Clive Berlin was given notice of termination of his services yesterday.
QPR would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the impact he has had on the club over the years and wish him well.
QPR is consolidating its position, working hard to turn its fortunes around and is focused on building for long term success.
Flashback 2011 QPR Net INterview with Chris Wright
www.qprnet.com/the-chris-wright-interview.html
"...
It all went wrong right from the word go though. As soon as we took over the club Ray Wilkins resigned as manager and to this day I don’t know why. I think he thought he wasn’t going to get on with Clive Berlin, who was the Chief Executive, but I’m only guessing.
"...QPRnet: To clarify Ray Wilkins resigned, he wasn’t sacked?
CW: Oh he resigned, he didn’t resign to me, he resigned to the Chief Executive so whatever happened happened between him and Clive Berlin. I would have kept him on personally but Clive told me he only wanted to be the manager so he could pick himself.
We lined up Alan Curbishley to take over but he couldn’t get out of his deal with Charlton and I think if he had come at the time it could have been a completely different story because he went on to prove what a good manager he was with Charlton.
Clive Berlin thought we had to have a manager with Premier League experience which proved hard to find, Stewart Houston came up and he had managed Arsenal for the best part of a year so we chose him. Stewart was a very decent guy and I don’t think he did that terribly either but the fans never really took to him and I think he made a mistake in bringing in Bruce Rioch as his number two.
"....
PRnet: The big signings didn’t work out and Stewart was out 14 months after arriving. How did we arrive at the decision to appoint Ray Harford?
CW: Ray Harford was very definitely Clive Berlin’s choice, we had initially gone back in for Alan Curbishley a second time and we thought we had him but missed out again. Ray Harford was doing very well with West Brom and it seemed quite a shrewd move really but of course it proved to be a mistake.
QPRnet: You could see from the transfers that season that it was a different strategy. Was that financial strain starting to show or did we make a decision to go at it in a different way?
CW: That is a very good question. Ray Harford and Clive Berlin proved to be very close and the two of them dictated the transfer strategy. To this day I’m not sure myself what the motivation was for the players being singed and the players being sold. Clive was a football agent he was connected with agents and I admit some of the transfers seemed very strange.
We signed a player from Sunderland called Richard Ord for a good few hundred thousand. Of course he got injured pre-season, in fact I think he was injured before he came to us, and he never played a game. We got a goalkeeper from Crewe called Ademola Bankole who wasn’t even signed to Crewe when we brought him which we didn’t know about. We let the likes of Rufus Brevett go to Fulham and signed really bad replacements.
And this 2001 David Conn article re QPR the old days
www.boardroomblues.co.uk/ind280901.htm
QPR show how to lose £27m in four years
From the Independent, 28 September 2001[/b]
By David Conn
Rather fewer than the nearly 12,000 people who watched Queen's Park Rangers beat Cardiff City on Tuesday night will file into Loftus Road today for the latest solemn instalment of the club's extravagant financial collapse. Those who do turn up for the creditors' meeting will find some glum reading matter on their seats: the administrators' matter-of-fact account of waste, including nearly £27m of losses over the last four years. Nearly £4m is owed to the VAT tax man and assorted creditors, and £11m to the club's owner and former chairman, Chris Wright, who has his debts secured over the club's property.
Ray Hocking, of BDO Stoy Hayward, the joint administrator, confirmed yesterday that he is holding talks with a consortium interested in providing enough for QPR to pay off Wright and all the other creditors. The group, whose members are mostly London-based, with one member in Switzerland and one in the Midlands, are also understood to be promising funds for the club itself. So there are currently some grounds for optimism. The chief executive, David Davies, who joined in July 2000, promised yesterday that there will be no return to the recent years of wilful extravagance. "Lessons here have been hard learned, and we are determined to run the club responsibly in the future, as we have done during the period of administration," he said.
QPR's is the most spectacular collapse of all the football clubs which headed eagerly for the Stock Market in 1996-97. Several made quick fortunes for a new breed of investor suddenly interested in the century-old national game. The club, the official prospectus noted, had been established in 1886. A founder member of the Third Division in 1920, they were also a founder member of the breakaway Premier League in 1992, and were only relegated from the Premiership in 1996. The prospectus lists a distinguished roll call of players QPR had brought in from lower-division clubs and made money by selling on: Les Ferdinand (signed from Hayes), David Seaman (Birmingham), Darren Peacock (Hereford), Paul Parker (Fulham), Andy Impey (Yeading), Trevor Sinclair (Blackpool) and Andy Sinton (Brentford). The club had made a £1.7m profit in 1996 and the highest-paid director earned just £4,932.
Chris Wright, chairman of the Chrysalis music and entertainment group and a Loftus Road season-ticket holder, bought in separate deals QPR, and Wasps Rugby Club, in August 1996, for nearly £9m plus £4m borrowed from Barclays Bank. QPR were bought from the Thompson family for around £9m and the trustees of the old amateur Wasps club were given £3.5m worth of shares in the new holding company, Loftus Road plc.
The flotation, the latest in a rush of football clubs to a Stock Market suddenly dazzled by the television millions pouring into the Premier League, raised an additional £12m for Loftus Road plc. Wright owned a majority of the shares, some personally, some through his Culture Vulture Pension Fund and others through a family trust. The prospectus talked of the "synergies" and "economies of scale" to be gained from bringing the football and rugby clubs together under the same roofs, which "should result in significantly increased revenues." A newspaper article of the time summed up the mood with the headline: "Footie thrashes the Footsie".
The directors immediately rewarded themselves. One, Charles Levison, was paid £100,000 in "success fees" for working on the acquisitions and flotation. Chris Wright himself became a part-time non-executive director, for which the club paid £8,000 per month, £96,000 a year, to Chrysalis. Since the administration, Wright has several times said that he was not "hands on" enough. QPR, Wasps and Loftus Road each had their own chief executives. QPR's, Clive Berlin, a former players' agent, was given a £100,000 salary, plus bonuses, benefits and a car.
The extravagant deals which Berlin then did, flush with the flotation money, look, in hindsight, endearingly homespun compared to the exotic talent on which other clubs were spending their own nouveaux riches. Two of the big signings, Gavin Peacock and John Spencer, were pushed out by the Euro-influx at Chelsea which began with Ruud Gullit and Gianluca Vialli. Mike Sheron, a £2.5m signing from Stoke, was the other major signing of Wright's reign. According to Davies, the salary deals for players were, simply, too much, and for too long. Most players were on five-year deals. Fifteen youth team players were on full-time salaries, with several being paid £50,000-£60,000 a year and three or four on over £100,000 a year. "You cannot blame the then chief executive personally," he was at pains to stress. "The whole board sanctioned these deals and the club itself has to take responsibility."
The proceeds of the flotation were frittered away. Wasps' ground at Sudbury was sold to McAlpine Homes, for around £9m. The money paid off some of Wright's loans to Loftus Road and was poured down the wages black hole. When Wright finally called a halt in April this year and surrendered the club to administration, QPR had 61 full-time professional players and a wage bill over a third higher than the club's income.
"As has been well documented," says Hocking's report, with deadpan understatement, "the economics of professional football and rugby union are marginal at best."
The losses Hocking lists were, between 1997 and 2000, £27m. Directors' pay ballooned: 10 directors, including Wright, were paid a total £490,000 in 1997, 11 were on the payroll at £373,000 in 1998, nine were paid a total £512,000 in 1999. Numbers were reduced to three by 2000; Wright's pay dropped to £32,000.
Since the administration began, 20 players have been released. Some who were out of contract, such as Paul Murray and Karl Ready, they would have liked to have kept. The agreements with the Professional Footballers' Association do not allow footballers to be made redundant, but "compromise agreements" were made which meant some of the youth players have now left the club. Given the current dispute in which the PFA is demanding a significant share of the Premiership's latest billion pound TV deal, it is salutary to hear from Davies that six members of QPR's administrative staff, a fifth of the office workforce, have been made redundant. "If I could have laid off one player whom we didn't want any more, I could have saved more than we did having to make six people redundant. I understand the PFA's argument that players have to be protected because their careers are short, but I do not think that argument is realistic any more in the current economic circumstances."
Chris Wright has consistently said he has lost £20m on his Stock Market punt of his football club. This is accounted for mainly by the acquisition and investment when QPR floated, although the prospectus does carry a warning that: "Potential investors should be aware that the value of shares could rise or fall." He has also propped up the club with £11m worth of loans which have now been reduced by his purchase from the administrators of Wasps, for £2.5m, and both clubs' Twyford Avenue training ground for a further £2.5m. The QPR 1st Supporters Trust, which launched shortly after the club entered into administration, has campaigned to ensure QPR is guaranteed a share of any profit Wright might make by selling Twyford Avenue in the future. David Davies said yesterday they do have such an agreement, although he would not disclose what QPR's share is.
Davies, whose background is in entertainment venues and ice hockey, here and in the US, believes football should have a salary cap, as rugby union now does, with its ceiling of £1.8m for the wages of top clubs. "It is the only sensible way forward," he said. "Clubs have to keep to sensible limits otherwise there will be a major collapse very soon. The banks are not sympathetic to football any more. We've learned this the hard way." Hocking was succinct: "Given the talk that's going around, it looks certain that there will be more football club insolvencies." QPR's experience shows there are real victims to these collapses, as well as those retreating, with their fingers burned, from the notion of five years ago that there was money to be made in football stocks.
Last Edit: 3 minutes ago by Macmoish
Read more: qprreport.proboards.com/thread/6473/yrs-diaz-holloway-years-hill#ixzz3CKbOlwzc
22 Years Ago: Clive Berlin Departs
QPR Official Site - September 4, 1998
CLIVE BERLIN
QPR can confirm that chief executive Clive Berlin was given notice of termination of his services yesterday.
QPR would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the impact he has had on the club over the years and wish him well.
QPR is consolidating its position, working hard to turn its fortunes around and is focused on building for long term success.
Flashback 2011 QPR Net INterview with Chris Wright
www.qprnet.com/the-chris-wright-interview.html
"...
It all went wrong right from the word go though. As soon as we took over the club Ray Wilkins resigned as manager and to this day I don’t know why. I think he thought he wasn’t going to get on with Clive Berlin, who was the Chief Executive, but I’m only guessing.
"...QPRnet: To clarify Ray Wilkins resigned, he wasn’t sacked?
CW: Oh he resigned, he didn’t resign to me, he resigned to the Chief Executive so whatever happened happened between him and Clive Berlin. I would have kept him on personally but Clive told me he only wanted to be the manager so he could pick himself.
We lined up Alan Curbishley to take over but he couldn’t get out of his deal with Charlton and I think if he had come at the time it could have been a completely different story because he went on to prove what a good manager he was with Charlton.
Clive Berlin thought we had to have a manager with Premier League experience which proved hard to find, Stewart Houston came up and he had managed Arsenal for the best part of a year so we chose him. Stewart was a very decent guy and I don’t think he did that terribly either but the fans never really took to him and I think he made a mistake in bringing in Bruce Rioch as his number two.
"....
PRnet: The big signings didn’t work out and Stewart was out 14 months after arriving. How did we arrive at the decision to appoint Ray Harford?
CW: Ray Harford was very definitely Clive Berlin’s choice, we had initially gone back in for Alan Curbishley a second time and we thought we had him but missed out again. Ray Harford was doing very well with West Brom and it seemed quite a shrewd move really but of course it proved to be a mistake.
QPRnet: You could see from the transfers that season that it was a different strategy. Was that financial strain starting to show or did we make a decision to go at it in a different way?
CW: That is a very good question. Ray Harford and Clive Berlin proved to be very close and the two of them dictated the transfer strategy. To this day I’m not sure myself what the motivation was for the players being singed and the players being sold. Clive was a football agent he was connected with agents and I admit some of the transfers seemed very strange.
We signed a player from Sunderland called Richard Ord for a good few hundred thousand. Of course he got injured pre-season, in fact I think he was injured before he came to us, and he never played a game. We got a goalkeeper from Crewe called Ademola Bankole who wasn’t even signed to Crewe when we brought him which we didn’t know about. We let the likes of Rufus Brevett go to Fulham and signed really bad replacements.
And this 2001 David Conn article re QPR the old days
www.boardroomblues.co.uk/ind280901.htm
QPR show how to lose £27m in four years
From the Independent, 28 September 2001[/b]
By David Conn
Rather fewer than the nearly 12,000 people who watched Queen's Park Rangers beat Cardiff City on Tuesday night will file into Loftus Road today for the latest solemn instalment of the club's extravagant financial collapse. Those who do turn up for the creditors' meeting will find some glum reading matter on their seats: the administrators' matter-of-fact account of waste, including nearly £27m of losses over the last four years. Nearly £4m is owed to the VAT tax man and assorted creditors, and £11m to the club's owner and former chairman, Chris Wright, who has his debts secured over the club's property.
Ray Hocking, of BDO Stoy Hayward, the joint administrator, confirmed yesterday that he is holding talks with a consortium interested in providing enough for QPR to pay off Wright and all the other creditors. The group, whose members are mostly London-based, with one member in Switzerland and one in the Midlands, are also understood to be promising funds for the club itself. So there are currently some grounds for optimism. The chief executive, David Davies, who joined in July 2000, promised yesterday that there will be no return to the recent years of wilful extravagance. "Lessons here have been hard learned, and we are determined to run the club responsibly in the future, as we have done during the period of administration," he said.
QPR's is the most spectacular collapse of all the football clubs which headed eagerly for the Stock Market in 1996-97. Several made quick fortunes for a new breed of investor suddenly interested in the century-old national game. The club, the official prospectus noted, had been established in 1886. A founder member of the Third Division in 1920, they were also a founder member of the breakaway Premier League in 1992, and were only relegated from the Premiership in 1996. The prospectus lists a distinguished roll call of players QPR had brought in from lower-division clubs and made money by selling on: Les Ferdinand (signed from Hayes), David Seaman (Birmingham), Darren Peacock (Hereford), Paul Parker (Fulham), Andy Impey (Yeading), Trevor Sinclair (Blackpool) and Andy Sinton (Brentford). The club had made a £1.7m profit in 1996 and the highest-paid director earned just £4,932.
Chris Wright, chairman of the Chrysalis music and entertainment group and a Loftus Road season-ticket holder, bought in separate deals QPR, and Wasps Rugby Club, in August 1996, for nearly £9m plus £4m borrowed from Barclays Bank. QPR were bought from the Thompson family for around £9m and the trustees of the old amateur Wasps club were given £3.5m worth of shares in the new holding company, Loftus Road plc.
The flotation, the latest in a rush of football clubs to a Stock Market suddenly dazzled by the television millions pouring into the Premier League, raised an additional £12m for Loftus Road plc. Wright owned a majority of the shares, some personally, some through his Culture Vulture Pension Fund and others through a family trust. The prospectus talked of the "synergies" and "economies of scale" to be gained from bringing the football and rugby clubs together under the same roofs, which "should result in significantly increased revenues." A newspaper article of the time summed up the mood with the headline: "Footie thrashes the Footsie".
The directors immediately rewarded themselves. One, Charles Levison, was paid £100,000 in "success fees" for working on the acquisitions and flotation. Chris Wright himself became a part-time non-executive director, for which the club paid £8,000 per month, £96,000 a year, to Chrysalis. Since the administration, Wright has several times said that he was not "hands on" enough. QPR, Wasps and Loftus Road each had their own chief executives. QPR's, Clive Berlin, a former players' agent, was given a £100,000 salary, plus bonuses, benefits and a car.
The extravagant deals which Berlin then did, flush with the flotation money, look, in hindsight, endearingly homespun compared to the exotic talent on which other clubs were spending their own nouveaux riches. Two of the big signings, Gavin Peacock and John Spencer, were pushed out by the Euro-influx at Chelsea which began with Ruud Gullit and Gianluca Vialli. Mike Sheron, a £2.5m signing from Stoke, was the other major signing of Wright's reign. According to Davies, the salary deals for players were, simply, too much, and for too long. Most players were on five-year deals. Fifteen youth team players were on full-time salaries, with several being paid £50,000-£60,000 a year and three or four on over £100,000 a year. "You cannot blame the then chief executive personally," he was at pains to stress. "The whole board sanctioned these deals and the club itself has to take responsibility."
The proceeds of the flotation were frittered away. Wasps' ground at Sudbury was sold to McAlpine Homes, for around £9m. The money paid off some of Wright's loans to Loftus Road and was poured down the wages black hole. When Wright finally called a halt in April this year and surrendered the club to administration, QPR had 61 full-time professional players and a wage bill over a third higher than the club's income.
"As has been well documented," says Hocking's report, with deadpan understatement, "the economics of professional football and rugby union are marginal at best."
The losses Hocking lists were, between 1997 and 2000, £27m. Directors' pay ballooned: 10 directors, including Wright, were paid a total £490,000 in 1997, 11 were on the payroll at £373,000 in 1998, nine were paid a total £512,000 in 1999. Numbers were reduced to three by 2000; Wright's pay dropped to £32,000.
Since the administration began, 20 players have been released. Some who were out of contract, such as Paul Murray and Karl Ready, they would have liked to have kept. The agreements with the Professional Footballers' Association do not allow footballers to be made redundant, but "compromise agreements" were made which meant some of the youth players have now left the club. Given the current dispute in which the PFA is demanding a significant share of the Premiership's latest billion pound TV deal, it is salutary to hear from Davies that six members of QPR's administrative staff, a fifth of the office workforce, have been made redundant. "If I could have laid off one player whom we didn't want any more, I could have saved more than we did having to make six people redundant. I understand the PFA's argument that players have to be protected because their careers are short, but I do not think that argument is realistic any more in the current economic circumstances."
Chris Wright has consistently said he has lost £20m on his Stock Market punt of his football club. This is accounted for mainly by the acquisition and investment when QPR floated, although the prospectus does carry a warning that: "Potential investors should be aware that the value of shares could rise or fall." He has also propped up the club with £11m worth of loans which have now been reduced by his purchase from the administrators of Wasps, for £2.5m, and both clubs' Twyford Avenue training ground for a further £2.5m. The QPR 1st Supporters Trust, which launched shortly after the club entered into administration, has campaigned to ensure QPR is guaranteed a share of any profit Wright might make by selling Twyford Avenue in the future. David Davies said yesterday they do have such an agreement, although he would not disclose what QPR's share is.
Davies, whose background is in entertainment venues and ice hockey, here and in the US, believes football should have a salary cap, as rugby union now does, with its ceiling of £1.8m for the wages of top clubs. "It is the only sensible way forward," he said. "Clubs have to keep to sensible limits otherwise there will be a major collapse very soon. The banks are not sympathetic to football any more. We've learned this the hard way." Hocking was succinct: "Given the talk that's going around, it looks certain that there will be more football club insolvencies." QPR's experience shows there are real victims to these collapses, as well as those retreating, with their fingers burned, from the notion of five years ago that there was money to be made in football stocks.
Last Edit: 3 minutes ago by Macmoish
Read more: qprreport.proboards.com/thread/6473/yrs-diaz-holloway-years-hill#ixzz3CKbOlwzc