Tony Fernandes interview: 'We were naive at QPR - there are no shortcuts to success'

For advice on what not to do when first buying a Premier League football club, the new owners of Newcastle United could do a lot worse than talk to Tony Fernandes. It is just over 10 years since the Malaysian businessman bought Queens Park Rangers from Bernie Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore, a period which has seen the club relegated, promoted, relegated again, and forced to pay a Financial Fair Play settlement of £42million. It has been a long, and often painful, journey, although with Rangers now sixth in the Championship, there are signs that the club may be on the cusp of a renaissance.

One of Fernandes's allies during his time at Loftus Road was Jamie Reuben, a QPR director until last year and now part of the new Saudi Arabian-led set-up at Newcastle. “He has been trained by QPR so he should do well!” Fernandes laughs. Understandably, the 57-year-old is reluctant to make predictions about what might be about to happen on Tyneside, although he does offer a warning about how the “pressures of football ... [can] force you into taking shortcuts.”

“You are chasing the ‘Cinderella-moment’," he says. "I wouldn’t say it about many things in my life but certainly at QPR there are some things I would like to go back on. There is no substitute to hard work, getting the right people and listening to them. The bottom line is we are now probably the most experienced owners in the business. We could run an Oxford University PhD course on how to run a football club.

“You learn the hard way. We feel very confident now in our ability to make the right decisions. The Tony Fernandes of 10 years ago thought everyone in football was like how he worked in AirAsia [the airline he operates] and everyone was trustworthy.”

Famously, or rather infamously, Fernandes and his partners, led by Ruben Gnanalingam, sanctioned huge spending on players under Mark Hughes and Harry Redknapp. Some of the deals, urged by agents seeing pound signs, were simply ruinous, ultimately leading to the owners writing off loans of £180million. It also failed to work on the field: Rangers were relegated in 2013 and again in 2015. They have not been back to the top flight since.

“I was 100 per cent naïve,” Fernandes admits. “My naivety was that people took your wage without doing their thing. But we won’t be the first and won’t be the last. I see another bunch of new owners coming into Newcastle so that’s an early process.”

Fernandes is self-effacing as well as determined, telling a story about how he and Gnanalingam, as they were leaving the directors' box at Everton following a crucial defeat, saw a poster on the wall proclaiming how the Merseyside club had never been relegated from the Premier League. "I always said ‘if we had owned Everton that poster wouldn’t have been there!’," Fernandes says, laughing again. Fernandes reveals that he and Gnanalingam had discussed buying Everton before deciding to pursue QPR, but the pair now count among the Championship's longer serving owners. How has he managed to last the course?

“I am not a quitter," he insists. "There are two ways in life. You get it wrong and run away, pretend it never happened. The harder one is to stay and say you want to fix it. We love this club and we want to do it the right way.”

Talk is cheap – even if football is not – but Fernandes is determined to forge a new future for QPR. A new stadium, or a re-build of Loftus Road, is still in the plan, but as Fernandes acknowledges, ruefully, London planning restrictions mean that is a long-term goal. First, QPR have hit the re-set button. They went back to “grassroots”, as Fernandes puts it, which started by bringing in Les Ferdinand as director of football six years ago followed by former head coach Chris Ramsey who returned as technical director. The focus has been on youth, developing players and working hard on the academy with the poster boy being Eberechi Eze, who was sold to Crystal Palace for £20million.

Now Ilias Chair - a 23-year-old Moroccan, signed by Rangers as a teenager from Lierse in Belgium in 2017 - is leading QPR’s push into the play-off places under Mark Warburton.

“We have the added benefit of not one of our players being a bad apple and that’s not always been the case,” Fernandes says. It looks far more solid, far more sustainable. There is also a new bond scheme, through Tifosy Capital and Advisory, which allows fans to invest in the new £20million training ground.

“The philosophy of the bond is, yes, the shareholders can write another cheque and we have written many already, but this is a way to get the fans involved," Fernandes explains. "It gives a sense of ownership, a sense of pride.”

So do the fans understand? “That’s a hard one. Fans want results but I think QPR fans are the most educated and financially aware in the league. I don’t see many comments saying, ‘the owners aren’t opening the cheque book’. I read comments about how they want the club to be sustainable and I don’t see that throughout the Football League. We get credit for how little we pay in the transfer window!

"We have to suck it up and be prepared to be in the Championship for a while. But it also means that when we do get up to the Promised Land we are in a much better position.”

Fernandes is always emotionally invested in what he does, and even football's occupational hazards still cut him to the quick.

"We had 26 shots against Bristol City the other day and lost - that’s f------ demoralising! And we lost with [former QPR striker] Nakhi Wells scoring in the 93rd minute. It took me three days to reply to an Instagram he sent me. I love the guy and he said ‘Tony I am always going to score against QPR. That’s why you should have signed me!’ But, no, I am not cynical because the buck stops with us; you can’t blame anyone else.”

So what is the vision now? “I don’t love talking about plans but of course we want to be in the Premier League. Of course we would love to do a Leicester. They are the model, getting to Europe. That has to be the dream. Any owner who says ‘I am very happy to stay in the Championship’ is not telling the truth.

“But the plan is we are going to take it one step at a time. The first plan was sustainability, and we are not quite there yet, the second was the training ground and that’s an ongoing project and the third would be to become a sustainable Premier League side and build a stadium and there’s no point thinking about that yet.”

If promotion does happen then Fernandes, personally, is far better-equipped to cope. “Oh God, yeah. But it’s tough, right? How many times have Norwich gone up and down? Sheffield United had a fantastic year in the Premier League and now they are struggling in the Championship. There is no sure recipe. But we are smarter.”