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coming up on Talkshite in a minute
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I must away now, I can no longer tarry
This morning's tempest I have to cross
I must be guided without a stumble
Into the arms I love the most -
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If I'm honest what he said was alright. Accepted responsibility for the last 5 years and said directors are prepared to pay fine if need be.Originally posted by lymehoop View PostComment
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73 will be able to sleep better after his meltdown doomed couple of weeks hes had nowOriginally posted by Awin View Post
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Hahaha 😂Originally posted by Pinkie View PostOn twitter its hits handle
nsa/cia spy on this..............┌∩┐(◣_◢)┌∩┐Comment
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I blew a lot on vodka and tonic, gambling and fags. Looking back, I think I overdid it on the tonic. - The one and only Stanley BowlesComment
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Q: How do you become a millionaire in F1?
A: Start off as a billionaire
It also appears to apply professional (sic) football teams........Comment
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Speaking during an interview with Hawksbee and Jacobs on TalkSport, the Hoops supremo said:
"The first thing I learnt, in a very hard and expensive way, was that all my life I've got a wage, whatever it is, 10p or £10,000 I put my heart and soul into a job and I just assumed that would be the same for footballers and it wasn't.
So we learnt the hard way! The most important thing is character, good people, whether they're running Air Asia, an insurance company or football, that's the difference between success and mediocrity.
"It was a shock to the system, the people, the agents, but I do think football needs to be sustainable and the authorities have done a relatively good job. I do support FFP and sustainability and clubs are making decent money and profits now, it can be a relatively good business."
Read more: http://www.getwestlondon.co.uk/sport...dmits-13847782Comment
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Got an interview in the Times but it’s behind a firewall
Starts:
No football club owner in history has learnt lessons more expensively than Tony Fernandes. “We screwed up,” he says of racking up losses of more than £200 million only to end up lower in the league than when he started at Queens Park Rangers.
A new memoir sets out some of the costly blunders, the indiscriminate buying of big-name internationals on £80,000-a-week contracts with no relegation clauses and no work ethic.
Some would have run away, or blamed everyone else. You owe it to the fans to fix it
Tony Fernandes
“Pure naivety,” Fernandes acknowledges. “I thought every player would run their socks off because that’s always been my character. I never thought there would be guys who would take a salary and do f*** all.”
Fernandes disarms pointed questions about how such a successful businessman could lose his way so badly in football by…Comment
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Interview in The Telegraph too. Well worth a read: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/...nally-getting/Comment
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Was just about to post this. Yes he is doing. All these interviews to promote his book. But the honesty is refreshing.Originally posted by Stanley View PostComment
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Speaking to Radio 5Live, he said: "I just assume that everyone who takes a salary would work 150 percent, that's my philosophy all the time that if I take someone's wage I'd put in 150 percent, whether it's for £10 of £1000.
I realise that isn't always the case in football and so we really spent a long time making sure we had the right sort. It's all about people. If you put good people in, hire good people, whether they're playing staff or backroom staff, it makes a massive difference."
Football as a sport is overrun by the increasing power given to agents and footballers in the game, and Fernandes says that he's learnt that he needs to let the experts control footballing matters.
He said: "That's the one other thing I've learnt, there's got to be a seperation. My whole life I've been immersed in whatever I do. While I'm CEO of AirAsia I can carry bags, I can meet passengers, I do everything, but in football there needs to be seperation.
I think one of the biggest decisions I made was to step back and let Les Ferdinand deal with agents and leave the players to Les and Ian Holloway, so I think the stepping back and allowing the professionals to do it has made a difference."
Asked whether he ever had to bite his tongue with a player or agent, he said: "Biting my tongue with a player, most definitely. Biting my tongue with agents, no, I spoke my mind in the end.
It used to be frustrating when I'd see a player who was clearly not injured and pretending to be injured. Or seeing a player not giving 110 percent. That was an alien concept to me. But it felt it wasn't my place to do it. It's about making sure you have the right players and making sure you have the right contracts before you sign for a long-term."
Read more: http://www.getwestlondon.co.uk/sport...iting-13861352Comment
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Tony Fernandes admits to QPR mistakes during turbulent tenure but can finally raise a smile - JAMES OLLEY
Tony Fernandes has only just found peace after six turbulent years in charge of Queens Park Rangers but his grand ambitions for the club are undiminished.
“There was a poster at Everton which really struck me many years ago, walking down from the chairman’s suite. It read: 20 consecutive years in the Premier League.
If I could secure QPR as a consistent Premier League club with a new training ground and a new stadium, then we will have done something good. There is a long, long way to go but I believe the structure is finally right.”
The journey in establishing that structure forms one of the most compelling chapters of Fernandes’s autobiography, which details the mistakes you would not expect an otherwise successful businessman to make, let alone then admit in print.
Anyone who watched The Four Year Plan could glean an insight into the anarchic reign of Flavio Briatore and Bernie Ecclestone, yet even Fernandes, 53, was not prepared for the mess he inherited.
“I saw the film,” he said, smiling before taking a long pause. “Some of the team talks were... interesting. And the ways of going to matches. It was an angry club when I took over. The disconnect was obvious. It has rarely been said but we actually bought very little. There was no scouting department, no real sports science department, the academy was nothing very much, no director of football, no code of conduct.
I am very proud we have put in a good backroom structure but we’ve had our own ‘four-year plan’ of disasters and successes. It will take a few more years but we have certainly brought it back to sustainability.”
Fernandes restored QPR’s former badge, the club mascot and even changed the kit by returning the blue-and-white hoops to their original size.
Work was done to re-engage with the community — evidenced most clearly in Loftus Road staging Game 4 Grenfell to raise money for those affected by the horrific tower fire just one mile away.
Yet Fernandes admits to a catalogue of errors, not least in player recruitment, which led to a divided squad split between overpaid players high on reputation but low on commitment at the end of their careers sat alongside a disgruntled group who had earned promotion from the Championship.
“I walked into our dressing room at times and it felt like we had four different dressing rooms, even from the music that was played. Wages are a part of it. There is clarity, a wage structure now. There were guys on four- or five-year contracts and that takes a long time to rectify.
We were wrong to do that in the first place — we were badly advised — but we stuck at it and redressed the balance. Agents can smell blood. I’ve seen it and it won’t happen again. The buck stopped with me. But now, I walk in to QPR and it is like AirAsia.”
When Fernandes bought the airline in 2001, it had two planes, 254 staff and 200,000 passengers per year. Now it has 220 planes, around 20,000 staff and will carry 73million passengers in 2017.
Fernandes quit Formula One in 2014 because his Caterham team could not compete but he remains steadfast in his belief QPR will thrive. A wage cap now exists, a new training ground is in the offing and plans to build a stadium on the site of an athletics track one mile away are edging forward.
The excesses of the past — when the club were saddled with a £75.4m wage bill on a turnover of £38.7m in the Championship — have been redressed. However, an appeal over the size, and not the legitimacy, of a £40m fine from the Football League for breaching Financial Fair Play rules shows they have not been forgotten.
Nothing, it seems, will force him from the role he loves. “I assume I will die somehow in the club,” he said, laughing. “I am not sure whether my ashes will be thrown around the ground or embalmed at Loftus Road... but I love it.
I’ll eventually exit AirAsia because I am almost done with what I can do there. QPR, there is a long way to go. I love it. My dream would be to go to Under-23 games, Under-18 games, everything. I think there will be a point when I won’t be chairman any more — leadership always needs to be refreshed — but I’ll always have a share in QPR.”
That is not to say all QPR fans have been behind him. With 1.5m followers on Twitter, hate is never far away.
"There are days I think, ‘why do I put up with people calling me four-letter words?’. It isn’t just football fans, it is Air Asia passengers as well.
Sometimes I challenge them. If they call me a four-letter word, I direct messages to them and say, ‘why did you do that?’ Most of the time, they talk big but then when you talk to them they are quite decent people.
They just say, ‘sorry, it was just frustration.’ Many of my haters have become guys who buy me a drink in the pub now.”
QPR are on an even keel again under Ian Holloway, with Fernandes in no rush to accelerate progress having witnessed the perils of doing so. And his plans extend to proposing a radical shake-up of English football.
Fernandes outlines in his book an idea to combine the Premier League and Championship into Eastern and Western leagues, United States style, and then have a final between the two winners to determine a champion.
“The Championship has way too many clubs. On the one side, you want to cut costs, but if you have 46 games, you need more players and a bigger squad. You are spoiling the quality of the players.
But if you look at AirAsia, I started with getting my own house in order, building something and now we are trying to change policy. I am far away from telling someone how to change a league when we are still building. We want to be in the Premier League in the next couple of years.
And as we get better at what we are doing and more successful, then yes I will try to influence the leagues in owners’ meetings. There are some very proactive owners and I will get more involved.”
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