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Reply | Blowing Bubbles Up The R's Match Thread
at 21:20 9 Oct 2026
Gets the ball initially, then follows through and stamps on the back of Smyth’s ankle. Very subtle, completely understand why the ref would have missed it in real time, but properly nasty. |
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Reply | Blowing Bubbles Up The R's Match Thread
at 21:02 9 Oct 2026
Very tidy half from us, thought we've looked dangerous on the break and extremely solid defensively. West Ham will surely be better second half, need to stay focused and strong.
Pen's a funny one: Smyth gets a little touch and plays it onto Soucek, who then clears him out, coming in heavy and from behind. Anywhere else on the pitch, that's a free kick, but it feels soft for a penalty. If it'd been given against us I'd be fuming. |
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Reply | Everything that is wrong in the world is in this!
at 12:33 9 Oct 2026
Right, I think when you get down to it most people disagree less on this stuff than we're led to believe.
In terms of those 11 million people: there are enough homes across the UK for them, the issue is with how those homes are being built, and who's building them. You've obviously noticed the empty flats in London! I believe there's currently something like 30,000 new build properties in the capital sitting empty, having been completed but never sold.
The housing market's contracted since those projects started, but developers price in a profit margin at the beginning, which means they now can't drop prices to what people can actually afford. Forcible renationalisation of housing stock would be a pretty extreme response, but I guess my point is: this is not fundamentally an issue with supply, nor one we can fix simply by building more homes or slowing population growth.
The rental market's the same: we have enough homes, we just don't have enough *affordable* homes, because we've spent 40 years transforming housing from a public good into an investment asset. The number of people in social housing has roughly halved since the 80s, the number paying rent to a private landlord has roughly doubled: *that's* why rents have skyrocketed, not (primarily) because of immigration.
So when you see people like LBlock (whether consciously or not) alluding to the sort of explanations that emanate ultimately from the far right, I'm not surprised people react negatively. Even if - like I say - 99% of us have far more in common around these issues than we realise. [Post edited 9 Oct 12:38]
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Reply | Everything that is wrong in the world is in this!
at 10:36 9 Oct 2026
It's entirely possible to have a reasonable, evidence-based discussion on the impacts of migration. but when you take an issue that is not primarily related to immigration and blame it on migrants, as LBlock did, then I think that raises questions.
There's been plenty of research into Spain's immigration policies (though not yet around the 2026 reforms, given the inevitable time lag for academia). This 2020 study found that naturalising undocumented immigrants produced a net benefit for public finances of around €3k per person:
https://e-archivo.uc3m.es/rest
This study also shows that more than 50% of the people who moved to Spain between 2022 and 2024 didn't stay there permanently, which perhaps challenges your suggestions around pressure on services (while also raising some other tricky questions around the overall economic impact of migration):
https://www.funcas.es/wp-conte
Much like in the UK, the issues with housing in Spain have far deeper roots than the current government: Spanish house prices tripled between 1997 and 2007, a decade in which Aznar tightened rather than loosened restrictions on immigration. The subsequent crash has obviously been affected by questions of supply and demand, but migration (both into Spain from elsewhere and within Spain itself) is only one of many factors in that.
There aren't any easy answers to this, but I do think that anyone tempted to immediately blame housing pressures on migration, either in Spain or the UK, needs to be honest with themselves about the evidence which contradicts that, and perhaps ask themselves why that connection is the first one they tend to reach for. |
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Reply | Everything that is wrong in the world is in this!
at 17:13 8 Oct 2026
I don't know the populations of Madrid or Barcelona off the top of my head but it's certainly not true of London. Urban population has grown by less than a million people compared to 1951, while transport infrastructure has increased massively.
In terms of housing costs, it's also not the case that we have too many people or too few homes: UK wide the ratios of homes to people, and to households, are higher now than they were in the 1970s. The issue is that over that time the country's reserve of social housing has been almost entirely privatised and not replaced, which has driven up prices across the rest of the market.
When you look at the numbers, the underlying macroeconomic issues have relatively little to do with immigration, and a huge amount to do with the mass transfer of wealth from the working and middle classes to a much smaller number of much wealthier people, and from collectively owned state resources to privatised industries.
All of this is downplayed persistently and aggressively by rich and powerful people with very clear economic and political incentives for the rest of us to blame immigrants, people with disabilities etc instead of politicians, private equity, large corporations and the like. We all spend a huge amount of time pointing fingers at each other, when the people actually screwing us over get away scot free. [Post edited 8 Oct 17:19]
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Reply | QPR v Pissed on knob end match Fred
at 17:09 19 Sep 2026
Preston absolutely woeful, and in the grand scheme of things that’s probably two points dropped, but hard to quibble with that second half performance. Incredible effort and positivity from everyone on the pitch, could and should have won that 4-2 but for their keeper pulling off some incredible stops.
Hard to know quite what to make of this team: we’ve clearly got something about us, but it feels like we’re still lacking that little bit of quality at both ends of the pitch. Several games already where we’ve played well but not got the result we deserve, or made costly mistakes. If we can sort that out over the international break, it’s all there for us. |
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Reply | Rest of the Championship thread 26/27
at 13:19 19 Sep 2026
2-0 now! Both off long throws from a certain Lyndon Dykes. Somewhat less predictably they were also a crossbar's width away from a 3rd, off a 40-yard screamer.
West Ham looking dreadful. Nonsense league. Love it. [Post edited 19 Sep 13:20]
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Reply | Awful team selection
at 22:32 5 Sep 2026
Behave. It’s a three-game week, we’ve got a lot of players nursing knocks or needing to manage their minutes, of course we’re going to have to rotate them. Aside from maybe one of Kamara or Madsen in central midfield this was the strongest team available to us. I know it’s frustrating to lose a tight game at home, but come on.
It’s particularly mad to cite Warnock as the solution here, as if the Championship wasn’t a completely different place 16 years ago, we didn’t have the best player in the league by miles, and weren’t able to go out and sign Kyle bloody Walker when our right-back got injured. All well and good saying “play your strongest 11 every week” in those circumstances, but decidedly less relevant to our current situation. |
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Reply | Beg, Boro or Steal QPR Vs Middlesborough Match Thread
at 17:02 5 Sep 2026
Absolutely deserved a point there, really decent performance and a very frustrating result. Far and away the better team second half, just couldn’t make it count.
Today feels like a bit of a reflection of where we are as a team: we’re not far off the better teams in the league, just not quite sharp enough at both ends of the pitch. Keep playing like that, though, and we’ll win more than we lose. [Post edited 5 Sep 17:03]
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Reply | Beg, Boro or Steal QPR Vs Middlesborough Match Thread
at 16:29 5 Sep 2026
That breakaway’s shifted the momentum- Boro looking much more confident now, when previously we’d been bossing the second half.
Broadly encouraging performance so far though, we’ve been giving one of the favourites for promotion a proper game. Need to be far more clinical in front of goal, and cut out the silly errors, but no reason we can’t get something from this. |
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Reply | Blueballs Us or Them Edition. QPR vs Cardiff City match thread
at 22:24 2 Sep 2026
Overall more positives than negatives but god, that last twenty minutes was tense.
Kamara, Lamptey and Burrell (at least until the last 15 minutes, when he was clearly gassed) all excellent, Edwards and Dunne both very good (that assist for the 2nd goal was a thing of beauty), had a bucketload of shots & should really have won far more comfortably, once again took an absolute screamer to beat Charles.
Saito and Vale looked out of sorts, think we struggled in both full-back positions after Mbengue tired & Lamptey went off, consistently gave Cardiff’s wide players too much room, and on another day / against better opponents we’d have got punished for missing so many excellent chances.
Cardiff looked much better than expected, had that sinking feeling when they scored but delighted to see us tough it out. You can tell that the mindset’s different this season, real belief running through the team. Really enjoyable game, solid performance and a positive result against good opponents. [Post edited 2 Sep 22:27]
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Reply | Have QPR finally cracked this transfer window business? Preview
at 11:46 2 Sep 2026
"Good, strong, early, proactive business was done to bring Pierce Charles, Calum Ward, Dennis Cirkin, Boy Kemper, Tariq Lamptey and Glen Kamara into each of those problem areas. Not a single transfer fee paid for any of them."
Pretty sure we paid a fee for Ward, no? Completely agree with the wider sentiment of the piece though, great work as always Clive. |
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Reply | Chery
at 13:10 20 Aug 2026
How about Radek Cerny? Final professional game for Slavia Prague in 2014, a year after leaving us, at the age of 40.
Also - Djibril Cissé, who appears to have signed up for Gerard Pique's 7-a-side baller league thing in his mid-40s. [Post edited 20 Aug 13:16]
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Reply | Surprise Cirkin addition marks another statement of QPR's intent - Signing
at 15:33 18 Aug 2026
Great piece, thank you as always Clive.
One thing that's struck me about the "development club vs. progressing up the league" debate you mention towards the end is that they're not mutually exclusive. Pushing towards the playoffs isn't just fun for supporters, it also puts the players we're hoping to sell far more prominently in the shop window; surely it's easier to get £10m for Richard Kone if we're in 5th rather than 15th.
I can understand the reasoning behind throwing Walsh, Larkeche etc into the first team, but if it keeps us stuck in the bottom half of the table then it's a false economy. Hopefully investing smartly in the rest of the team, which this deal with Cirkin feels like, will give us a better chance of not just improving the team on the pitch, but securing the sales that our trading model demands. |
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