Most football fans have had their attention riveted on Qatar for the past couple of weeks, but for those of us who support Queens Park Rangers there’s been an unwelcome distraction at home. Our manager Michael Beale, who’s only been in charge for 21 league games, announced on Monday that he’s leaving us for Rangers, the Glaswegian football club. Having spent a huge amount of time and effort recruiting a manager in the summer – and seemingly picking a winner – QPR’s top brass will have to start again.

Such behaviour isn’t particularly unusual in the modern game. Nathan Jones, who steered Luton to a top six finish in the Championship last season, left the Hatters in November to become the manager of Southampton. Another second-tier manager, Neil Critchley, was tempted away from Blackpool in June to become a mere assistant at Aston Villa, which must have been a kick in the teeth for the fans. At least our manager has been lured away by a proper job. True, Beale was only at QPR for five and a half months, when you’d expect a manager to stay for at least a season before making eyes at a more glamorous club. But that isn’t what makes his departure so annoying.

No, the really irritating thing about this is that in October another club came for Beale – Wolverhampton Wanderers – and he turned them down, explaining that he was too honourable to leave QPR so soon after being appointed. ‘Integrity and loyalty are big things for me, and if they are the values you live by you have to be strong,’ he told the press. ‘I have been all-in here and I have asked other people to be all-in so I can’t be the first person to run away from the ship.’

In case he hadn’t portrayed himself as saintly enough, he added: ‘The only reasons for leaving QPR right now would be selfish ones around ego, status or finance. And that’s not really me.’

This was music to the ears of QPR fans – finally, a football manager with a moral compass! – and we let Beale into our hearts. At every home game since, including the two we’ve lost, I’ve stood on the terraces chanting ‘Micky Beale’s blue army’ at the top of my lungs. I even travelled to Birmingham to watch the team lose 2-0 and looked on admiringly as a visiting fan hung up a banner that read: ‘Loyalty will always be rewarded.’ My four children, who are all avid QPR supporters, were also impressed by Beale. He was one of the few people in authority in their short lives (including their dad) who hadn’t disappointed them.

Now what are we to think? Beale ditching us this week, having announced he was far too noble to do anything so mercenary, is worse than if he’d gone in October. He hasn’t merely disappointed us; he’s broken our hearts. We’re left with the suspicion that the reason he didn’t take the Wolves job was nothing to do with loyalty and integrity, but because he suspected the Rangers job was about to become available and knew he was in with a shout. (Beale worked as an assistant coach at Ibrox for three years.) To quote Sam Jolliffe, a fellow QPR fan: ‘The Mick Beale situation in non-football terms: you’re in a relationship that you think is going really well and then you see their screen time stats and the most used app on their phone is Tinder.’

How catastrophic is this for the Hoops? Pretty bad. Not because Beale is an incredible, irreplaceable talent – QPR has lost four of the last five matches under his stewardship – but because he brought in seven decent players since his arrival and most of them came to the club to work with him. Beale has a good reputation for player development and has coached many of these footballers before, some of them when they were kids. In the case of one – a very promising Dutch left-back called Kenneth Paal – Beale persuaded him to leave behind his pregnant girlfriend in Holland to join our squad. How’s Paal going to feel now that his paterfamilias has hotfooted it to Glasgow? Hard to see him sticking around. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if Beale tries to poach him for Rangers in the January transfer window, along with some of the other players he brought in. That would be the icing on the snake.

Modern football is such a moral cesspit, it takes a great deal to shock me. But I confess to being completely poleaxed by Beale’s duplicity. I really thought we’d found a good’un. Turns out, he’s just like all the rest.

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