A dark cloud has descended over Queens Park Rangers, my beloved football club. On 22 October last year, when we beat Wigan Athletic 2-1 at home, we were top of the Championship table. Under our new manager, Michael Beale, we had won nine of our first 16 games, drawn three and lost four. Since then, it’s all gone Pete Tong – and not just a bit pear-shaped, but disastrously, catastrophically wrong. In the 23 games that followed, we have won twice, drawn six and lost 15, meaning we’ve only chalked up 12 points, the lowest tally in the division. We’re now just three points off the bottom three and look likely to be relegated. What in God’s name has happened?

For the fans, the main culprits are the club’s owners – Tony Fernandes, Ruben Gnanalingam and Lakshmi Mittal. When Fernandes, who owns AirAsia, became the majority shareholder in August 2011, QPR had just been promoted to the Premier League, Brentford was in League One and Luton Town was a non-league side. (I single them out because they’re both rivals of ours.) Today, Brentford is in the top half of the Prem, Luton is fourth in the Championship and we’re 19th. At Loftus Road, QPR’s west London home, it’s now routine to see fans holding up banners saying ‘Sack the Board’, which would mean finding new owners, since the chair is Mittal’s son-in-law, Amit Bhatia, and the other two owners are vice-chairs.

But that’s easier said than done, partly because the shareholders have done what the fans wanted and poured money into the club. According to the latest set of accounts, it owes £11.5 million on its new £20 million training ground, £6 million to the EFL for Covid bailouts, £10.2 million in fines for over-spending in previous seasons, £2.1 million on transfer instalments and £68 million in loans. So anyone buying QPR would be taking on debts of £97.8 million – and that’s before the annual operating loss of £24 million. Any businessman buying a football team needs their head examined – only four clubs in the UK recorded a profit of over £1 million in 2019-21 – but you’d have to be some kind of fool to take on QPR. At least the current owners have deep pockets.

A more plausible villain is the afore-mentioned Micky Beale. He abandoned ship less than halfway through the season to manage a more successful club, leaving us in the lurch. He’d brought in seven new players and nearly all of them have become less enthusiastic about wearing the shirt since his departure. Four were defenders and they’ve all picked up injuries in the past few months. Indeed, one of them – a centre back – only returned to the starting line-up last Saturday, having not played since Beale left, and he conceded a penalty in the first four minutes. That proved to be the match winner for bottom-of-the-league Wigan Athletic, their second victory in 20 games.

But blaming our slump on Beale’s disloyalty overlooks the fact that he lost four of his last five games in charge and only managed a 0-0 draw in the other, suggesting the rot had already set in. The man appointed to replace him – Neil Critchley – looked good on paper. He took Blackpool from League One to the Championship in 2020-21 and kept them up the following season. But he only managed one win during his 12-game tenure at QPR, the worst record of any manager in the club’s 137-year history. His successor, Gareth Ainsworth, again looked like a smart choice. A former QPR player, he’d successfully managed Wycombe Wanderers for 11 years, taking them from League Two to the Championship. Yet his record so far is no better than Critchley’s. He’s only won once during his six games in charge, losing all the others – including a 6-1 drubbing from Blackpool. It’s beginning to look as if the problem lies with the players.

At one point, ten of our 26-man squad were nursing injuries – an unusually high figure even for the Championship, which has a notoriously crowded fixture list. The fans suspect some of them are faking it, but it’s possible there’s another reason. QPR moved to a new training ground at the beginning of the season and that’s where some of the injuries have been picked up. Perhaps the playing surface takes some getting used to? Or maybe the only players we can afford, given the club’s financial predicament, are particularly injury-prone? Or are we just unlucky? In any event, five of those injured players were back in the starting line-up against Wigan and we still managed to shit the bed.

So, all in all, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher. I’m beginning to think a disgruntled ex-manager has put a curse on the place. We don’t need a new broom. We need an exorcist.