How to undermine and relegate your own club

And so it comes to this; QPR chairman Tony Fernandes sits at the poker table in his underpants, carefully placing the keys to his house on the summit of a large pile of chips.

At the door, a well-dressed man who appears to be made entirely of muscle and knuckles licks his lips expectantly. The definition of insanity, as Albert Einstein once said, is spending approximately 175% of your turnover on wages for monosyllabic young men to fritter away on sports cars and tattoos. Seriously, look it up.

It can be foolish to be judgmental in football, so these next words have been chosen carefully. Almost everything that Fernandes has done since buying QPR has been wrong. It’s as if he’s working his way, page by page, through a playbook entitled, How to Undermine and Relegate Your Own Football Club.