Director of football Les Ferdinand is concerned that Premier League clubs will come calling for QPR’s biggest talent with West Ham and Newcastle United planning moves, speaking to West London Sport.
The phrase ‘victims of your own success’ comes to mind.
Despite a winless run of four matches, Queens Park Rangers are still sitting pretty in fourth in the Championship table. The coupon-busting dark horses going nose-to-nose with the pedigree stallions Fulham and Bournemouth.
But such success comes at a cost.
According to 90Min, a West Ham side who snapped up Jarrod Bowen, Craig Dawson and Said Benrahma from second-tier clubs have their sights firmly fixed on another Championship talent. QPR’s ball-playing, wondergoal-scoring centre-half Rob Dickie.
TEAMtalk believe that Lyndon Dykes, the square-shouldered targetman, has admirers at Newcastle, Norwich, Crystal Palace and Rangers.
Youngster Sinclair Armstrong, meanwhile, has found himself on the respective radars of Celtic and Manchester City.
So no wonder Ferdinand is bracing himself for a difficult summer.
“We’ve got some good, young and exciting players,” says Ferdinand. “I’m worried, come the end of the season, people will be knocking on the door and wanting to take them.
“We’ll try to resist as much as we can.”
Will Rangers or Celtic raid QPR this summer?
This is without mentioning the mercurial Ilias Chair, goalkeeper Seny Dieng and creator-in-chief Chris Willock; A player so influential some have labelled him the second coming of Eberechi Eze.
QPR were disappointed to lose Eze to Crystal Palace in the summer of 2020. But Ferdinand knows that, ‘if the right offer comes in’, then QPR may be powerless to prevent Dykes or Dickie from joining Palace’s number ten in the Premier League.
“Obviously we want to keep our prize assets,” the former England international explained at a fans’ forum earlier this month.
“I don’t want to sell (our best players). I didn’t want to sell Eze because I felt, with Eze in the side this season, we’d have a better chance of getting promoted. But the money was too good for us to turn down.
“So the situation is, if the right offer comes in for a player, we have to sell.”
Of course, QPR will find themselves in a much better position to resist those offers if they can force their way into the automatic promotion positions…
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