Queens Park Rangers chief Les Ferdinand explains why Cole Kpekawa was sold to Barnsley

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The promising youngster moved from QPR to Barnsley on summer deadline day.

Director of Football Les Ferdinand has explained Queens Park Rangers’ decision to sell Cole Kpekawa to Barnsley at a recent fans forum which was broadcast via the club’s official Youtube channel.

Kpekawa was regarded as one of QPR’s top prospects, and his deadline day departure came as a shock to many.

But Ferdinand says that while Rangers did not want to lose the 20-year-old, they were effectively left with little alternative after he appeared to take issue with a fitness programme laid out for him by the club.

“I don’t want to stand here and lambaste him, or disrespect him in any way, but a load of you will have heard the saying: you can bring a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. And that’s where we felt we’d got to with Cole Kpekawa,” the 49-year-old said.

“The manager (Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink) brought him on pre-season, he done pre-season with the first team and perhaps never got to the levels that you needed him to get to. So we had to do something with him when he got back.

“We felt we had to get his fitness levels up to where they needed to be, so we set out a programme for him. Then I got calls from his agent saying: ‘the kid wants to leave, the kid wants to leave, the kid wants to leave, the kid wants to leave’. So he didn’t want to follow the programme we gave him and just wanted to leave.”

Ferdinand added: “I really do hope he goes on to have a good career because if he does have a good career we’ll benefit from it.”

Kpekawa made nine appearances for the QPR first team after graduating the club’s academy, and impressed in loan spells at Colchester, Portsmouth and Leyton Orient.

Barnsley paid a reported £450,000 for the versatile defender, who has since featured in all but one of the Tykes’ five league fixtures.

Both Ferdinand and Hasselbaink, who was also at the meeting, discussed at length QPR’s summer recruitment drive, explaining why it took so long to land Yeni Ngbakoto, how they missed out on one unnamed target and why they chose to loan out both Michael Doughty and Darnell Furlong.