To this day, we are still seeing some fans of both Queens Park Rangers and Rangers try to claim QPR were in freefall under Michael Beale and in the former’s case they were glad to get rid, and in the latter’s case they protested his appointment.

Wolverhampton Wanderers famously had interest in Michael Beale when he was at Loftus Road – indeed, according to Sky Sports, he was the number one choice.

When was that announced? 19th October 2022. Where were QPR under Beale at this point?

Here’s where:

That’s right, top of the table. A team based on Bosmans and zero-budget summer work, with Beale in the job for just 15 matches, and they were top of the table by goal difference.

Queens Park Rangers, 100%, were on track for promotion either by winning the division, very possible, or via second place, also quite possible.

In short, Beale overhauled the struggles they ended up under after previous manager Mark Warburton left, and the-now Rangers boss had his previous side at the summit of the Championship.

Then Wolves moved in. They could see what a manager he was, and he was 100% top priority for them to replace Bruno Lage, fired after a dreadful start at Molineux. That approach completely derailed Queens Park Rangers’ season – it lost the squad’s focus given some players had signed particularly because of the manager, and Beale himself became extremely distracted by it.

After the 19th of October, QPR’s season pretty much collapsed. But this wasn’t because Beale wasn’t good enough, it was due to Wolves’ distracting approach. Absolutely nothing else.

There is, or was, a real agenda among some of our fans and certainly a lot of QPR fans to smite Beale and blame him for what happened to the team after Wolves moved in – a lot of them claim it was falling apart under Beale, and factually they’re correct, because his head got turned and the players lost focus.

But it wasn’t because he wasn’t any good, let’s be clear – the table doesn’t lie, does it? Or maybe it does, and it was all a fluke. What do we know?