Marti Cifuentes on QPR and why every manager needs to be ‘delusional’ | OneFootball

A while into a reflective chat, on a more relaxed day at Queens Park Rangers’ polished new training base, Marti Cifuentes offers an insight that a lot of managers would surely empathise with.

“It might be that we need to be a little bit delusional to be head coaches,” he chuckles.

A certain self-belief is clearly all the more valuable in the Championship, where the volatility can abruptly disabuse managers of where they think they are. You can be looking over your shoulder at relegation one week, only for two good results to put you in view of the play-offs the next… and then back again.

Cifuentes now knows this well, having been through the extremes at Loftus Road. The 42-year-old has earned admiration as one of the game’s brightest young coaches after first guiding QPR out of what seemed certain relegation last season, and then turning around a terrible start to this campaign, before driving among the best form in the division at the turn of the year with four successive wins.

It is testament to a composure currently displayed across the club that Cifuentes himself also showed when they looked doomed in October.

“It’s easier to say than to do it,” he again laughs. “What I try to remind all the players is the joy of playing the game that we tend to forget, why we started to play football when we were kids.”

Psychology and perspective are themes that Cifuente returns to a lot, in a discussion that goes as far as artificial intelligence in football. He has had his own outlook widened by working in five different countries. Cifuentes left La Liga’s Hospitalet in 2016 to then go to Norway’s Sandefjord, Denmark’s AaB and Sweden’s Hammarby IF before arriving at QPR in 2023.

“I decided I wanted to try different leagues, different countries, because this is definitely something that I think helps you to develop as a manager,” he says.

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Marti Cifuentes and Zan Celar of QPR celebrate (Getty Images)

He is guarded on future ambitions, including for this season, but it’s hard not to be in the Championship. Cifuentes echoes the view that it is the most intense division in football. What is most insightful, though, is how his experiences allow him to rationally explain why exactly that is.

“It’s the first league I coached in that you don’t feel safe at 2-0 in the 90th minute,” Cifuentes says. “When I see a lot of Championship games, the difference between the first half and the last 20 minutes is massive.”

Cifuentes points to an observation made by his assistant, Xavier Calm.

“In Spain, most of the games are kind of open at 0-0 but, when someone scores, it’s difficult because the teams are technically and tactically quite strong. If you want to press them high, you are going to get destroyed. So… 1-0, it’s a big thing.

“While here in England, sometimes there is a bit of respect for each other at 0-0. But, when there is one goal, everything can explode.

“Perhaps so far one of the main things I have learned is that the atmosphere in stadiums can affect the game.”

Cifuentes has certainly felt that at Loftus Road.

“I think it’s very pure at QPR and it’s something I really enjoy. These are small details but, when we score, it’s not just phones all around. It’s pure joy of people celebrating; celebrating the goal, celebrating the game itself. So, it’s certainly very special…”

It’s also why Cifuentes feels that composure, and playing to enjoy, is all the more important.

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Ilias Chair of Queens Park Rangers celebrates after scoring against Derby at Loftus Road (Getty Images)

“We train this mental power… if you want to call it this,” he adds.

That was especially key in the difficult period of early November, when QPR had only won one game out of 16 before sparking into life around the turn of the year. Cifuentes puts the switch down to new players adapting to the league and injuries to leaders like Jake Clarke-Salter and Ilias Chair, to go with a crucial tactical change.

As a Catalan whose father brought him to watch Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona “Dream Team”, Cifuentes is a devotee of the Pep Guardiola “positional game”. His system just needed tweaking. As he elaborates on this, you can start to see why Cifuentes laughs about coaches having to be “delusional”.

“There is always this balance between believing in your ideas more than in yourself,” he notes. “But it’s about how much you need to change things to make things change, if that makes sense? So always these balances are very difficult. And I don’t have a right answer.”

Cifuentes does see pressing with speed as a non-negotiable.

“If you give four seconds to any average player to execute an action, everybody can perform at a really high level,” he maintains. “The difficult part is that nowadays football goes so fast it’s difficult to get more than half a second, to think and watch and to scan. So that’s what we try to do through positional play. It’s to try to find where there is more time.

“Time is everything. Time is space. Time is more quality to execute, even for an average player.”

Cifuentes has always been attuned to the virtues of timing and speed in sport, given his father’s career as a professional racing driver.

He reveals: “My dad had very high tolerance for high speed!”

He goes on to laud the “risk” that drivers take, and the necessary single-mindedness - you might say “delusion” - of individual sports. He believes it is why committing yourself are more important than just committing to an idea.

“Whatever you do, if you do it well, it can be successful,” he continues. “That’s the beauty of the game. I think that all managers, in our heads, we have a perfect game, a perfect way of playing. That’s what we chase…”

It is naturally more difficult to impose any perfect idea on the Championship, but Cifuentes feels this is one challenge not unique to the division.

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Michael Frey of Queens Park Rangers celebrates scoring (Getty Images)

“That’s why adaptation is so important,” he says. “In Norway [with Sandefjord], the first game we had 70 percent possession, playing well in many aspects - and we lost 2-0 in two corner kicks. I was defending pure zonal, that in Spain worked really well for me. And suddenly I face three big Norwegian centre-halves… the game was over!”

Hence managers need to adapt, but also be assured with it.

“When you are in front of a group, the players notice in one second if you are telling them the truth or not, 100 percent. So I think to be a good head coach, you need to be very honest, and to have a strong belief in what you are saying.”

From such communication, Cifuentes offers what is maybe a slightly surprising view.

“I heard some of the coaches say they would really like to have players connected [by ear-piece], so you can give them instructions,” he says. “It’s something I would hate because, for me, what I really want is to help the player during the week, to make sure he can take his own decisions during the game. The game should belong to players.”

A question about artificial intelligence shaping management leads to an even more strident response.

“I would like to think nothing will beat the human being. We have a good example with chess. Hopefully I will not see any laptop or computer beating Magnus Carlsen or whoever.

“Human relations are different.”