What's happened to QPR's 'Project Big Ben' plan for new 40,000-seater stadium? | OneFootball

It's now been more than a decade since QPR were linked to a move away from Loftus Road, but little has happened since to make this a reality.

Queens Park Rangers have long been linked with a move away from their Loftus Road home, but little has ever come of it.

One of English football's biggest inequalities can be found in the EFL Championship, where parachute payments for clubs relegated from the Premier League give those who've just dropped from the top-flight a huge financial advantage over those who haven't yet scaled those heights.

While a bog-standard Championship club will receive in the region of £10 million to £12 million in broadcasting money from the EFL's contract with Sky, those relegated from the Premier League get three years' worth of parachute payments worth multiple times that amount, which only ends in the event that they're promoted back. With this in mind, increasing match-day revenues is crucial to other clubs who are hoping to get promoted themselves, as well as future-proofing them, should they win promotion back.

Queens Park Rangers are tethered to Loftus Road, an increasingly aging stadium with a relatively low capacity. And with this being the case, it's not surprising that they have frequently been linked to a move to somewhere new, although this hasn't actually come to pass on a permanent basis yet.

Queens Park Rangers were seeking investment for a new stadium as recently as 2024

In October 2024, The Sun followed up on reports from eleven years earlier that QPR were intending to leave Loftus Road for a new 40,000-capacity stadium in the Old Oak area of London, two and a half miles from their current home.

They reported that the club's then-owner Tony Fernandes had said in 2013: "Loftus Road is – and always will be – a special place for the club and our supporters, but we need more than an 18,000 capacity", and that, "Not only will this give us a top quality stadium to cater for QPR’s needs as the club progresses and grows over the years ahead, but we are very excited about being the driving force behind creating one of the best new urban places in the world."

The site was near the famous Wormwood Scrubs prison, and the club at that time were reportedly looking for investors to pump cash into “Project Big Ben.” Having been relegated from the Premier League in 2015 and not returned, though, new stadium talk since then has been muted, although another site has been investigated since then.

QPR have long been linked with a move away from Loftus Road

Even though they only moved into Loftus Road in 1917, stories linking Queens Park Rangers to a move away from their home have been circulating for almost a century, and on two separate occasions they have left the ground for pastures new.

They moved to the nearby White City greyhound track for the 1931-32 season, but returned to Loftus Road in 1933 after having run up losses of £7,000 - £416,000, adjusted for inflation from 1931 - a very large amount of money for a football club of that time. For comparison, the UK record transfer fee in 1931, which had been set in 1928, was just under £11,000, the first five-digit transfer fee in the history of English football.

This wasn't the only time that QPR went to the dogs. They moved to back to White City - which hosted one match at the 1966 World Cup finals - for the 1962-63 season, this time returning to their former home after just one season, with the attempted relocation having broadly been dismissed for a second time as a failure.

On this occasion, a decision was made to redevelop Loftus Road was made, and between 1968 and 1981 the stadium was completely re-built with four new standards and the professional game's first artificial playing surface. But times have changed since then. Loftus Road is now widely considered to be cramped and dated, and its relatively low capacity of 18,439 limits match-day and commercial revenue streams.

Relegation from the Premier League in 2015 put paid to any realistic likelihood of the Old Oak plans coming to anything, while even White City ceased to be an option when it closed in 1984 and was demolished a year later. The club had coveted a move to the nearby Linford Christie Stadium, but by 2019 these plans had also run aground and by the end of 2022 it seemed most likely that a local community group would be redeveloping that site.

Yet still the desire to leave Loftus Road doesn't seem to have gone away. In March 2024, the Daily Mail reported that the club was actively seeking investors for what they described as "Project Big Ben." According to the Mail, Montminy, the American bank dealing with this on behalf of the club, claimed in a prospectus that QPR's vision was to 'produce a state-of-the-art, multipurpose stadium, as part of a major regeneration in West London,' and claimed that 'discussions are underway to further explore significant stadium development with local municipal authority.'

With the Loftus Road site severely restricted for growth by its residential location, a move away remains Queens Park Rangers' best option if they want to grow their attendance figures and reap the financial benefits that would follow such a move.

But the club have tried this twice before, and both times it was a failure. And with available land in the capital being as restricted as it is, new stadium developments in London have tended to be huge - as with The Emirates Stadium, The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium or The London Stadium - or relatively small, as with Wimbledon's Plough Lane or Brentford's new community stadium, which is roughly the same size as Loftus Road is now.

The hunt for a new stadium for Queens Park Rangers goes on, then, as has been the case for much of the last hundred years. In the meantime, it seems likely that the only way they'll get back to the Premier League for the foreseeable future will be to overcome that vast discrepancy in income caused by more than a decade's absence from the top-flight.