2 QPR players who must seek Loftus Road escape route in January | OneFootball

These two QPR players desperately need a loan move when the transfer window opens.

QPR may be getting busy in the January transfer window to give Julien Stephan the best chance of getting his team to make an outside late run into the Championship play-off places.

The Hoops were ambitious in the summer window, bringing in the likes of Richard Kone and Kwame Poku, two of League One's best players in 2024/25, re-signing the ever-popular Koki Saito and adding the likes of Isaac Hayden to help bolster the midfield after his successful spell at Portsmouth last season.

Evidently, the higher-ups at Loftus Road are getting quite restless with Championship mediocrity and are looking to make a fist of getting in and around the top six in their 11th consecutive second-tier campaign.

If this proves to be the case, and more experienced quality is brought in when the transfer window reopens in January, these two bright stars need to be looking to head the other way and explore a loan move for the rest of the campaign.

Kieran Morgan

19-year-old Kieran Morgan was thrown in at the deep end in his first season at QPR last year after arriving from the Tottenham Hotspur academy, making 30 Championship appearances, of which 19 were starts.

It seemed like the versatile youngster, who operates mainly as an attacking midfielder but can play deeper and even slot in at right-back, was going to be a key man for Julien Stephan in his sophomore year.

However, QPR started the current campaign on the wrong foot, and when Stephan began to figure out his best team, Morgan was left by the wayside.

After starting the first three games of the campaign, in which the Hoops picked up one point and conceded 10 goals, Morgan went on a six-game run as an unused substitute, a run during which QPR went unbeaten.

He's had sporadic bench appearances since then, but with several players ahead of him in the pecking order, perhaps a loan move to a League One side where he can get regular senior minutes in the second half of the season would be optimal for the highly-rated teenager.

Rayan Kolli

With the likes of Kone and Rumarn Burrell emerging as key men at the top end of the field this season, the likes of Paul Smyth and Michael Frey have been demoted to squad players.

Rayan Kolli, who was the squad player to the likes of Smyth and Frey last season, has therefore become a mere afterthought.

The Algerian Under-20 international came through the QPR academy and had a mini-breakout spell during the middle of last season, where he netted four times in the space of eight appearances across December and January.

However, after a hamstring injury halted his progression for a couple of months towards the tail end of the 2024/25 campaign, the 20-year-old striker hasn't been given much of an opportunity by Stephan during the first few months of his reign as manager.

Therefore, like with Morgan, a loan move for Kolli, perhaps to a side in League One, just to get him back playing regularly once more, could stand him in good stead to come back and make real inroads into the QPR squad next season.

He netted in his side's 3-2 defeat to Plymouth Argyle in the EFL Cup in August, and with five goals and three assists in 21 total appearances for the R's last season, he's shown that he possesses clear ability and potential to develop into a classy centre-forward in the years to come.