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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
