New QPR boss Marti Cifuentes namechecks Burnley in Championship claim | OneFootball

Queens Park Rangers ushered in a new era earlier this week by hiring Marti Cifuentes as their new head coach to replace Gareth Ainsworth.

Pretty unknown in English footballing circles, Cifuentes has swapped Sweden for West London as the Hoops hierarchy decided to snap the 41-year-old up from Allsvenskan side Hammarby, and they are pinning their hopes on the fact that he can really make a difference at Loftus Road.

Marti Cifuentes' managerial record

Cifuentes certainly has had a unique pathway into English football, although he has been briefly in it already when a youth coach at Millwall for a few months.

His actual managerial career started in the lower leagues of Spain though, taking charges of sides such as Rubi, Sant Andreu and L'Hospitalet before making the move to Sweden in 2017, becoming AIK's reserve team coach.

That opportunity led to his senior managerial career restarting in 2018 in Norway with Sandefjord, and Cifuentes has continued to build himself up in Scandinavia, moving on to Aalborg of Denmark in 2021 and then to Sweden with Hammarby a year later, getting them into European football in his first season in charge.

QPR swooped.

Cifuentes himself likes to play a possession-based style of football that he implemented pretty well at Hammarby, and the use of inverted full-backs is something that has been seen not only in his sides, but in the Championship recently as well.

The likes of Enzo Maresca at Leicester City have been utilising the same concept with Ricardo Pereira slotting into midfield in possession, and there's every chance we could see someone like Kenneth Paal doing the same at Loftus Road in the near future.

What has Marti Cifuentes said about Burnley and Vincent Kompany?

Cifuentes has kept a close eye on the Championship since he was a part of Millwall's youth setup in the past, and he has lauded Burnley's title-winning side of 2022-23 in particular for the way they played football.

The Spaniard himself likes to play football on the floor like Vincent Kompany does with the Clarets, and it is a side that he can take inspiration from and it's one he has praised for how they took the Championship apart, claiming that how Burnley did it would have been impossible a decade ago at the same level.

“It has more foreign influence, more coaches from different parts of the world, more players from abroad so that makes the game, and the league, develop," Cifuentes said in an interview with The Sun.

"Last season, Vincent Kompany with his Burnley team went up playing a style that perhaps was impossible 10 years ago in the Championship.

"That makes this league interesting from a coaching perspective because they are very different teams.”