The Four Year Plan

The Four Year Plan is a documentary film directed by Mat Hodgson about London based football club Queens Park Rangers.

The film chronicles the take over of the nearly bankrupt club in 2007 by a consortium of billionaires and their effort to promote the team to the Premier League by 2011. The consortium consisted of Bernie Ecclestone, Flavio Briatore and Alejandro Agag, steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal and Amit Bhatia. It is an observational documentary that follows the club from within the boardroom. The Cameras for this documentary were brought in by the new owners to create this, however although the club gave permission for the cameras to be there, they had no say on where on when the cameras would be filming. The title derives from a statement made by Briatore in 2007 where he declared his 'target to be Premier League in four years'.

They are, of course, all but relegated this year. Cardiff City will wave to them as we go up and they drop past us going down. QPR are old sparring partners of the City (see Icons passim) and the clubs have met in play offs in both the Championship and, before that, League One over the last tumultuous decade or so.

You can stream the film for £2.99 pay per view from the Guardian at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/interactive/2012/dec/20/the-four-year-plan-watch-online. (The Guardian? Everyone is an online distributor these days.)

It's probably worth a watch as a guard against hubris in our own billionaire sugar-daddy era.