QPR’s Michael Beale: ‘Steven Gerrard is like my football brother’

To understand how long Michael Beale has been working towards this moment, it makes sense to go back to the start, to the church hall in Bromley where he coached youngsters futsal 20 years ago. The room cost £35 an hour to hire but only three schoolboys, each of whom paid £4, turned up to his first session, including a 12-year-old Harry Watling, who this week joined Beale’s coaching staff at Queens Park Rangers tasked with a focus on set plays. “He was one of the first people to walk into that hall,” Beale says, smiling. “When he was 16 or 17, I went full-time at Chelsea and he paid me £150 for the soccer school – the balls, goals, and four after-school clubs for £150, so he got a good deal – and he still runs that business now and has about 32 staff.”

From Bromley to Blackburn, where on Saturday Beale will take charge of his first game as a first-team manager after working as an assistant to Steven Gerrard at Rangers and, more recently, Aston Villa. Beale loved his three years in Glasgow, though he lived out in the sticks. “After the Covid lockdown, after not seeing people for months, we won the league, and then when I went out things were a lot different. I got sent off in the Old Firm which put my face more in the public domain, shall we say?” The 41-year-old grins. Before that, he worked in the academies at Liverpool and Chelsea, and spent six months as an assistant to Rogério Ceni at São Paulo. Beale turned down “five or six” managerial opportunities in England, Scotland and abroad but had a different answer when the call came from QPR in May. “Steven always knew we would get to that day,” Beale says. “After the move to Aston Villa, I just felt overly ready.”

Gerrard must be a hard person to disappoint? “It was