Queen's Park: Resilience in Championship Football
Reports of Queen’s Park’s collapse were filed early and filed wrong.
When word spread last year that Lord Willie Haughey was ending his financial agreement with Scotland’s oldest club, the narrative wrote itself. The Spiders, stripped of backing, would surely slide back down the Scottish Professional Football League ladder and into the shadows they’d only just escaped.
They didn’t.
Under Sean Crighton, Queen’s Park dug in. Instead of folding, they flirted with the promotion play-off spots and finished sixth in the Championship – not spectacular, but a long way from the freefall many had predicted.
The academy may have gone, but the production line has not. The under-17s and under-19s both won their leagues last season, a quiet statement that the club’s identity is being reshaped, not erased.
And Haughey has not vanished either. His City Charitable Trust has helped turn Lochinch, in the middle of Glasgow’s Pollok Park, into a training base that would make plenty of top-flight clubs envious.
“One thing we’ve got here is a great training centre,” Crighton says. “And, obviously, at Lesser Hampden, the pitch is unbelievable. We’ve got the facilities – we need to be a good Championship team.”
That’s the bar now. Not survival. Credible, sustainable Championship football built on youth, aligned with Craig Mulholland’s Scottish FA blueprint for developing homegrown players and adding value on the balance sheet.
Queen’s Park have done it before. Andy Robertson cut his teeth here before captaining Scotland and lifting the Champions League with Liverpool. Lawrence Shankland, now Rangers captain, also used the club as a launchpad. Crighton wants more of that – and quickly.
“Josh Fowler’s moved on to St Johnstone, doing well in the Premiership,” he says. “Seb Drozd has moved on to Partick Thistle – he’s flying over there. Henry Fieldson’s gone to St Mirren.
“We’ve got a barrowload of them [this season]. Young Ross McLean has come into the team last year a couple of times and progressed well this year. He’s a manager’s dream, he’s very versatile – he can play in the middle, he can play wide, he can play at the back.
“Tyrece McDonnell as well. I think he made 26 appearances last season.”
This is not an accident. It’s policy.
“We need to be that club because that’s Queen’s Park’s history,” Crighton says. “The guys that are in the national team, they started at Queen’s Park.
“When I got the job, that was it from the outset. It was, ‘can you help players progress?’ Not just me, everyone in the building. That’s what we want to try and do.
“I’ve got a sense of pride that we’ve managed to have these players play for us and then move on.”
In the middle of it all, 29-year-old Scott Martin feels almost like an elder statesman. The central midfielder has seen enough dressing rooms to know when a group has something about it, and the younger names around him are catching his eye.
“Young Aiden McCallion [co-operation loan from Rangers], he’s a central midfielder as well,” Martin says. “He’s been great since he came through the door, gets on with his work, very tidy on the ball. Same with Lewis Stewart [also co-operation loan from Rangers], he’s lightning.”
The contrast in environment for those Rangers loanees is stark.
“At Rangers, they must be so used to dominating the ball and having time. But here in the Championship it’s a totally different game. It’s end-to-end, it’s high intensity.
“It will be a great experience for them because they’re learning a totally different side of the game that maybe you wouldn’t learn at a B team or an under-19s or 20s, whatever it might be. The way they have fitted in has been absolutely top notch.”
The promise is clear. The table is less forgiving.
After a strong League Cup group campaign hinted at momentum, the league season has snapped back with a reminder of how brutal the Championship can be. Queen’s Park sit second bottom, peering up at a tight pack where a single win can change the mood, but a bad month can drag you into a fight you never planned for.
Next up is Ayr United at Lesser Hampden, live on BBC Scotland, with Ayr just one place and one point ahead. It feels early in the season to call anything a test of character, but that’s exactly what it is.
“Anybody can beat anybody,” Martin says. “We’ve had a lot of difficult games, but I think the Partick Thistle game was our turning point [0-0 draw] in the sense that we found that belief that we can go to, in my opinion, the hardest place in the Championship and grab a point.
“In terms of where we are this season, I think we’re OK. There’s been parts of games where we play really, really well. It’s just trying to put that all together and be more consistent.
“We’ve got a youngish squad at times as well, so it can be a bit difficult, but we’re not far away from being a right good side again.”
The narrative last year was about Queen’s Park falling away. This season, it’s sharper: can a club built on youth, pride and a refurbished training base hold its nerve in a division that offers no protection for ideals?
