Depending on one’s outlook, Friday evening in the unlikely surroundings of Ochilview Park could either see a Scottish football fairytale come to life or the latest temporary vindication of the boom-or-bust culture that has scarred the game in the past. Queen’s Park, who were amateurs for more than a century and proud of it, will earn a place in the top flight as a professional team if they defeat Dundee. But for an Arsenal-esque stumble – Queen’s have won one of their past six games – promotion would already have been secured.
Sixty-five years have passed since Queen’s, formed in 1867 and Scotland’s oldest league club, played top-division football. In those more simple times of 1957-58, Hearts secured the title at a canter from the Old Firm as the Spiders won four matches out of 34. In the intervening decades Queen’s have generally floated around the nether regions of Scotland’s league structure. They were a cuddly club, untouched by the corporate classes.
That changed owing to two events of late 2019, with the team in the fourth tier. Members of the Queen’s Park Football Club voted overwhelmingly in favour of abandoning amateur status, permitting the club to receive transfer fees for players and compete more reasonably with sides further up the pyramid by paying professional wages. This represented a seismic shift; for more than a century, Queen’s had taken pride in their players taking to the field “for the sake of the game”. The second key element was the planned sale of Hampden Park, eventually completed in 2020, to the Scottish Football Association for £5m.
“I thought it would be a tragedy if Hampden was going to lose out as the home of Scottish football,” said Willie Haughey, who grew up in the shadows of the venue and helped to fund the deal. Queen’s planned to continue playing at Hampden, where hundreds of fans rattled around in the midst of 52,000 seats, until the completed redevelopment of the adjacent Lesser Hampden.
Queen’s breezed though League Two in 2020-21. The following campaign proved tougher but promotion was achieved to the Championship via the playoffs. Owen Coyle, once one of the hottest managerial properties in the Premier League, arrived back in Scotland from the Indian Super League to take the helm last March.
Club accounts show salaries for the financial year ending December 2021 leapt from £630,000 to £1.3m inside 12 months. In Covid-affected times, Queen’s reported an operating loss of £1.1m on a turnover of £1.4m but, crucially and because of that Hampden sale, had seven figures left in the bank. One name conspicuous by its absence on all such paperwork is that of Haughey, one of Scotland’s wealthiest men, who is widely credited with bankrolling Queen’s. It is curious that Coyle barely, if ever, mentions Haughey in interviews but others are less reticent. “They have a guy, Willie Haughey, ploughing money in there and that always helps,” said the Inverness manager, Billy Dodds, recently. His is a widely held view.
Haughey broke cover only to defend Queen’s – on a radio station he is a director of – after their embarrassing ejection from this season’s Scottish Cup for fielding an ineligible player. The mistake was amateur in nature; it has become more painful as the team who benefited, Inverness, progressed to the final. Notable, too, has been the delay in rebuilding Lesser Hampden. Queen’s have played home games this season as tenants of Stenhousemuir, 25 miles away, as a result.
Haughey, who attended Sunday’s League Cup semi-final between Celtic and Rangers with his close friend Brendan Rodgers, can well afford dalliances with a team such as Queen’s Park. If predicated on some romantic notion from his youth, perhaps that is fair enough. Yet the Scottish game’s multitude of damaging experiences with benefactors and the opaque nature of this particular relationship mean an element of scepticism feels sensible.
Courtesy of its Hampden deal with Queen’s and Haughey, the Scottish FA is in no position to be awkward. The dominant force that is the Old Firm in Glasgow makes it hugely questionable how much Queen’s can grow. Their last home fixture, against Hamilton, attracted 679 spectators. For their last home game on a Saturday, it was only 627. Ochilview’s location, 40 minutes from Glasgow’s south side on a good day, is a mitigating factor but this is a team on the verge of glory.
Coyle bristles at the widely asserted notion he has bought league success. The manager’s point is not without merit. It hardly takes fortunes to progress at this level, where a description of mediocre is being kind. Coyle’s squad is not laden with players who should be playing in loftier environments. Simon Murray, prolific in the opening half of the season, was tempted away by a relegation battle at Ross County in January.
This week, Coyle said his present scenario was as exciting as chasing promotion to the Premier League with Burnley in 2009. “I’ve turned jobs down in the last few years all over the globe,” added the 56-year-old. “I came here because of the plan that’s in place, what we want to do and to build a club for years to come.” Work elsewhere in the club is arguably more interesting than at first-team level. The appointment of a Dutch sporting director, Marijn Bueker, has led to an overhaul of youth development processes. Scotland desperately needs fresh thinking on that front.
Victory over Gary Bowyer’s Dundee would trigger celebration at Queen’s but raise longer-term issues. Could Lesser Hampden, when belatedly completed with a capacity of less than 2,000, host Premiership matches or would Queen’s look to revert back to Hampden itself and profit accordingly from tens of thousands of away supporters?
That Steve Clarke’s Scotland team recently started using Lesser Hampden, rather than Edinburgh’s National Performance Centre, as a training base felt a little coincidental. Coyle can claim this is not his department and again it would be hard to argue. Still, the “plan” to which he refers must at some point prove itself sustainable.
