Queen’s Park: A New Era of Ambition and Youth Development
Queen’s Park were supposed to fade quietly. They were meant to slip back into the shadows of the SPFL, a brief flirtation with ambition snuffed out when Lord Willie Haughey’s financial backing was scaled down.
They didn’t get the script.
Instead of folding, the Spiders dug in. Sean Crighton’s first season in charge ended not in crisis, but in a solid sixth-place finish in the Championship, with his side brushing up against the promotion play-off race before falling just short. Hardly the collapse many had predicted.
The academy, that famous old conveyor belt, has gone. Yet the pipeline has not dried up. The under-17s and under-19s both won their leagues last season, a quiet statement that the club’s identity is evolving rather than evaporating.
Haughey’s influence has shifted too. Less front and centre, more structural. Through his City Charitable Trust, he has helped turn Lochinch into a serious training base in the middle of Glasgow’s Pollok Park. It is there that Crighton’s project is taking shape.
“One thing we’ve got here is a great training centre,” the manager 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 demand now. Not romance, not nostalgia. Results.
Yet Queen’s Park remain determined to be more than just another Championship club clinging on. They have thrown their weight behind Craig Mulholland’s Scottish FA vision of developing young Scottish talent, with an eye on both the first team and the balance sheet.
This is the club that helped launch Scotland captain Andy Robertson and Rangers captain Lawrence Shankland into senior football. Crighton wants that tradition not just preserved, but sharpened.
He rattles through the roll call of recent departures with something closer to pride than regret.
“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.”
For Crighton, this isn’t a side project. It is the job.
“We need to be that club because that’s Queen’s Park’s history. 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.”
Inside the dressing room, that mission is obvious. Scott Martin, at 29, is one of the elder statesmen in a squad built around emerging talent. The central midfielder has seen enough young players to know when something is real.
He looks across the training pitch and sees it again.
“Young Aiden McCallion, he’s a central midfielder as well,” Martin says of the Rangers loanee. “He’s been great since he came through the door, gets on with his work, very tidy on the ball. Same with Lewis Stewart, he’s lightning.”
These are players raised at a club where they usually dominate possession. The Championship is a different world.
“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 there. The league table, for now, is less kind.
After an encouraging League Cup group campaign, Queen’s Park have stumbled out of the blocks in the Championship and sit second bottom. The margin for error is thin, the pressure real.
Martin doesn’t flinch.
“Anybody can beat anybody,” he says, as they prepare to host Ayr United, the side sitting just one place and one point above them before Friday night’s BBC Scotland TV match.
“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 facilities are in place. The pathway is clear. The young talent is already breaking through and moving on.
Now comes the real test: can Queen’s Park turn that long-term vision into short-term survival in one of the most unforgiving leagues in the country?
