Queen's Park: A Championship Team on the Rise

Queen's Park were supposed to fade. They were meant to slide quietly back into the lower-league shadows once the money dried up and the grand experiment stalled.

They have not obliged.

When word broke last year that Lord Willie Haughey was ending his formal financial agreement with Scotland’s oldest club, the narrative wrote itself: the Spiders would drift down the Scottish Professional Football League ladder and return to obscurity. Instead, Sean Crighton walked into the technical area and Queen’s Park dug in.

They did more than survive. They flirted with the promotion play-offs, hung around the sharp end of the table for long enough to make people look twice, and finished a very respectable sixth in the Championship. For a club supposedly on the wane, it felt like a pointed response.

A club that refused to vanish

The academy may be gone in name, but the pipeline hasn’t dried up. The under-17s and under-19s both won their leagues last season, a quiet, stubborn reminder that this club’s identity has always been tied to development, not just chequebooks.

Haughey’s influence has shifted rather than disappeared. His City Charitable Trust has helped turn Lochinch, deep in Glasgow’s Pollok Park, into a training base that would shame some Premiership outfits. It’s there that Crighton’s squad work, then step out at Lesser Hampden on a pitch the manager describes simply as “unbelievable”.

“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.”

The infrastructure is in place. The philosophy is clear.

Leaning into the Mulholland model

Queen’s Park have thrown their weight behind Craig Mulholland’s Scottish FA vision: develop young Scottish players, sell smart, and keep the club sustainable. It is not a marketing line. The evidence is already scattered around the country.

This is the club that gave early senior minutes to Scotland captain Andy Robertson and Rangers captain Lawrence Shankland. Crighton is determined that the next wave will not be a footnote.

“Josh Fowler’s moved on to St Johnstone, doing well in the Premiership,” he notes. “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 nostalgia for Queen’s Park’s amateur past. It is a modern version of the same idea: produce, polish, move on.

“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.”

Veterans, loans and a crash course in reality

On the pitch, 29-year-old midfielder Scott Martin is one of the older heads in a squad built to run, learn and grow. He has seen enough dressing rooms to know when a club’s youth policy is window dressing. This doesn’t feel like that.

He points to the co-operation loans from Rangers as proof. Young midfielder Aiden McCallion and rapid wide player Lewis Stewart have been dropped into a league where reputations don’t count and time on the ball is a luxury.

“Young Aiden McCallion, 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, he’s lightning.

“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 message is simple: if you want to know whether a young player can cope, throw him into the Championship and see if he swims.

From League Cup promise to league reality

The early signs this season were encouraging. Queen’s Park put together a strong League Cup group campaign and looked primed to carry that form into the Championship.

Then the grind kicked in.

As the league table settles, they sit second bottom, their attractive theory of football meeting the reality of a division where points are clawed for, not handed over. The margins are thin, the punishment for lapses brutal.

Martin, though, is unshaken as Ayr United come to Lesser Hampden for a Friday night BBC Scotland fixture, just one place and one point better off.

“Anybody can beat anybody,” he 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 table says trouble. The dressing room insists this is a team on the verge of clicking.

Queen’s Park have already confounded one prediction of decline. The next few months will tell whether this young, restless squad can turn a development project into something more dangerous: a Championship side that grows without letting go.