Queen's Park FC

[RIP]

What's their secret?

On track for three promotions in three seasons. Some guy called Murray top scorer 3 seasons in a row?

[Northernhibee]

A CEO who has a scooby how to run a football club.

[Libby Hibby]

Everything LD touches turns to gold

[Smartie]

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A CEO who has a scooby how to run a football club.

Someone who really doesn't get the credit they deserve imo.

[Northernhibee]

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Someone who really doesn't get the credit they deserve imo.

I wonder if their fans are thinking “yeah, but we could do with fancier hospitality and a multi million pound catering deal”?

[Hibby Bairn]

Biggest wage budget. No real miracle.

Bankrolled by Lord Haughey. But is it sustainable?

[Glory Lurker]

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Biggest wage budget. No real miracle.

Bankrolled by Lord Haughey. But is it sustainable?

Aye. You've fair spoiled the agenda there, HB!

[Waxy]

Can they use the national stadium for league games against the uglies?
They will be a force if they can.

[Since452]

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Biggest wage budget. No real miracle.

Bankrolled by Lord Haughey. But is it sustainable?

Yup. Not really a surprise. We've seen it with Gretna, Livi etc.

[Billy Whizz]

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Yup. Not really a surprise. We've seen it with Gretna, Livi etc.

This guy has real money though

[Since452]

Actually wouldn't mind seeing QP return to the top. A very historical football club with long suffering loyal fans. Also a lot of time for LD.

[Smartie]

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Biggest wage budget. No real miracle.

Bankrolled by Lord Haughey. But is it sustainable?

Do they really have the biggest wage budget in the Championship?

They'll have bullied their way up the leagues but I'd be surprised if they were sinking that much into it relative to the other sides in the division.

And from memory it's not that easy a league to get out of, even if you have more money to spend than the other teams.

[Just_Jimmy]

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Biggest wage budget. No real miracle.

Bankrolled by Lord Haughey. But is it sustainable?

Utilising their competitive advantage, or punching their weight instead of pissing it all away ... you could say?

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[green day]

I would say good luck to them, but Willie Haughey is a prick.

When the national stadium was up for tender he kept offering the SFA more money as "The national Stadium must be in Glasgow".

Hes a Celtic fan as well.

Throwing loads of money at the project though, removed the astro from their pitch but the chat seems to be that they will have to groundshare with someone as their place only holds 3000.

They wont be using Hampden, but lets hope it isnt Partick as their pitch is a mess.

[Willis1875]

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I would say good luck to them, but Willie Haughey is a prick.

When the national stadium was up for tender he kept offering the SFA more money as "The national Stadium must be in Glasgow".

Hes a Celtic fan as well.

Throwing loads of money at the project though, removed the astro from their pitch but the chat seems to be that they will have to groundshare with someone as their place only holds 3000.

They wont be using Hampden, but lets hope it isnt Partick as their pitch is a mess.

If they come up I don’t think we have too much to worry about in regards to where their pitch is…..at this rate

[1875Sean]

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Can they use the national stadium for league games against the uglies?
They will be a force if they can.

They don’t own hampden anymore so I doubt it

[Bostonhibby]

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I wonder if their fans are thinking “yeah, but we could do with fancier hospitality and a multi million pound catering deal”?

Have they got big tellies?

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[Billy Whizz]

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They don’t own hampden anymore so I doubt it

Did Haughey not help the SFA buy Hampden?

[Hibees1973]

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Did Haughey not help the SFA buy Hampden?

Indeed he did.

If Queen's Park come up I expect Haughey to use this as a bargaining chip for them to play their home games at Hampden next season.

[Danderhall Hibs]

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I wonder if their fans are thinking “yeah, but we could do with fancier hospitality and a multi million pound catering deal”?

Probably asking where the stadium is though.

[Danderhall Hibs]

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They don’t own hampden anymore so I doubt it

Yeah - sold it and have been ground hopping due to the rebuild delay on lesser hampden. Spent a load of the money going pro hence why they’re top.

[1875Sean]

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Indeed he did.

If Queen's Park come up I expect Haughey to use this as a bargaining chip for them to play their home games at Hampden next season.

Yeah he did and the SFA own it, they are not going to start letting Queen’s Park play there twice a season for Rangers and Celtic, would be ridiculous basically making it a away game

[Hibby Bairn]

Wouldn't be so sure. Haughey is already discussing ownership of Toryglen next door.

The problem for QP is that the original business plan was to get to the Prem in 4 seasons which they are on track for.

But the fan and community base build (LD's job) along with the new stadium and commercial income is lagging this.

[LustForLeith]

Really good article in Mundial magazine recently about Queens Park that they’ve reproduced in a recent newsletter

Here’s the excerpt

“We were the first team to introduce the crossbar…” says Queen’s Park’s Head of Commercial, Kieran Koszary, as he dips a chip in gravy at Best Chippy Hampden, brandishing it briefly as if proud of the chips, of Glasgow itself, and of the football team across the road building a new home in the shadow of a world-famous national stadium. “The inventors of the passing game”, he continues, growing in enthusiasm now and helping himself to another, “the first ticketed fixture, the first use of a turnstile at a football match. There’s so much history here, and that’s why we were all drawn to it.”

The ‘we’ Kieran is referring to is a new hierarchy at Scotland’s oldest football club, brought on board by Queen’s Park’s most generous benefactor Lord Willie Haughey and consisting of Marijn Beuker, a charismatic Director of Football and former AZ Alkmaar youth guru, Leeann Dempster, the former CEO of both Motherwell and Hibernian, and most recently Glasgow local Owen Coyle. You know him.

Kieran made the leap across from Falkirk, where he had spent eight happy years. Why? It’s the vision they all share, he says, to take The Spiders to the very top and to challenge the blue and emerald green dominance of the two clubs they share a city with.

After 150-odd years as the world’s most storied amateur football club, ten Scottish Cup wins, two appearances in the FA Cup Final (that’s right), and cameos from Sir Alex Ferguson and Liverpool’s Andrew Robertson, Queen’s Park are back on the up. They’ve got a plan, and they invited MUNDIAL to the Southside to learn all about it…

Marijn Beuker is in the car park waiting to meet us. He strides toward us and stretches out a gigantic Dutch hand for me to shake. He looks like the football coaches Rafa Benítez and José Mourinho have nightmares about. Pundit trainers, slim trousers, a T-shirt and the perfectly sculpted hair of a Eurovision entry. Nagelsmann in ZARA, Jesse Marsch without the Yee-hawws. He’s straight into the apologies, pointing at things he’s going to have painted a different colour, showing us where the new pitches will go in the middle distance, and talking us through his pride and joy—a gravel pit of a car park that he wants to turn into a cinder pitch. It soon becomes apparent that, like every other football enthusiast from The Netherlands, he believes great players are made playing on rough surfaces.

“I came here in September,” he explains a short time later, in what will eventually be a large office that looks out across three new football pitches but is currently a big boardroom. "The original plan was to have this place as our training facility for the first team, but things change fast here. They’re always changing to be bigger or better. Now the plan is that this place can be somewhere for the reserves, the development team, and the U-18s as well.”

“The first words I said when I arrived at the club were, ‘everything I am going to do is related to winning in the long term.’ We want the first team to win, but we need to be winning in a sustainable way. I was fortunate enough to work with Billy Bean at my old club”, says Marijn, following up with a generous “Moneyball?” just in case I’d not done the required reading. “The CEO at my old club, AZ Alkmaar, was a former New York Yankees player, he was friends with Billy Bean, and Billy had a share in the club. He actively helped. We used their model.”

Marijn speaks fondly of the job Michael Edwards has done at Liverpool with a similar model—“a great guy”—drops Louis van Gaal and Guus Hiddink’s names into the conversation without them clanging to the floor, and proudly proclaims himself to be a disciple of Johan Cruyff. The man who started it all, he says. “I try to understand what winning looks like. I try to be objective with information and work backwards. What do you need to do in these different age groups to build success ten years later? We are looking at talent identification, along with cognitive, technical, and physical control. This should be the emphasis of age group football. I always say to coaches, ‘I don’t pay you to become a champion; I pay you to help the childhood programme.’ That’s what we have to achieve here. By the time the player is in the first team, it’s too late to fix these things.”

Part Cruyffian re-gen from a great conveyor belt of single-minded Dutch coaches and part Silicon Valley podcast host, Marijn’s enthusiasm is infectious. He explains how he dropped out of high school to pursue football, talks us through his internships at Nice, Espanyol and Roma, and how he has always been a student of the game. Most tellingly, he talks of how he is capable of removing all emotion from his footballing decisions. He’s not a fan, he says. And that’s important.



***

In the past I used to cover lower league Scottish matches and spent a couple of Saturdays at Hampden with just over 200 fans in the national stadium…

[Lago]

Simon Murray

[Torto7]

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Wouldn't be so sure. Haughey is already discussing ownership of Toryglen next door.

The problem for QP is that the original business plan was to get to the Prem in 4 seasons which they are on track for.

But the fan and community base build (LD's job) along with the new stadium and commercial income is lagging this.

That sounds familiar. Has she got her pal working in the commercial dept again?

[cabbageandribs1875]

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That sounds familiar. Has she got her pal working in the commercial dept again?

i thought she was at Glasgow City

[Torto7]

[QUOTE=cabbageandribs1875;7221376]i thought she was at Glasgow City[/QUOTE

I dont know I was just wondering. I remember someone on here wanted to invest in Sponsoring Hibs and was directed to the ladies team by her. That's the type of petty personal politics that shouldn't get in the way of running the club. The much maligned Kensall has done a lot of good things for the ladies team.

[cabbageandribs1875]

[QUOTE=Torto7;7221387]

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i thought she was at Glasgow City[/QUOTE

I dont know I was just wondering. I remember someone on here wanted to invest in Sponsoring Hibs and was directed to the ladies team by her. That's the type of petty personal politics that shouldn't get in the way of running the club. The much maligned Kensall has done a lot of good things for the ladies team.

yeah it was something like that

[davhibby]

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I wonder if their fans are thinking “yeah, but we could do with fancier hospitality and a multi million pound catering deal”?

They’re going to have a stadium that holds 900 because one side of the ground has been given over to a 40 seat VIP stand so probably not the best way to go here.

On the pitch they’re doing well because they have money, off the park they’re a shambles and my QP supporting pals hold a lower opinion of LD than most Hibs fans do of Ben Kensell.

Sorry to burst the bubble of this thread though