There are only two OWEN COYLES
Queen’s Park’s boss plans to make Scotland’s oldest club a modern-day force... with some help from his namesake son
AS THE manager of Queen’s Park, Owen Coyle involves himself in every nook and crannie of Scotland’s oldest senior football club.
Uncovering a production line of Andy Robertsons is a responsibility he takes seriously. The task of winning promotion to the Scottish Premiership falls squarely on his shoulders. He welcomes updates on the club’s new stadium at Lesser Hampden and oversees plans to develop the idyllic training centre in Glasgow’s Pollok Park.
He shares the task of delivering Lord Willie Haughey’s vision for a sustainable football club with chief executive Leeann Dempster and director of football Marijn Beuker. When journalists come to visit, he even makes a decent mug of tea.
There was only one project he felt he couldn’t be part of. When the Spiders sought a head coach for Young Queen’s Park, they identified his 25-year-old son Owen Junior as the best candidate to develop the first-team players of tomorrow. Sensitive to accusations of nepotism, the manager recused himself from the process.
‘I said: “I can’t take anything to do with that”,’ he tells Sportsmail. ‘I could wax lyrical, I knew fine what Owen could do. I certainly didn’t doubt his abilities. I just felt that the final decision to appoint him couldn’t be anything to do with me.’ Sometimes, it pays to be a chip off the old block. In the interview, Dempster and Beuker were blown away by the youthful coach of England’s national amputee team. As well as steering Young Queen’s Park, the new man will also help out with first-team matchday duties and the sight of two Owen Coyles in the technical area will no doubt prompt double takes up and down the SPFL Championship. ‘Because he’s 25, Owen sees things differently from old-school guys like me and my assistant Sandy Stewart,’ says the old man with an enthusiasm which defies his 56 years. ‘He is a whizz on the data side of things and he has been brilliant. But equally he knows that when we are in here, he’s not my son. He is a coach the same as everybody else.’ Young Queen’s Park’s ran a Rangers side featuring senior players Scott Arfield, Steven Davis, Ryan Jack, Malik Tillman and Scott Wright close in a narrow pre-season defeat. They followed that by beating a Hibs development team featuring Paul Hanlon and Jake Doyle-Hayes.
‘Owen knows he needs to be judged on his own merits as a coach — but he has already done that with the England amputees’ team,’ says Coyle (below). ‘He is very much his own man. His style is different from mine and I like that.’
Every father and son relationship brings moments of friction and irritation. Asked how they’ll pan out in a professional setting, Coyle senior adopts the facial expression of a dad catching his boy swigging cans of Special Brew down the local park.
‘Don’t be in any doubt. He’ll take a telling like the rest of them!’
On July 9, 1867, Scottish football began with the formation of Queen’s Park FC. The nation’s oldest club introduced the concepts of crossbars, half-time, free-kicks and the first purposebuilt football stadium — now the site of Hampden Bowling Club.
Between 1874 and 1893, they won 10 Scottish Cups and clung to their amateur status until the professional era swamped them.
After decades of mediocrity, the sale of their traditional Hampden home to the SFA for £5million in 2020 instantly made them one of Scotland’s wealthiest clubs. Equally, the patronage of Lord Haughey, one of Scotland’s wealthiest businessman, did no harm. Since renouncing their amateur status after 152 years, Queen’s have been promoted to the Championship, begun the (troubled) redevelopment of Lesser Hampden and developed state-of-the-art training facilities at the old Lochinch police sports pavilion.
The recruitment of highly-rated Dutchman Beuker from AZ Alkmaar raised eyebrows even before Coyle was lured home from a successful spell at Indian champions Jamshedpur.
For Coyle, the task of rebuilding Queen’s Park stirred the old juices. ‘I knew from the outset what the big vision was,’ he says. ‘And the idea of taking this historic club back to the top table, where it started, is exciting.
‘People should know this isn’t a club just throwing money at shortterm success. We want to be sustainable. We are trying to put a plan in place which ensures we are not living beyond our means. We are completely different to some of the other clubs who have tried to get through the leagues quickly, because we are trying to lay down foundations.
Before selling Hampden and turning professional, mentions of Queen’s Park were pretty much restricted to their role in the firstteam development of Champions League winner Robertson.
The award of a ten-year contract to academy chief Beuker — Coyle settled for three — was both a recognition that it needed something special to lure him to Glasgow and a serious commitment to developing the Scotland captains of the future.
‘We want to produce more Andy Robertsons,’ adds Coyle. ‘We want to have a world-class academy and the very best facilities. And we want to develop kids who will play for Queen’s Park.
‘At the right time, they can then go and flourish to have their career wherever they want to have it.
‘We want that consistently and that’s not easy when we exist in the same catchment area as Celtic and Rangers and Partick Thistle.
‘We’ve already done that here with Alex Bannon making his debut at the age of 18. Cammy Bruce is only 16 and he made his debut last season against Airdrie.
‘I’ve probably got 19 core firstteam players and then there is space for young players to come through. If you are good enough, we will play you regardless of age.
‘But, at the same time, we want to be in the Premiership playing against Celtic and Rangers.’
Inevitably, the journey to the top tier will hit a few bumps in the road. Queen’s are currently awaiting the delayed completion of a stadium project blighted by construction issues. Even their
temporary ground share arrangement with Stenhousemuir has been more problematic.
East of Scotland Division Two side Syngenta also play their games on the artificial pitch at Ochilview and a fixture clash forced Queen’s to bring forward their home game against Ayr United to last night.
‘The problem was that Syngenta were playing a team from the Borders and they couldn’t make it up in time,’ Coyle explains. ‘They tried to help us, but there will be minor roadblocks along the way.
‘We will have to play the odd Championship game on a Friday night. But that doesn’t faze me and Sandy Stewart. We went to Burnley in the English Championship and had a parttime goalkeeping coach, we had no sports scientist and played 61 games with the smallest budget in the league — and we still found a way to get a team in the English Premier League.’
The quest to get a team into the Scottish Premiership was enhanced this week by the impressive capture of defender Stephen Eze — capped 13 times by Nigeria. Coyle paired the six-footsix pivot with former Motherwell captain Peter Hartley when he led Jamshedpur to their first Indian Super League title.
Offered a three-year contract extension to stay put, Coyle jokes of football and family being the two competing factors in his life. When he decided to move back to Glasgow, family secured a rare home win.
‘There is extreme wealth in India and equally there is extreme poverty,’ he says. ‘My God, some of that was so difficult to see.
‘It’s a country with a population of 1.3billion compared to six million in Scotland and 60million in the UK. The untapped potential in football there is immense and, at the beginning of January, Jamshedpur offered us a fantastic three-year deal.
‘But when I spoke to my wife Kerry we spoke about having two little grandkids of five and three now. We had reached a stage where the kids and the grandkids probably needed me a wee bit more than the football club.’
Following the sacking of Laurie Ellis as boss after 26 games in charge on December 31, Queen’s Park made unsuccessful overtures to Derek McInnes and Jack Ross.
A phone call to India convinced Coyle the job was perfect for him. Reviving a team struggling to win promotion via the League One play-offs, he won’t place a timescale on when Queen’s Park might make it to the Premiership.
Craning round to peer from a window of Queen’s Park’s impressive training facility, he jabs a finger towards Glasgow’s East End.
‘I had a paper run over there when I was 13,’ he says. ‘I was on the high flats in the Gorbals.
‘In those days the lifts were constantly broken.
‘There was no shortcut to delivering the papers. You had to earn your money climbing those stairs. It’s the same with football.
‘No one in this game will hand you something for nothing. We won’t make any mad statements here saying: “We will do this or we will do that”.
‘But if success does come our way quicker than expected? We’ll take it.’