Queen's Park played their first home game of the season this past weekend, drawing 1-1 with Livingston in a game on Friday night.

Though a share of the spoils will be a mild disappointment to the hosts considering they held a half-time lead, it was further indication after the previous week's narrow defeat to Falkirk and a successful League Cup group-stage that the Spiders will once again be competitive in the second tier of Scottish football.

On the park things have been going really well over recent seasons for Scottish football's oldest club. Typically a modern-day, bottom-tier outfit with brief forays into the League One, they've now in their third consecutive campaign at this level and narrowly missed out on Premiership promotion just 15 months ago.

But off the park it's been a completely different story.

Every Scottish football fan worth their salt knows Queen's Park's proud history: the 10th oldest club in the world; ten-time winners of the Scottish Cup (including the first ever final); the team who called Hampden Park their home stadium, and, of course, their status as the only amateur team to play in the Scottish leagues.

They were an anomaly, but one that was easy to root for. Their ethos was about bringing through young talent, giving them a platform to succeed and typically playing a brand of football that would develop prodigious skills. Many excellent players have formerly called Queen's Park home, including two members of Scotland's underachieving Euro 2024 squad – captain Andrew Robertson and striker Lawrence Shankland.

Bringing through young players is still something which the club takes pride in, as evidenced by top goalkeeping prospect Callan McKenna moving to Bournemouth earlier this year, while nobody can take their history away from them. But everything else has changed. They are no longer amateur, they sold Hampden to the Scottish FA, and supporters are fed up with a club hierarchy who seem to have no direction and aren't telling them anything.

The plan was to move from Hampden Park into Lesser Hampden, the small ground beside the massive stadium. There they would build themselves a new identity as a full-time club.

In many ways it made sense. The opening up of trap-door at the bottom of the SPFL put them in danger under the previous model of following the likes of Brechin City, Berwick Rangers or Albion Rovers by dropping into either the Highland or Lowland League after one bad season. After which, it's tremendously hard to get back up through the bottleneck. And while it was great to call Hampden Park home, it didn't exactly lend itself to be the best matchday experience, seeing as it would typically be a few hundred supporters rattling around a 50,000-seater stadium.

So the club sold Hampden to the SFA for £5 million, moved into a full-time model and then sought to ground-share with another team while Lesser Hampden (now imaginatively called the City Stadium) was being constructed. First they went to Falkirk. Then they went to Partick Thistle. And then they went to Stenhousemuir. Three seasons and still the ground wasn't finished. Leeann Dempster had been brought in as CEO after building a strong reputation for herself in similar roles at Motherwell and Hibs, so at least they were in good hands, right? Well...

Part of the delay was down to the original plans being deemed not fit for purpose. I would love to know what those plans were. Because if they were so far below the standard of what Queen's Park ended up building then they must've been drawn up by a pre-schooler.

When supporters finally got the chance to see what their club had put together they were aghast. One stand with just a few rows of seats, opposite a stand-alone directors' box which was elevated above the pitch. The subtext couldn't have been any more transparent: 'we are the people who run this club and therefore deserve a higher footing than you plebs who pay to come watch.' Above the box they also spelled the name of the club wrong, forgetting to include the apostrophe in 'Queen's'.

They soon moved back to Hampden as the meagre 900 capacity wasn't big enough to house most Championship visitors. But they've since moved back for the time being after allowing Rangers to use the national stadium instead while repair work goes on at Ibrox.

It should be noted here that Queen's Park received planning permission to build a 1,700 stadium in 2019. So what happened? That's the most frustrating part for fans. They don't know. Dempster barely spoke to them before she left and the same goes for the rest of the board.

The strangest thing is that you can't accuse them of penny-pinching. Comparable with their fanbase, Queen's have had an expensive team on the park over the past few seasons. While not official, it is widely believed they are bankrolled by William Haughey, one of Scotland's richest men.

The plan for the football side of things isn't obvious either. Marijn Beuker was brought in as director of football operations on a ten-year (!) deal. He was charged with implementing a Dutch-style model for nurturing young talent. This led to a disastrous season last term where coach Robin Veldman stacked his starting XI with youth players and didn't win a game for months. 

Yet Beuker only saw out two years of his deal before being headhunted by Ajax. So did Queen's Park replace him, and the eventually-sacked Veldman, with somebody similar? No, they brought in Callum Davidson. The former St Johnstone boss won a cup-double at McDiarmid Park and certainly did a great job last term in reviving Queen's Park's fortunes, but he's hardly a continuation of the previous strategy.

Eventually the flow of money will stop. When that happens, supporters are likely going to be left with a stadium they hate, a club which no longer has a unique identity and will probably see it crash back through the divisions. The owners need to get their finger out, sort out a long-term plan and put the pillars in place for Queen's Park to thrive after they've gone.

The fans deserve better. Scottish football history deserves better.