Queen's Park - The Rise and Demise
or "When did The Spiders Cease to Dominate?"
With the launch of the Football's Four Miles - Vale of Leven site, reached by simply clicking on the title itself and the contention, one, that Glasgow's southern suburbs was and with Hampden Park remains to a large extent the cradle of Scottish football but, two, Dunbartsonshire's Vale of Leven was the source of the distinctive, Scottish game the time has come for some proper examination of the evidence in the form results, of matches, played, won, drawn and lost.
That Queen's Park F.C. was both the first and early, dominant, Association football team in Scotland, there is no doubt. The facts are known and transparent. And it is also clear that at some point that domimance ceased with the question then being when. And the answer based on games played and results is, its appears, "that depends" as the table below illustrates, with yellow where The Spiders are ahead by just a goal difference per game or less and gold where there is at least parity or the opposition has by the same measure of goal-difference actually shown itself to be superior.
It is clear from the figures that for the best part of a decade from the arrival of Association football in Scotland on-field opposition to the Hampden club came not from Glasgow and its suburbs but only from the Vale of Leven, the obvious questions being why and how. See A New Historiography of Football for answers to both.
Indeed the reality is that Glaswegian clubs would not even get close until the mid- to late-1890's with until then the only additional challenge coming from the mid-1880s when teams from England, teams with often increasingly Scottish content, were met. Moreover, throughout the whole of the three decades to 1890 it is also clear that teams from outwith the Glasgow area would at no stage except perhaps 1893-4 get near to offering a real challenge. That would come but only later.
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