In Glasgow, there are two other big clubs but so much untapped talent... we are ambitious and we’ll be patient

DIRECTOR OF FOOTBALL MARIJN BEUKER ON HIS PLAN TO RETURN QUEEN’S PARK TO THE TOP OF SCOTTISH FOOTBALL, HIS REGULAR CHATS WITH LOUIS VAN GAAL... AND WHY KIDS SHOULD PLAY

EACH month, Marijn Beuker sits down for a conversation with his mentor Louis van Gaal. The typical agenda might range from nostalgia for their days together at AZ Alkmaar, to the inside track on the Netherlands’ adventure at the World Cup in Qatar, Van Gaal’s third tour of duty as national coach. More often than not, they’ll chat about Queen’s Park. And before the end of the season, the revered Van Gaal will travel to Glasgow to bear witness to the work Beuker is doing in his role as director of football with Scotland’s oldest senior club.

Appointed in November 2021, the 38-year-old has been placed in charge of the strategy that seeks to re-establish the Spiders as one of the country’s top sporting institutions, famed for player development and competitive at the highest strata.

Just three years on from the vote to shed amateur status, the first-team project is racing ahead of schedule. Currently top of the

Championship, Owen Coyle’s team are on course to secure a third consecutive promotion.

Presently playing their home games at Stenhousemuir’s Ochilview

Park, Queen’s will soon be hosting games at Lesser Hampden. Yet promotion would render their bespoke home too small and require another groundshare next season.

If all this represents a massive headache for chief executive

Leeann Dempster, Beuker is loving the thrill of the ride.

‘Every chance you get to grasp a prize or promotion you take it,’ he says. ‘Because they don’t come easy or often.

‘At AZ, I wanted to win the youth league and everybody said it was not possible. But, if you have a plan, a strategy and everyone on board, you will get prizes.

‘We are busy in a process to reach excellence and, as a result, I know we will be there challenging.’

Beuker is driven, talkative and a little bit off the wall.

One of his favourite phrases is

‘movement poverty’, a way of referencing the lack of sufficient physical activity in children.

He bemoans the lost art of climbing trees in childhood and eschews the notion that pristine facilities breed good footballers.

Struggle is key to a philosophy rooted in the streets or even the maligned red blaes pitches of yesteryear.

Turn up at a Queen’s Park academy session in summer and you might see kids training in bare feet. Turns out he’s always seen the game a little differently.

‘As a youngster, I wanted to be a director of football rather than a player,’ he states. ‘At 17, I had this weird vision of how to run a football club.

‘I sent a letter to 50 clubs and 50 agents asking if I could come in. I didn’t want paid, I just wanted to learn.

‘Three responded —

Espanyol, Olympique

Nice and AS Roma. I spent a couple of months at each.’ Eventually, he found his way to AZ, spending 15 years in a nebulous role.

‘At first, the full focus was on the first team and that happened in ’08’09 when we became champions with Van Gaal as coach,’ he reflects. ‘The next month, the club was bankrupt and that created the need for talent.’

His key skillset was in refining the club’s academy system to the point where it became prolific enough to flood the AZ first team with homegrown players.

‘Your vision and strategy must contain knowledge,’ he says. ‘That comes from three things. Data, science and experience.

‘For data, we research and acquire facts. We work with neuroscientists to discover creativity’s role in the brain. And for experience, you meet people. You can either decide to tell them everything or ask and learn more.

‘My philosophy is to be the dumbest guy in the room. At AZ, I worked with Dick Advocaat in two spells. I also worked with Marco van Basten.

‘Louis van Gaal is still my personal mentor. When he quit his job with Manchester United, we found each other and every month we’d meet up. Often we’d do it in the Netherlands but he also has a house in Portugal. Sometimes we do it by video.

‘He is going to come here in the spring/summer. People in the Netherlands are hearing about this and they want to come. Atletico Madrid want to come here, too, and learn from Queen’s Park.’ Backed by businessman Lord Willie Haughey and led by former Hibernian and Motherwell chief executive Dempster, Queen’s Park wish to draw on what they see as a deep pool of untapped Glasgow talent.

While it’s never been harder for youngsters to get game time at Celtic and Rangers, the southsiders have cleared a pathway from the streets to the first team.

Famed as a disrupter, one who declared his wish ‘to put a dent in the universe’ when he accepted the job, Beuker is eager to embrace some of Scotland’s earthier qualities in his quest.

He reveals: ‘Queen’s Park was not a club I knew much about. The first connection came through Arthur Numan, who asked me if I could speak to someone here.

‘I have never done a job interview but I assume you’d wrap your words in something nice. But I could be brutal about how I felt about football, so I had a real open conversation and then did my research on the club’s story.

‘I think this is the most passionate country in the world for football. Everyone breathes it. And maybe in Glasgow most of all.’

While work has been ongoing to repurpose Lesser Hampden to stage first-team games, the club has also established new training facilities at Pollok Park.

‘The essence of what I did and do is the same,’ expands Beuker. ‘The key is surrounding yourself with experts who are better at something than you are.

‘What we did at AZ in those 15-16 years was focus a group of people on a particular way of working. The results will come.

‘People talk about doing things differently. I do that, too, but I would also say it’s about thinking logically.

‘I think the football world has forgotten how to think simply. A lot of what we do is coming directly from street football.

‘I know about the fantastic football that was played by people from the Glasgow area, people tell me about the black and red ash pitches.

‘A lot of clubs in the world have misinterpreted professionalism.

‘Every three miles in Holland, there is a football field. That is a good foundation but there are elements here that I wish Dutch people had more of, the mentality of the kids especially. They are all eager to learn, open and they never ask the question of why they have to do something.

‘Good performance behaviour is almost automatic for Scottish people. The technical fundamentals are not on the level they can be but then you have to look at PE in

school. How often? What is the quality of the work?

‘But there is movement poverty all over the world. Even in the favelas in Brazil I have been told they don’t play as much on the streets now.

‘The other day I took some of ours to a field and said: “Do not go through the gate but climb over it”.

‘The kids struggled with that. Because they don’t climb trees any more. Our job is to sometimes make life difficult for children, not to take obstacles away but create them.

‘When somebody is comfortable, learning stops. So we have to raise the bar, train in diverse circumstances. We train on perfect grass, bad grass. Different shoes, different balls. If it’s good weather and a good field, it’s important to train barefoot at a younger age because you have more chance of creating nimbleness.

‘The most creative players of the world in Brazil or Africa don’t play with shoes that much. There is a direct correlation with technical mastery of the ball. That’s the thing about street football. The imperfect circumstances. The ball moving unpredictably, no referee.

‘My seven-year-old son does it. And you can go up to 11-12. At 15-16, the biological process is done and it becomes about decision-making and intelligence. It’s in the 18s that they learn how to win. And then in the first team they must win. That’s the 10-year pathway.

‘The bigger goal is to perform and grow as a club. And if you play exciting football it will attract fans. We are all romantically triggered by total football or what Man City are showing.

‘You can do it two ways. Buy it or create it. I believe in creating it.’

Settled in Glasgow with his son Joa and wife Joyce, Beuker insists he is here for the long term.

He adds: ‘I love it here, the people are super friendly. But there is also a certain calm. I never see a driver who is aggressive or in a rush.

‘I still have eight years and nine months on my contract, so I signed for the long term and I did so because the club has not only ambition but patience.

‘If you want to disrupt the status quo then you need to have time. Everyone here recognises that.

‘Last season, we got promoted, this season who knows? But the big plan we have for producing a particular type of player is there. We already have some interesting players in our age groups and some are already in the national team.’

Underpinning all of this is the philosophy of Billy Beane, the baseball data specialist portrayed by Brad Pitt in the Hollywood movie Moneyball and an investor in AZ.

‘Billy always told me if you want to have the best academy, be in the biggest city,’ says Beuker. ‘In Glasgow, there are two other big clubs but so much untapped talent.

‘The longer I stay here, the more positive I am about our opportunities. There is so much potential to not only make Queen’s Park better but raise up Scottish football.’

A bold statement perhaps but, by starting on the streets, Beuker has set a trajectory for the sky.

‘ATLETICO MADRID WANT TO COME HERE AND LEARN FROM QUEEN’S PARK’