I signed as a goalkeeper at 16 – now I’m 28 I run the club

Dan Armstrong joined Queen of the South as a 16-year-old goalkeeper with dreams of a playing career.

Twelve years later, he is the chief executive of the Scottish League 1 side – one of the youngest people in such a role in the UK.

It is not where the 28-year-old – originally from Accrington – imagined he would end up when he first moved north.

However, his philosophy of “no problems, only solutions” has seen him put his hopes of playing to one side and take over the running of the Dumfries outfit.

“I played with Burnley as a youngster in their academy, but I wasn’t good enough,” he explained.

It was after that that he was offered a trial north of the border with Queen of the South.

“At that point nobody else was looking at me as a 5ft 9in goalie,” he said.

“All I wanted to do was to be a footballer, so when the opportunity came, I came up to Palmerston and I loved it.”

However, it did not pan out as he had hoped.

“I played here for three years but, again, familiar story – I was really rubbish and that brought to an end the football career,” he said.

That could have been the end of the road in the sport, as it is for so many aspiring footballers, but the south of Scotland club had other ideas.

During his playing days, Dan was “injured quite a lot” and while he had a broken arm he had got involved in an SPFL Trust schools’ water project – teaching the importance of hydration.

He said the club had so many initiatives on the go that he was able to quickly switch from playing to off-the-pitch activities.

“One day I’d been pulled in by the manager at the time and he said: ‘Obviously we’re not renewing your contract’,” he said.

“I said: ‘I sort of gathered that, and that’s probably a good decision for everybody involved, because I’m not going to be a consistent first-team player at all’.”

The club, however, was keen to keep him in some capacity and chairman Billy Hewitson offered him a role as a community coach.

“I was just sort of guessing and playing at everything and asking so many questions of so many people – and it would have been the most ridiculous questions,” Dan admitted.

“But you got an answer and started shaping an idea and seeing what other clubs were doing and did a lot of research in my own time.

“That’s when we formed the Queen and South Community Trust, which has then gone on to do great things.”

It has seen the Doonhamers reach out to locals in a wide range of ways including coaching, school visits, mental health initiatives and even running a food bank.

“We just want people to engage in sport in a positive manner,” said Dan.

His vision and energy helped him become commercial manager – with the club putting him through his Masters in business.

Then, when the board announced plans to stand down a couple of years ago, he became chief executive.

So what does his average day involve?

He said: “It could be we’ve got meetings with the community team, what’s our vision for that, what do we want to achieve, how do we achieve that?

“And then from that it could be on a call with the Macron kit supplier about maybe what’s the kits looking like next year.

“So from one minute we’re going on about feeding children in our local area to the next minute being on the phone to Italy and Macron going – now what’s the kits going to look like?

“It’s a lot of different decisions and different conversations.”

He is well aware of the pressure from fans who want a winning team as well as all the community activities and said he hoped to get the Doonhamers “as high as possible”.

They currently sit in the play-off places of Scottish football’s third tier.

“If you could see Queen of the South in the Premier League, it would be a dream, an absolute dream,” he said.

“And I don’t see why you can’t aim for that and strive for that.”

He knows that results are “massively important” but said part of his job was trying “build a business around results not mattering”.

“I’ve never been at a game and never played in a game where I’ve gone – I wouldn’t mind the other team winning today – because everybody wants to win,” he said.

“There are 42 teams in the SPFL that want to win every single week and they come up against another team that wants to win every single weekend – so you can’t win every game.”

The aim, he said, was to improve “year on year” and try to get all parts of the club performing the best they could.

He might not be out there playing any more, but Dan Armstrong is working all the time to achieve that goal.