The surprising truth behind Queens Park Rangers’ name | OneFootball

Almost all professional clubs are named geographically, but in London naming a football club can be more of a challenge than elsewhere.

The overwhelming majority of professional football clubs are geographically named, but naming a club can get tricky in big cities such as London.

There are conventions attached to naming football clubs in England, and one of the most important is that there should be a geographical element to it. Only one of the 92 clubs in the Premier League and EFL has a name which isn't geographical - Port Vale, who are named after the hostelry at which they held their first meetings - but this isn't necessarily straightforward in larger urban conurbations.

Conurbations don't come much bigger than London, and it is one of the striking ironies of football in the capital city that none of the clubs based there have the city in their name. There's an undeniable truth about the old adage that London is essentially a connection of villages, and that as such it would be thoroughly inappropriate for any of them to assume the name of the city overall.

But things can get quite complicated, quite quickly. Arsenal are named after the Woolwich Arsenal, when they moved from south of the city to the north in 1913, having played south of the river in Plumstead until then. West Ham United's Boleyn Ground was a little closer to East Ham than it is to West Ham. And Stamford Bridge, the home of Chelsea, is in Fulham.

No other English club have been more of a group of rangers than Queens Park Rangers

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But few other London clubs have quite as peculiar a reasoning behind their name as Queens Park Rangers. The "Rangers" part of it couldn't be more appropriate. No other professional English club has played at as many different grounds as QPR; 14 in total, with their last move away from Loftus Road being a second stay at the White City Stadium during the 1962-63 season.

But the "Queens Park" part of their name is a slightly different matter. Able to trace their roots back to 1882, the club had a nomadic existence, playing on various pitches around West London before moving to Loftus Road in Shepherds Bush in 1917. But to understand the reason why the club became known as "Queens Park Rangers", we have to go back to their very formation.

Queens Park Rangers took their name from the part of London where their first players lived

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QPR give their year of birth as 1882, but they didn't become Queens Park Rangers until 1886. 1882 saw the formation of Christchurch Rangers, who merged with another club, St Jude's Institute to form the club that we all know today four years later.

But with the club having had such a rootless past, the name comes from somewhere different. The St Jude's Institute was on Ilbert Street in Queens Park, just over a couple of miles north of where the club would come to end up in Shepherd's Bush. The club, therefore, took their name from the location of where their first players lived, rather than the location that they played at.

They were one of the first clubs in London to turn professional, doing so in 1889, and joined the Southern League ten years later. This league was very strong at the time, having been founded as a League for clubs who had been frozen out of the early years of the Football League.

They won their first Southern League title in 1908, and this led to them playing in the first Charity Shield match against the Football League champions Manchester United, which they drew 1-1 before losing the replay 4-0. They won the Southern League title again in 1912.

They moved from their previous ground at Park Royal to Loftus Road in 1917, but their big step up came in 1920. The Football League had come to realise that while the League had expanded very effectively across the Midlands and North of England, the south had been overlooked, somewhat.

By the time that the First World War put a stop to the Football League in 1915, the League had expanded from its original twelve clubs to forty, but only five of them - Chelsea, Spurs, Arsenal, Clapton Orient and Fulham - came from south of Birmingham.

So in 1920, the entire Southern League was invited to join the Football League as its Third Division, and QPR were part of this influx. At the end of the following season, a further twenty clubs were admitted, creating a Third Division South and a Third Division North, which existed until the creation of the Fourth Division in 1958.

More than a century on from their accession into the League, Queens Park Rangers remain one of London's most distinctive football names. But while their home remains in Shepherds Bush, there does always remain the possibility that they'll move again. Former chairman Tony Fernandes had plans to move them three miles away to Old Oak Common, but this plan never came to pass.