Clyde began in 1877 at Barrowfield on the river’s north bank — a rowing club’s neighbours taking up the new game, and taking their name from the water itself. In 1898 the club crossed to Shawfield, on the Rutherglen boundary south of the Green, and there the ‘Bully Wee’ — a nickname of cheerfully disputed origin — spent nearly ninety years as the third point of Glasgow football’s southern triangle.
The honours came in the middle of the story: Scottish Cup wins in 1939, 1955 and 1958 — a haul bettered among Glasgow clubs only by the Old Firm and Queen’s Park — with sides good enough to finish among the country’s best and to send players to the very top; Tommy Ring of the 1950s teams remains a Scotland legend. Shawfield’s odd double life added to the flavour: from 1932 the ground also hosted greyhound racing, the dogs circling the pitch the Bully Wee played on.
The late twentieth century told a harder Glasgow story. Crowds shrank with the industries that had fed them; the greyhound company came to own the ground; and in 1986 Clyde left Shawfield — beginning eight nomadic years of ground-sharing at Firhill and Douglas Park while the search for a home went on. It ended outside the city entirely: in 1994 Clyde moved to the new town of Cumbernauld as tenants of Broadwood, the first senior Glasgow club to leave Glasgow.
The decades since have been the honest weather of the lower leagues — promotions, relegations, one famous modern afternoon in 2006 when Clyde knocked a Roy Keane-debuting Celtic out of the Scottish Cup — sustained, as such clubs are, by durable support and volunteer graft, with the question of a return closer to the old heartland a hardy perennial.
Clyde’s story carries a moral the bigger clubs never had to learn: what happens to a football club when the city changes around it. The Bully Wee survived the answer — which, in the leagues where survival is the trophy, is its own kind of honours list.