The State of Scottish Football and can it change for the better?
Sunday National, 30 August 2026
Gerry Hassan
Another week, another set of controversies about Scottish football. Celtic humiliated in Europe; Rangers looking hopeless and Hibs and Motherwell out, while Hearts continue to fly the flag after a decent away result. The co-efficient of Scottish teams in Europe has fallen from 9th to 19th in four years.
Broadcaster Danny Baker was overstating things describing this as “a collapse of Scottish football” but journalist Graham Spiers is correct to talk of “the horrifying humiliation” of Celtic and Rangers in another bleak week for the game.
The Scottish men’s national team had a dire World Cup. But since then, the SFA (Scottish Football Association) have practiced a monk-like silence by not commenting on the team’s disappointing performances and have also failed to join widespread calls on FIFA head Gianni Infantino to resign; only reluctantly coming out against his re-election.
There is something strange at the heart of our game. We continue to behave as if we are a great football nation while increasingly producing the evidence of being a small, inward-looking one. We rightly talk about football as if it were part of the national character but too often confuse emotional attachment with achievement.
We have great supporters, historic clubs and iconic grounds alongside an evocative history of the Scottish game from its codified origins in the late 19th century where it influenced the world continuing well into the late 20th century. Despite this important legacy, we are in denial about the real state of our game, and as we continue to do this, each new season demonstrates that something is seriously wrong.
For four decades the Scottish top-flight championship has belonged to two Glasgow clubs. Celtic and Rangers have dominated to an extent that would have seemed extraordinary when Aberdeen and Dundee United were challenging them in the early 1980s. Aberdeen’s 1984-85 championship was the last won by a club outside Glasgow. This is not simply a story about Celtic and Rangers being exceptionally successful but more about the rest of Scottish football being progressively weakened.
The same paradox exists internationally. Scotland have qualified for the European Championship four times and never escaped the group stage. At the World Cup, the record is even more pronounced. We have now appeared at nine finals, including 2026, yet have never reached the knockouts. In 2026, after a 28-year absence, Scotland once again were unable to progress beyond the group stage. So here are the uncomfortable questions. What happened to Scottish football? Does it tell us something more about Scotland? And can our decline be reversed?
The country that thinks it is better than its results
Scotland has always had a complex relationship with football. We simultaneously understand that football is serious yet also insist that it is only football. We can spend a week debating a manager’s tactics but dismiss deeper institutional questions as somebody else’s problem. We are capable of sophisticated arguments about society, economics and politics, while discussing football as if it existed in a parallel universe where none of those forces apply. But football is a mirror of society.
The wealth distribution of Scottish football resembles the wider concentration of wealth and power. The centralisation of decision-making resembles other Scottish institutions. The instinct to defend established interests is hardly unique to football. Nor is the tendency to announce ambitious strategies while struggling to translate them into structural change.
Scottish football has acquired something approaching a culture of managed decline. We do not collapse. We survive. We do not become irrelevant. We remain relevant enough. We do not fail completely. We qualify occasionally, win the occasional famous European night, produce the occasional outstanding player and then use these exceptions to suggest that the underlying system must be working.
We go on about the English going on about 1966. But we too go on about our peak football memories – 1967 Lisbon and Jim Baxter’s keepy-ups; 1978 and Archie Gemmell – and for some of us our own magic team experiences. The writer William McIlvanney observed that we have been so alienated from our own history that it is reduced to these “moments” – some romantic, some tragic; the same is true of our football for all our supposed passions.
There are positives of course. The rise of women’s football and the recognition of the suppression of previous generations of women’s football is welcome, as is the celebration of pioneers like Rose Reilly who had to leave Scotland to play and find success in Italy and France.
Scottish football isn’t dead. Far from it. The passion around clubs such as Aberdeen, Dundee United, Hearts, Hibernian, St Mirren and dozens of others is evidence of a football culture with extraordinary depth. Across the land small clubs do great things against the odds. The likes of Stenhousemuir, Forfar Athletic – and in my own hometown of Kirkcudbright, St. Cuthbert Wanderers. The problem is the wider system and the cultural acquiescence which reinforces it.
Forty Years of the Same Old Story
The most obvious symptom is the Old Firm. It is tempting to blame Celtic and Rangers. But that lets everybody else off the hook. David Goldblatt, author of The Ball is Round, a history of global football, thinks “the dominance of the Old Firm” harms the game, but much more damaging is “the suffocating cultural hegemony and self-regard they infect the rest of the game with.”
Celtic and Rangers are powerful because they have enormous support, commercial strength, rich histories, modern stadiums, global audiences and European revenues. They did not invent the inequalities of modern football but have exploited them brilliantly over the years.
The transformation is stark. Research cited by BBC Sport found that Celtic and Rangers accounted for around 70 percent of Scottish Premiership revenue and an even larger proportion of wages and transfer spending. In 1984-85, Aberdeen’s revenues were higher than Celtic’s but today Aberdeen generates only a fraction of Celtic’s income. That is not simply the result of two clubs becoming successful but the outcomes of a system that increasingly rewards those already powerful.
European qualification is central to this. European football brings money, prestige, better players, improved facilities and coefficient advantages. Success becomes self-reinforcing. The richer club has a better chance of qualifying; qualification makes it richer and greater wealth makes qualification more likely.
The Scottish league has consequently become a competition in which the question is usually not who will win? but which of the two will win? That matters. Hearts gave us a glimpse of a different league last season, but was this an aberration or the green shoots of change? Competitive uncertainty is one of the basic attractions of sport. Supporters can tolerate losing because they believe that winning remains possible. Once that disappears, something changes in the emotional contract between club and supporter.
There is a difference between supporting a club through difficult times and knowing that your club has virtually no route to the destination. The remarkable thing about the 1980s was not merely that Aberdeen and Dundee United challenged Celtic and Rangers. It was that they made Scottish football imagine something different.
The “New Firm” represented a different possibility – that geography, organisation, coaching, recruitment and ambition could overcome financial disadvantage. Alex Ferguson and Jim McLean were not merely successful managers. They were institutional disruptors.
They demonstrated that Scottish football could produce teams capable of competing beyond Scotland. Aberdeen won the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1983 and the European Super Cup. Dundee United reached the European Cup semi-final in 1984. That generation made Scotland look outward but we subsequently became increasingly inward-looking.
The European Problem
The decline of Scottish club football is perhaps most visible when Scottish clubs play in Europe. Domestically, Celtic and Rangers can look formidable. In Europe, the economic realities become clearer. There have been exceptions. Rangers reached the UEFA Cup final in 2008 and the Europa League final in 2022. Celtic reached the UEFA Cup final in 2003.
These were great achievements. But they are exceptions rather than evidence of sustained national progress. The deeper problem is the lack of a broader Scottish European ecosystem.
A healthy football country does not depend upon one or two clubs carrying the European reputation of the entire system. Instead, it develops several clubs capable of qualifying regularly, accumulating coefficient points, nurturing players and talent and competing beyond the early qualifying rounds.
Scotland has struggled to do this. This is where the argument becomes uncomfortable for the clubs themselves. Scottish clubs have often been too short-termist. Managers are hired to win the next match. Players are recruited to solve the immediate problem. Young players sit on the margins because experience is considered safer. Academies become facilities rather than philosophies.
The SFA’s research acknowledges this. Its work on the transition from academy to first-team football found that Scotland lags comparable countries in young player minutes and identified the gap between academy and first-team football, weak strategic planning and problems in youth development as major factors. It also found that clubs which consistently overperform financially and competitively typically have strong academies and player-development strategies. Scottish football has diagnosed part of the illness itself. The question is whether it has the appetite to administer the cure.
The national men’s team: qualification has become the destination
The men’s national team offers another version of the same story. There has been progress. Steve Clarke took Scotland to successive European Championships and the 2026 World Cup, ending a 28-year absence from the global tournament. Qualification for the World Cup was a genuine national achievement. But qualification has increasingly become the destination rather than the beginning.
Scotland have now reached four European Championship finals and exited in the group stage every time. The 2026 World Cup offered another opportunity to break the pattern, but Scotland again failed. There is no shame in losing to better teams. The question is why Scotland so often enter major tournaments without appearing to possess the institutional and individual confidence that they belong there.
We have developed a culture of qualifying with relief and then competing with caution. Perhaps this is psychological, perhaps tactical, perhaps structural but probably a mix of all three.
The modern Scottish player can be technically excellent. There are Scottish players performing at the highest levels of European football. Scott McTominay, Andy Robertson, John McGinn and others demonstrate that genuine talent exists. The argument that Scotland simply lacks players is too easy. The harder question is why a country capable of producing individual players of genuine international quality struggles to create a football environment capable of consistently producing teams of quality.
The SFA Question
This takes us to the SFA. The SFA has changed considerably over recent decades. It has professionalised many areas, invested in facilities, developed the Oriam (Scotland’s Sports Performance Centre in Edinburgh), expanded women’s football, embraced new forms of governance and produced successive strategic plans.
Its current Power of Football 2.0 strategy is ambitious. It identifies three broad goals – Enable, Enjoy and Excel – proposing investment in facilities, youth development and infrastructure. Therefore, it would be unfair to portray the SFA as an organisation that does nothing.
The more accurate criticism is that it often appears better at strategy than systematic transformation. Scottish football has had no shortage of strategies. It has had reviews, working groups, consultations, reports, initiatives, committees and action plans. What it has lacked is a sustained political project for changing the distribution of power.
Reform is not simply about deciding that youth development is important. It means confronting the clubs whose immediate interests conflict with long-term development. It is not merely stating that Scottish football should become more competitive. It means examining how broadcasting income, prize money, European revenues and voting structures reinforce existing inequalities.
It is not merely talking about participation. It means asking why the country seems unable to turn participation into elite development. And it means asking the question that institutions find uncomfortable. Who benefits from the system as it currently operates? That is a political question. And Scottish football has been remarkably reluctant to ask it.
The conservatism of the game
There is a conservatism running through Scottish football. It exists among administrators, but also among clubs, media and supporters. We complain that nothing changes and then become suspicious whenever somebody proposes new ideas.
We want better players but resist different development methods. We want more competitive football but defend arrangements that protect established interests. We want European success but often judge clubs almost entirely on what happens on a Saturday afternoon.
We want young Scottish players to flourish but demand immediate results. We want innovative managers but sack them when they experiment. We want the SFA to show leadership while distrusting leadership whenever it threatens somebody’s established position. None of this is uniquely Scottish.
But Scotland has become unusually good at institutionalising compromise. The result is a system in which everyone possesses a veto and nobody possesses sufficient authority to transform the whole. The irony is that football, unlike politics, eventually exposes this.
What would real change look like?
The first step would be to stop pretending that the problem is one thing. Scottish football does not have an Old Firm problem, an SFA problem, a youth-development problem or a European problem. It has a system problem.
The first reform should be a national independent commission on Scottish football – not another internal SFA review, but a genuinely independent body involving clubs, players, coaches, supporters, broadcasters, economists, educators, local government and people from outside football. Its purpose should be simple: What would a successful Scottish football system look like in 2040, and what must change to get there? A new national long-term football settlement. Not another strategy paper.
The second step should be redistribution. European income will always favour the clubs who qualify. But domestic football can choose how much inequality it wants to reproduce. Prize money, broadcasting revenue and development incentives should be examined with the aim of creating greater competitive balance without punishing success.
The third should be a radical youth-development programme. Every Scottish Premiership club should have a footballing strategy that links children’s football, academy development, first-team football and player pathways.
The SFA’s research has pointed towards the importance of this strategic alignment. We should stop measuring academies primarily by buildings, badges and age-group results. Measure by first-team players produced. Measure clubs by minutes given to Scottish-developed players. Measure the system by the number of Scottish players capable of playing at European level. And reward clubs for doing it.
The fourth is governance. The SFA and SPFL (Scottish Professional Football League) need to become more transparent about who makes decisions, how decisions are made and whose interests are being served. Football supporters should not be treated merely as consumers who turn up, buy merchandise and pay subscriptions. They are the real stakeholders.
The Big Question
The most important reform needed is cultural. Scottish football needs to recover ambition. Not the kind of ambition based upon nostalgia for Lisbon, Gothenburg, Seville or Wembley 67 or 77.
We need to stop defining success as being better than we expected. We need to stop treating qualification as achievement enough. We need to stop congratulating ourselves for having passionate supporters when those supporters deserve better football structures. The Tartan Army should not be the main story about the men’s national team.
Football remains one of the few institutions capable of connecting Scotland’s cities, towns, islands and communities in a genuinely emotional way. It reaches places that politics often cannot. It crosses class, age and geography. It can be tribal, ridiculous, beautiful, infuriating and profound. Yet the Scottish game increasingly reflects a country uncertain about its capacity to change across public life. That does not have to be the future.
Scotland has produced footballers, coaches and clubs capable of extraordinary things. Aberdeen under Ferguson did it. Dundee United under McLean did it. Celtic under Jock Stein did it. Rangers have had European nights that seemed impossible. Scotland have produced generations of players who succeeded abroad when the domestic system could not fully contain them.
The capacity is there. The question is whether the institutions have the courage to use it. The challenge is not to recreate some mythical golden age of Scottish football. There was never such a thing. Every generation had its arguments, incompetence, poor players, bad managers and administrators.
The task is to create a football culture and system suited to the Scotland that exists. A Scotland with outstanding players but too few pathways. A Scotland with extraordinary supporters but inadequate stadiums and facilities. A Scotland with clubs rich in history but often poor in strategic capacity. A Scotland with a national association capable of producing impressive strategies but not the political muscle to implement them. And a Scotland where two clubs have accumulated so much power that the rest increasingly compete for the scraps.
The first act of reform, therefore, is not another committee. It is honesty. We should admit that the current model has failed. Not because Scottish football is uniquely bad. It isn’t. Not because Celtic and Rangers should somehow be prevented from succeeding. They shouldn’t. Not because Scotland lacks talent. It doesn’t.
The model has failed because it has allowed success to become increasingly concentrated, short-termism become institutionalised, youth development to remain inconsistent, European competition to expose our limitations and national ambition to become satisfied with qualification.
That is the crisis. But crises offer opportunities. The story of Scottish football does not have to be one of inexorable decline. The lesson of the 1980s is that systems can change. The lesson of the modern game is that countries smaller than Scotland can build competitive football cultures through organisation, investment, youth development and long-term thinking. Look at Croatia with 3.9 million people: World Cup runners-up in 2018; third place in 2022.
The lesson of our own history is that we have done it before. The real question is not whether Scottish football can compete again. It is whether we are prepared to change the institutions, incentives and assumptions that currently make sustained success so difficult.
For too long, Scottish football has been asking whether this is the year. The question should be different. What kind of football country do we want Scotland to be – and what are we prepared to change to become it? That is a much harder question. It is the one worth answering.
