Is analyzing Celtic Football Club’s performance levels an inherently paradoxical exercise?
There’s £66 million of cash in the bank and this trophy haul over the last 10 seasons, so how dare we peasants question the king?!
While my view has been that these objective truths have been really poor indicators to gauge Celtic’s board performance, I also fully appreciate why some/many would.
This column is intended as part analysis and part editorial.
As Gavin at Scotland’s Coefficient diligently chronicles and analyzes, the state of the club game in Scotland has been in competitive decline. The UEFA club coefficient stands at 26.25 as of this writing, placing it 19th.
Importantly, that is over 8 points behind Cyprus (34.694) in 15th, which would trigger additional access to the riches of European club competitions. At the same time, Scotland stands just ahead of Croatia (25.906), Sweden (25.75), with Azerbaijan in 25th (23.688).
Why reference 25? That has been around the floor for the coefficient when Celtic were effectively a unipolar entity in Europe post-2012 liquidation of Rangers, or even during past relatively brief periods of national decline since 1960. Importantly, the resurgence in the coefficient coincided with a Rangers surging in the Europa League, with a top 10 penetration for a brief period.
Fortunately, only Croatia has 2 teams in league stages, so hopefully Hearts and Celtic can earn enough to hold them off this season, as the next five countries have only one club remaining.
For the club coefficient to have a plausible scenario of returning to the 20 to 25 ranking area with two clubs with the financial resources of Celtic and Rangers is an indictment on how woeful the league has become. The lack of profits from player trading has also been stark - Aberdeen, Hearts, and Hibs combined for roughly £31 million over the past 10 seasons, with £11 million last season alone.
For the vast majority of the post-2012 era, Celtic SHOULD have won the league every season due to the combination of a massive resource advantage and very poorly run clubs as competitors. The relative dominance in Cup competitions was, in my analysis, largely a result of the intersection of resource advantage and the high quality coaching of control-focused game models under Brendan Rodgers and Ange Postecoglou…and some good old randomness.
Squeaking by poor Hearts teams under Craig Levein, the League Cup final in December 2019, and multiple squeaky bum wins last season under Martin O’Neill were examples of fortune shining brightly in other occasions. That’s football!
I wrote this piece about 18-months ago chronicling similar dynamics in Serbia, with Red Star now going for 10 in-a-row in the current 2026-2027 league season, and on a 6 in-a-row run in the Serbia Cup. If only they had a League Cup competition in which to prioritize playing 1st team starters to have had an unprecedented sextuple treble t-shirt to sell!