New Era of Competitive Balance

What could dystopian math look like?

This week’s column is dedicated to doing some scenario analysis based upon the premise that the Scottish Premiership is entering a material shift in competitive dynamics beginning with the 2025-2026 season. Here is some context:

1. Rangers being run by a relatively competent, if unspectacular, football operations department being run with a blueprint comparable to that deployed at Leeds

2. Hearts adopting a Tony Bloom-influenced football operations department, with a material improvement in aligning recruitment with a playing style that is coherent for the competitive dynamics the club faces

3. With Hibernian more fully embracing the relationship with Black Knight during late 2024 and into 2025, their football operations may also be poised to improve and build upon what was already a relatively successful 2024-2025

4. Aberdeen continues to spend money and appear to have embraced some semblance of a more modern football operations department, though likely lagging Hearts and likely Hibs by some distance.

I started the time period covered in this column with the 2018-2019 season, as that was the first where Rangers’ wage bill eclipsed 60% relative to Celtic’s.

Given the outlier nature of the 2020-2021 season, I have excluded it from this exercise. By “outlier” I am referring to the confluence of a myriad of unusual factors, with the pandemic-related issues obviously most prominent. However, just as a contextual reference, the points total was 77 for that season.

Also, please note that I have pro-rated the 2019-2020 points throughout this exercise using the rates for the 30 games played up to a hypothetical 38 game season.