The 2025-2026 season has been living up to the Huddle Breakdown preseason billing as being the most competitive and interesting in years…so far.
But is this likely to continue?
Will the major changes at Celtic and Rangers lead to improved performance levels? Will Derek McInnes continue being Derek McInnes? How resilient will Hibernian be despite the Black Knight divorce?
To explore these topics in this column, I want to start by placing Celtic’s performance against St. Mirren into some context, as I did following the Midtjylland performance on Extra Time.
Through Saturday’s game, Celtic have had 270 league games since Rangers reached some semblance of financial relevance beginning with the 2018-2019 season. The image shows the xG for Celtic for each game on the vertical y-axis and the non-penalty xG difference on the horizontal x-axis. Needless to say, but these measures, Saturday in Paisley was no bueno.
I added some labels to the image showing the date of each game merged with the opponent. Probably unsurprisingly, the lower left corner of sadness is populated mostly by games versus greater-resourced opponents such as Rangers. Please forgive the Americanized formatting on dates.
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