The Old Firm: the story behind Scottish football's fiercest rivalry

Two clubs founded within a few years of each other in Glasgow have gone on to contest one of the most intense derbies in world sport. Here's the history behind it — where it came from, what it's meant off the pitch, and where it stands today.

Two clubs, one city

How the two clubs began

Rangers were formed first, in March 1872, when four teenagers — brothers Peter and Moses McNeil, Peter Campbell and William McBeath — decided over a walk through Glasgow’s West End Park to start a football club. The club has been based on the south side of the city since 1899, at Ibrox in Govan.

Celtic followed in November 1887, founded by Brother Walfrid, an Irish Marist brother, with an explicit charitable purpose: raising funds to feed impoverished Irish Catholic immigrant families in Glasgow’s East End, many of whom had arrived in Scotland fleeing the aftermath of the Irish famine. Celtic played their first match the following spring, on 28 May 1888 — a friendly against Rangers, which Celtic won 5–2.

Confusingly, Celtic’s own crest has always read 1888, not 1887, which trips up even long-time supporters of both clubs — the likely explanation is that the badge marks the club’s first season on the pitch rather than the founding meeting the previous winter.

It’s a genuine inconsistency rather than a settled fact, since Celtic’s own milestone anniversaries are counted from 1887: the club’s 125th anniversary was marked in 2012, which only works if 1887 is the reference point.

Where "Old Firm" comes from

There was no rivalry to speak of in that first meeting — some accounts of the “Old Firm” nickname, which emerged in the early 1900s, actually trace it to the two sides being described as being on unusually friendly terms in that early period, or to a satirical cartoon mocking how commercially lucrative their fixture had become for both clubs. Over the next two decades, as both clubs grew into the dominant forces in Scottish football, that early goodwill gave way to something far more intense.

How the rivalry took shape

Fuelled by religion

The divide that came to define the fixture was rooted in identity rather than football. Celtic became a focal point for Glasgow’s Irish Catholic community, a place to express an identity that was often marginalised in a predominantly Protestant Scotland. Rangers, over the same period, became associated with Protestant and Unionist identity, drawing support that saw itself as distinctly loyal to the British state. By the 1910s, those associations were well established, and matches between the two clubs became a lens through which much broader tensions in Scottish and Irish society played out.

That divide had real, tangible consequences. For most of the 20th century, Rangers maintained an unofficial policy of not signing Catholic players — a practice that only ended in 1989, in one of the most dramatic transfer sagas in Scottish football history.

Betrayal?

Maurice “Mo” Johnston, a boyhood Celtic supporter who’d already had one spell at the club, announced publicly in May 1989 that he was returning to Celtic from French side Nantes — his “boyhood heroes,” as he described them. But only weeks later, he would instead cross the divide to join Rangers, causing anger on both sides of the rivalry.

What's happened on the pitch

A near-perfect record

Set against that backdrop, the football itself has been relentlessly, almost improbably even. As of the most recent meeting in May 2026, the two sides have played each other 452 times: Celtic have won 172, Rangers have won 172, and 108 matches have been drawn — as close to a dead heat as a rivalry played out over 138 years can produce. Between them, Celtic and Rangers have won all but a handful of Scottish top-flight titles since the league began in 1890. That trophy haul is even stitched into the badges themselves — both clubs carry a star (or, in Rangers’ case, several) above their crest marking a title milestone. We’ve explained exactly what the stars on football shirts actually mean in a separate piece.

European nights

Both clubs have had their standout moments on the European stage, too. Celtic, managed by Jock Stein, became the first British club to win the European Cup in 1967 — the “Lisbon Lions,” a Celtic side built entirely of players born within thirty miles of Celtic Park. Rangers won the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1972, beating Dynamo Moscow in the final, and have reached two further European finals since, most recently the 2022 Europa League final.

Despite Scottish football’s modest reputation on the continent, both clubs have talked genuinely world-class players into signing — Henrik Larsson and Brian Laudrup among the most famous — part of a wider pattern across Scottish football that’s surprised more than a few visiting scouts over the years.

Tragedy at Ibrox

The fixture’s history isn’t only about identity and silverware. Ibrox Stadium has been the site of two of British football’s worst disasters, in 1902 and 1971 — the second of which killed 66 people and led directly to significant safety reform across British football. Each January, the anniversary is marked with a wreath-laying at the John Greig statue outside Ibrox — Greig, Rangers’ captain on the day of the 1971 disaster, has laid a wreath there himself every year since, often alongside representatives from Celtic. It’s a sober reminder that a rivalry built on this kind of intensity has, at points, carried a very real human cost.

The away-fans dispute

A shrinking allocation

That intensity has caused more recent, less tragic but still genuine friction — this time over something as basic as who gets to attend. Away ticket allocations, once as high as 7,500–8,000 fans a fixture, were cut by both clubs in stages from 2018 onwards, each move typically prompting the other club to reciprocate. By 2023, away fans were barred entirely at Old Firm fixtures, before a partial return (around 4–5% of capacity) was agreed for the 2024/25 season.

March 2026: a test case abandoned

That agreement was tested badly on 8 March 2026, when a Scottish Cup quarter-final at Ibrox — the biggest away allocation since 2018, with 7,500 Celtic fans in attendance — ended in a penalty shoot-out win for Celtic and a pitch invasion. Celtic supporters entered the pitch to celebrate, followed by a large group of Rangers fans; flares were thrown and scuffles broke out before police restored order. Both clubs were subsequently charged by the Scottish FA. An independent review into the incident found Celtic’s support had entered the pitch first, in celebration, while describing the response from Rangers’ Union Bears group as “reactionary, confrontational, and overtly threatening.” It’s exactly the kind of fixture-specific detail neither club particularly wants attached to their name, and it’s set back hopes of a fuller return to normal away allocations.

An occasion that earns its reputation

For all the very real problems attached to it, the football world outside Scotland tends to be strikingly consistent on one point: this is a genuinely enormous occasion, not a provincial curiosity. On BBC’s Match of the Day podcast, former England internationals Gary Lineker and Alan Shearer — neither of whom has ever played for or managed either club — discussed the fixture’s atmosphere in a segment ranking Britain’s biggest derbies.

Shearer went further still.

It’s a rare thing for English football — not always known for its generosity toward the Scottish game — to concede so consistently, from voices with no stake in either side, that this is the biggest derby in Britain. The passion that occasionally boils over into the kind of trouble described above is, uncomfortably, tied up with exactly what makes the occasion what it is.

2012, and an argument that still isn't settled

In 2012, Rangers entered financial administration and were liquidated, with a new company taking on the club’s assets and its Ibrox home, starting again from the fourth tier. Whether that’s the same club continuing or a genuinely new one remains a real, unresolved argument in Scottish football — enough that a section of Celtic’s support prefers “Glasgow derby” to “Old Firm” as a result.

There’s a genuinely odd footnote to that disagreement: both clubs jointly own the registered trademark for the term “Old Firm,” established in 2001 and periodically renewed by each side ever since — including, at points, within days of Celtic publicly insisting the club wants nothing to do with the phrase. Whatever the two sets of supporters make of each other, neither club has been in a hurry to give up its half of the name.

Where it stands today

The 2026/27 season’s first Old Firm fixture is set for Sunday 20 September, live on Sky Sports. Whatever else divides the two sets of supporters, the fixture itself remains one of the most watched, most intense, and most consequential occasions in Scottish sport — a rivalry that, on the pitch at least, genuinely is as close to fifty-fifty as football gets.