Last night, the Scotsman highlighted a recent thread from the well-known Twitter feed Scotland’s Coefficient; it was an absolutely staggering, even terrifying, statistical summary of where the national coefficient currently sits.
As it stands right now, Scottish football is in a position that the website itself describes as being “on the cliff edge.”
If we fall over that edge, the consequences for the 2026-27 season—the one after next—will be disastrous.
Next season, as we all know, there will be no automatic qualification for the UEFA Champions League. No one who has watched the indefensible disgrace of this transfer window so far should believe for one minute that, under the current club leadership, we will be even remotely prepared to play a qualifier when next season comes around.
This club doesn’t care about European football except in terms of the money it can bring in.
If this club had leaders worthy of the word, they would be scared to death by what Scotland’s Coefficient Twitter feed revealed about where we are and what the future might look like.
It’s bad enough that we will find ourselves scrambling desperately to get into the Champions League next season, even if we win the title. If we finish second, we’re facing an even darker, more perilous road than that. And that’s in a scenario that right now looks relatively benign because even that awful scenario is only valid if Scotland finishes in the coefficient top 15.
If we finish 16th or lower, and we start this campaign in 17th place, the consequences for Scottish clubs in Europe will be catastrophic.
The national coefficient determines how many teams enter each competition and how many places we get in Europe.
If we drop below 15th, we lose one European place straight away.
At that level, we have one Champions League team, and they face three qualifying rounds. Right now, if you fail in the qualifying rounds and go out of the Champions League, you drop into the Europa League groups automatically.
At 16th or lower, that distinction is gone.
We would drop to a Europa League qualifier and, if we fail that, to a Conference League qualifier.
If we fail that? Then it’s adios muchachos, and a Champions League place will be gone, a Europa League place will be gone, and we could be out of Europe entirely before the season’s festivities even kick off in earnest.
And that’s the good news.
That’s what happens to the team that finishes first.
In the worst-case scenario, the team that finishes second would find itself having to play three qualifying games just to get to the Europa Conference League. Let me say that again: three qualifiers to get to the third-tier tournament. The Europa League places would go to the team that won the Scottish Cup, and they will have to play four rounds to get there.
Scottish football gets three clubs automatically in group stage football, but as soon as the season after next, we may not be guaranteed any.
From there, the trajectory only goes one way, which is down.
So this stuff matters to us, clearly.
It matters because 30% of Scotland’s current coefficient comes from Celtic.
In light of this information, going into this year’s Champions League group stages with a weaker team than last season is an act of self-harm on a whole different level.
This is a board of directors that says it budgets and needs a surplus for years when we don’t have Champions League football. That, I think, is at the heart of a lot of what we’re seeing at Celtic right now.
I think the club is well aware of what the coefficient picture looks like. I think they’re well aware of the disaster Scottish football stands on the brink of, and I think they’re well aware that we’re facing that disaster along with every other club.
But this club’s policy, which more and more appears predicated on staying one step ahead of a shambolic Ibrox outfit, only brings that nightmare scenario ever closer to our door.
That nightmare scenario only exists in the first place because this club never adequately prepares us for European competition.
This club’s signing policy, predicated on players under 23 and on low wages, stops us from ever reaching that next rung on the ladder—the next rung which puts coefficient points on the board, money in the bank, and helps us make sure we’ll be competing in a Champions League spot every year as long as we’re winning the title here at home.
Last night, I published a piece about the risk we’re taking if the Ibrox club can put Champions League money in the bank.
They will spend. They won’t stash the money under the bed or in a mattress, or whatever it is we’re doing right now. They will try their damnedest. Looking at that coefficient projection, it is a risk they have virtually no choice but to take.
The gap between Champions League football and Conference League football is so enormous that if we get the first and they get the second, they will never catch us in 100 years.
And they know it. And we know it.
Last season’s title was, in the eyes of many of us, the most important in over a decade.
Winning that title gave us a straight shot at this year’s Champions League pot of gold, and we won it, but we won it narrowly.
They gave us a fight because we fell asleep at the wheel.
What we’re seeing this year is much worse than that.
It’s much worse than last summer. It’s on an entirely different level of risk and stupidity because the difference here isn’t between one pot of gold and a slightly less valuable European reward. It’s between possible Champions League qualification the year after next and the abyss.
This is the risk you take as a club when you are in a period of perpetual downsizing. This is the chance you’re taking.
Celtic’s coefficient is a joke. It is an embarrassment, and that is down to the people who run the club and the insane policies they chain us to.
This isn’t just about writing off the Champions League progress that we could be making this season. This could be us writing off participation in the Champions League itself for years to come.
The loss of that revenue means less money spent on transfers (no laughing at the back), less money for wages, less latitude under Financial Fair Play, and a less attractive prospect for players and managers we might want to employ.
With that dwindling pool of cash and those dwindling prospects of attracting quality, further downsizing becomes inevitable. It might even be necessary.
Imagine the damage that will do, in years to come, to the coefficient and to the club’s standing and to the standing of this league.
That policy now represents a clear and present danger to the well-being not just of Celtic but of Scottish football itself.
We are in a lot of trouble here because those figures are shocking and their implications are dreadful. Instead of putting us in the best possible position to escape that fate and all that goes with it, our board of directors are preparing for the worst.
And that is all these people know how to do.
This is a small ‘c’ conservative board that long ago lost its ambition, if it ever had any. The path in front of us is a dark one, and they themselves are the people who have put us on it.
I’ve been saying for weeks the Celtic supporter has to drive this present board out of the club because their destroying our football club. For those of us who are a little slow in the uptake, you’ve laid it out in chapter and verse for everyone to fully digest what is on the horizon. Infact had it not been for Servco’s run in Europe, we might not be playing Champions league football now because it certainly WASN’T us that got us there. I don’t know where the future goes for our Club because there’s zero ambitions within the board to do little more than line their pockets and pat one another on the back. The football club is ours and it’s up to us to do something about it.