No away fans at Old Firm games this season — and English clubs should be watching closely

Glasgow’s biggest fixture is about to be played at half volume. There will be no away supporters at Celtic and Rangers derbies in the Scottish Premiership or the Premier Sports Cup this season, after a temporary arrangement agreed between the two clubs and the Scottish Professional Football League. Strip the away end out of an Old Firm game and you remove the thing that makes it an Old Firm game. English fans, whose away allocation is one of the most fiercely protected customs in the domestic calendar, should read this one carefully.

What the SPFL, Celtic and Rangers have agreed

Away supporters will not be admitted to Celtic and Rangers derbies in the Scottish Premiership or the Premier Sports Cup this season. The arrangement came out of talks between the two Glasgow clubs and the SPFL, and has been described as temporary rather than permanent.

In practice, every Old Firm fixture will now be staged in front of a wholly home crowd. No away end, no visiting tifo, no counter-singing — the acoustic architecture of the derby simply disappears.

The agreement covers the league and the Premier Sports Cup, Scottish football’s League Cup competition. Other competitions fall under different organisers and are not part of the same arrangement.

Why it happened: the Scottish Cup quarter-final at Ibrox

The decision follows the Scottish FA’s independent review into events surrounding last season’s Scottish Cup quarter-final at Ibrox. On 8 March, police and stewards had to intervene after pitch incursions involving supporters of both clubs, in a match badly marred by unrest.

The reasoning is preventative rather than punitive: cut the number of flashpoints inside the ground instead of managing disorder once it has already started. Whether that logic holds when the disorder simply relocates outside the stadium is the question that follows every ban of this kind.

Rangers are reported to have put forward a proposal of their own during the discussions. With no detailed statement from the clubs, the specifics of that proposal remain unconfirmed.

The first fixtures affected: 13 and 20 September

Rangers host Celtic in the Premier Sports Cup on 13 September, with the city rivals meeting at Celtic Park in the league a week later. Those two fixtures will be the first played under the new arrangement.

For season-ticket holders on both sides, the loss is immediate: the most anticipated away day of the year vanishes from the calendar. And it is an away day of barely a few miles, between two grounds in the same city — which makes the restriction all the more striking.

Any return of away fans will depend on how these matches pass off. The word temporary is written into the agreement, but no review date has been made public.

What this would mean in the Premier League

English top-flight clubs are typically required to make a substantial away allocation available at every league fixture, and the away end has survived derbies with genuine hostility behind them — north London, Merseyside, Manchester and the Black Country among them. Full away bans in the Premier League are vanishingly rare, and closures are usually partial, targeted and short.

That is not accident but policy. Post-Hillsborough stadium reform, banning orders aimed at identified individuals, and close cooperation between clubs and police forces have been the English model for three decades. It is expensive and slow, and it has largely kept away supporters in the ground.

The Scottish case is a reminder of how quickly that consensus can be reversed once a single fixture escalates badly enough. Reciprocity in English football is a convention, not a guarantee, and conventions survive only while nobody has a reason to break them.

The cost to clubs and supporters

A derby without opposition support loses sporting and commercial value. Away gate receipts are small relative to the budgets of clubs the size of Celtic and Rangers, but broken reciprocity is expensive in a different currency: trust between clubs and their own supporter base.

The danger flagged in every comparable European case is entrenchment. A temporary measure that appears to work rarely gets reversed, because nobody carries the political cost of restoring it. Scottish supporter groups moved quickly for exactly that reason.

And the underlying question is the same in Glasgow as it is anywhere else: are you sanctioning identified behaviour, or an entire supporter population? No league in Europe has produced a convincing answer yet.

FAQ