The Story Scottish Football Didn't Tell

by A Grand Old Tee

A 56th title, a fairytale interim, a Hearts side that came within four minutes of history. And the back pages led with something else.

Celtic FC 2025/2026 Double Winners graphic — Martin O'Neill pictured with members of the title-winning squad

The fixture was Celtic against Hearts at Celtic Park, last day of the league season, 16th May. By the time it kicked off, the country had been watching the same scoreboard for the best part of nine months: Hearts top, the rest chasing. The Jambos had held the league for the majority of the season, the longest sustained challenge from outside the Glasgow clubs that anyone of our generation can really remember. The Hearts support, with a 66-year wait for the championship and only a point needed at Celtic Park, was as close as it has been since Love Street in '86.

In the first half Shankland headed them in front from a set-piece. For a stretch, a 66-year wait looked like it might just hold.

It didn't hold for long. Still in the first half, Kieran Tierney's cross struck the arm of Alexandros Kyziridis, Don Robertson pointed to the spot, VAR did not intervene to overturn, and Arne Engels did the rest. 1-1 at the break. And on a point, that was Hearts still in possession of the league. With 86 minutes on the clock, Daizen Maeda poked in a Callum Osmand cross. The flag was up, the flag was eventually down, VAR confirmed the goal stood, and Hearts, who had led the league for the bulk of the season, were no longer leading it. In the 98th minute, Osmand ran the length of the pitch and rolled the ball into an empty net. 3-1. Five-in-a-row. Fourteen titles in fifteen years. A 56th in total, one more than Rangers, a record that has now changed hands.

Sitting in the chair to receive all of it was Martin O'Neill, interim manager since January, 22 years on from his last title at the club, a man who said in his post-match remarks that "these players have given me a reason to live," and that "never in his wildest dreams" had he thought he would see them lift this league. Make a list, if you like, of the lines a journalist might wish to draw from that scene. There are not many seasons in any sport that put quite so many of them down in front of you at once.

The story that should have led

Strip the politics out for a moment and look at what was on the table for any sports desk in Britain to write up that evening.

A 74-year-old returning interim, brought in for what was supposed to be a holding job, delivering the double 22 years after his last title. Saying out loud, on camera, that his players had given him a reason to live. A fairytale by any reasonable definition of the word.

A Hearts side that had spent the better part of the season at the top of the table and come within four minutes of breaking a championship drought that began in the year Eisenhower was still in the White House. A team and a city denied at the death, but denied after the kind of league challenge from outside Glasgow that the wider Scottish game has been crying out for since Aberdeen were running the show in the early Eighties.

A title race that, for a stretch of the autumn, was a genuine three-horse affair, with Danny Röhl, a young German coach with a serious reputation, in the mix at Ibrox. Rangers eventually slid to third, and that is its own story, but for several months Scotland had a properly competitive top flight with a continental coach in the mix and a non-Old-Firm side leading the way. The wider sport in this country has wanted that conversation for decades.

And, almost as a footnote: a 56th Celtic title, a record that, until this month, belonged to the club along the road.

That is the back page. Four of them, if you like. Each one of them sells the Scottish game outwards, to readers in London and Paris and New York, in a way that "Old Firm runaway" and "tedious procession" never quite manage. It is the year, finally, when the cliché didn't fit.

The story that ran instead

Reader, you know what the story was. Within hours, Hearts had issued a statement reporting "serious physical and verbal abuse" of their players and staff, calling the scenes "unacceptable" and "disgusting", and stating that the aftermath had "embarrassed Scottish football." No video footage substantiating the abuse claims was made public. The club wrote to the SFA and the SPFL about what they described as the "premature ending of the match." Police Scotland were involved.

That is, on its own terms, a reasonable thing for a football club to do if its players have been mistreated and there is evidence to back it up. The question is what happened next in the press.

In one of the Scottish dailies, a column ran describing Hearts defender Frankie Kent as "blood spattered." There is, as far as anyone in the Celtic-supporting media has been able to verify, no photographic evidence of this. The framing was disputed in detail by other outlets, with photographs published of Kent in the immediate aftermath showing no visible blood. A separate "missing minute" theory pushed by parts of the same press (the suggestion that part of the closing minutes had not been properly accounted for) has, by my reading of the subsequent coverage, not held up either. Elsewhere in the Glasgow press, a senior columnist ran his piece in the days that followed without congratulating Celtic on the double. A small thing, perhaps. Old supporters notice small things.

Sky Sports, to their credit, covered the football. Their match report led with O'Neill's side being crowned champions on the final day. They also gave substantial space, in a separate piece, to the pitch invasion and Hearts' statement and the police involvement, in which O'Neill himself, asked whether the scenes had embarrassed Scottish football, replied: "I don't believe that, I just don't believe it, I think it's nonsense." On the wider talk of confrontations with Hearts players, he added: "I don't know about the confrontations in terms of the Hearts players, and there's a lot of hyperbole about that." On the use of the word "assault," reported by the Irish Examiner: "That's a fairly severe allegation as well, so that's not been proved."

Three sentences. Plain English. A man who has been around long enough to recognise hyperbole when he sees it.

How it looked from further away

It is worth, when the room you are in starts to feel airless, opening a window.

L'Equipe in France led on the football. Their headline, translated, ran: "A title awaited since 1960, 41 years of Glasgow hegemony to break: Heart of Midlothian sees its dream vanish at the very end of the match against Celtic." beINSPORTS framed the night around Celtic's "late double" and the title being "snatched." ESPN's match piece led with "Celtic deny Hearts a historic title as they clinch 14th Scottish Premiership triumph in 15 years." (Via the 67 Hail Hail round-up of the international coverage.)

These are people whose job is to take a Scottish league fixture and explain it to a reader who is not from here. They reached, without prompting, for the story. The fairytale denied. The hegemony broken and remade. The spirit of champions.

The closer the desk, in this case, the narrower the lens.

A question, properly posed

Here is the question I want to leave the reader with, and I want to pose it carefully because it deserves to be posed carefully.

Earlier in the season, in the title conversation for a stretch, were Rangers under a young German coach by the name of Danny Röhl, appointed at Ibrox in October 2025, contracted through to the summer of 2028. Rangers finished third in the end, but for a portion of the campaign Röhl was the story.

Imagine, just for a moment, that the league had been won by Röhl's Rangers in the 98th minute of the final day, from a goal down, by a returning manager 22 years on from his last title at the club. What would the back pages have led with? What would the Sunday columns have led with? What words would have been used, on the morning after, about the manager, fans, the players and the city?

I am not going to write the answer for you. I am going to leave that question with you, and I am going to trust you to think about it.

It is not, surely, because Celtic is a club with Irish Catholic heritage. Surely not.

The opportunity missed

The serious point, when the question has been asked and the air has cleared, is that this was a missed opportunity for Scottish football, not for Celtic. Celtic won the league. Celtic won the cup. The trophies are in the cabinet, the medals are with the players, the 56th flag has been earned. None of that is contingent on what the Scottish press did or didn't print.

What the Scottish print press did with it, what the Scottish broadcast media did with it, is the country's loss, not the club's. The wider game in Scotland has not had a season this rich in stories for a very long time. Hearts' challenge, O'Neill's return, Rangers' revival under Röhl, the 56th, the five-in-a-row, the final-day comeback, the Irish-inflected fairytale of a manager who said out loud that his players had given him a reason to live.

A serious press, with a serious feel for its own product, would have led with all of that and sold it outwards. We had, by historic standards, a remarkable league season. The country won't get many like it.

Hail! Hail!

Sources

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