The Old Firm derby is one of the oldest fixtures in world football, dating back to 1888, and it has long been shaped by political and religious divisions between the two clubs’ fan bases. It’s also, most seasons, one of the best-attended and most intensely policed derbies anywhere in Europe. This year’s edition of that intensity came to a head at the Scottish Cup quarter-final on March 8, when Celtic beat Rangers on penalties after a goalless 120 minutes at Ibrox.
That match marked the first time in years that an away allocation at an Old Firm fixture had been restored to its historic size — roughly 8,000 tickets, the largest travelling allocation at the derby since 2018. For context, Premiership meetings in the seasons before that had typically capped away allocations between 2,000 and 2,500, following an earlier two-year stretch with no away fans at all. So this was already being treated as something of a test case for whether a fuller away crowd could be safely accommodated at the fixture again.
It didn’t go well. Celtic’s penalty shootout win triggered a pitch invasion by their travelling fans, which in turn prompted an incursion from hundreds of Rangers supporters attempting to confront them. Reports described Rangers fans, many from the section housing the club’s Union Bears ultras group, charging toward the stand holding the away support. Fans threw missiles and fireworks and continued exchanging blows until police and stewards managed to form a barrier across the pitch. A flare was thrown toward the away section, and Police Scotland later said officers faced sustained hostility during the disorder.
The human cost of that afternoon went beyond the arrests. A 10-year-old child was struck by a thrown coin, and one police officer was hit on the head by a bottle. Footage circulated showing a female officer being kicked to the ground from behind by a fan sprinting toward the away stand. Celtic players were drawn into the chaos too — defender Julian Araujo was pushed by a Rangers supporter, and a member of Celtic’s backroom staff was involved in an incident that led to an arrest. Police also had to deal with separate trouble outside the stadium, including a serious assault reported on Helen Street after the match, which led to three further arrests.
The arrest count grew in the days that followed. Nine people were arrested within the first 24 hours, with police signalling that significantly more were expected once video and photo evidence had been worked through. By the time the disorder had been fully investigated, at least 37 arrests had been recorded, and the figure was later put at a total of 43 arrests once the process concluded. Police Scotland’s Chief Superintendent at the time, Emma Croft, called the scenes disgraceful and the fans’ conduct unacceptable and shameful, and confirmed a special policing team had been convened to review CCTV, officer footage and material submitted by the public through an online major-incident portal.
Both clubs’ managers condemned what had happened. Rangers’ head coach at the time, Danny Röhl, criticised the pitch invasion, while Celtic’s manager, Martin O’Neill, said he was worried the disorder would overshadow what had otherwise been a good result for his side. The Scottish FA opened a formal investigation under its Judicial Panel Protocol within days
The Scottish FA’s inquiry into the disorder was led by Mark Blackbourne, and its findings drew a distinction between how the trouble started on each side. The review concluded that Celtic’s ultras were the first onto the pitch, driven by the celebratory mood of the shootout win, while the Union Bears’ movement toward the pitch was reactionary, confrontational and overtly threatening — and that in both cases, the closeness of these groups to the playing surface significantly raised the risk of a mass incursion and helped the disorder escalate as quickly as it did.
The practical consequences followed fairly quickly. Both clubs were ordered to play their next home Scottish Cup fixtures behind closed doors, and each was handed a £100,000 compensation bill, payable to whichever team ended up drawn as the away side in their following Scottish Cup tie. That’s a meaningful financial and reputational hit even before getting to the ticketing question, which turned out to be the more consequential and longer-running fallout
Going into this season, Celtic and Rangers had an existing agreement for a five percent away ticket allocation at all SPFL matches at both grounds. That arrangement fell apart in the aftermath of the independent review. Ahead of the League Cup quarter-final at Ibrox, Rangers offered Celtic 300 away tickets instead of the roughly 2,500 that allocation would normally have produced, based on the club’s own assessment of the risk. Celtic rejected that reduced offer, and the dispute was ultimately kicked up to the SPFL to resolve.
The governing body’s answer, announced in early September, was to remove away fans from the equation entirely rather than adjudicate a number. The SPFL confirmed there would be no away supporters at any match between Rangers and Celtic in SPFL competitions for the rest of the 2026-27 season. In its statement, the league said the move would give supporters and matchday planners greater certainty and avoid repeated uncertainty around ticketing for individual fixtures, while stressing that all parties had committed to working constructively with safety and security as the priority. It added that the position would remain subject to review if circumstances materially changed during the season, and that arrangements for matches beyond this season would be considered well ahead of 2027-28.
That decision meant no travelling fans at Rangers hosting Celtic in the League Cup on September 13, and none at the first Premiership Old Firm meeting of the season at Celtic Park on September 20.
Reaction from both dugouts was resigned a than combative. Martin O’Neill told Sky Sports News that from a normal fan’s point of view it was really quite sad, and that despite everything, the fixture remains one of the most remarkable in European, if not world, football. He floated the idea that the two clubs might yet find a way to work something out between themselves, and suggested he didn’t think the process was ever going to succeed once Rangers’ opening offer landed so far below the usual number. In a separate interview, O’Neill described the outcome as both inevitable and really sad, adding that it’s a fixture that comes alive when the away end is full, and that it’s the travelling fans who help make the occasion what it is. Rangers’ manager at the time expressed similar disappointment, while acknowledging why the decision had been taken.
There’s also a genuine safety argument underpinning the ban, separate from the ticketing dispute. The police officer who led the investigation into the March disorder described large away supporter groups at Old Firm fixtures as simply not safe, given what officers encountered that day. That view — that the structural risk of putting thousands of Celtic and Rangers fans in adjoining sections has become harder to manage regardless of stewarding numbers — appears to have carried real weight in how the SPFL ultimately settled the dispute, effectively taking the away allocation off the table rather than trying to find a smaller number that both clubs would
The absence of travelling supporters didn’t mean the two clubs were treated as low-risk in the build-up to these fixtures. Ahead of the League Cup quarter-final at Ibrox on September 13 — played, again, in a 50,000-capacity stadium with no Celtic fans present — manager Martin O’Neill revealed that Police Scotland had visited the club to deliver what he called a general behaviour message. O’Neill described it as a brief, roughly 15-minute meeting intended as a timely reminder about conduct around the fixture, including behaviour on the pitch, given that punch-ups or excessive celebrations were exactly the kind of thing that could be taken further by the authorities in light of what had happened in March. Rangers won that League Cup tie.
A week later came the Premiership fixture at Celtic Park, and Rangers won that one too, 1-0 — their second victory over Celtic inside a week. With no away end to police in the traditional sense, the operation around both matches would have looked different from a typical Old Firm derby: no coach convoys to escort, no away turnstiles to secure, no segregation line to hold at full time. But Police Scotland’s approach to these fixtures over the years has never been only about the travelling end. Warnings issued ahead of past Old Firm matches have routinely covered things like pyrotechnics, sectarian singing and banners, alcohol consumption in and around the ground, and — in one notable case during the Covid-19 period — pleas for fans simply not to gather near the stadiums at all when the game itself was being played behind closed doors. Those broader appeals to “behave” or “stay away from trouble” tend to apply to home support just as much as to any travelling contingent, which is presumably closer to what lay behind whatever prompted this particular headline, even if the specific away-fan travel question has effectively been settled by the ban.
None of this is happeing in a vacuum. The question of whether it’s safe to let full away allocations attend Celtic-Rangers matches has come up repeatedly over the years, usually after some flashpoint of disorder, and the answer has swung back and forth more than once. Scotland has, at various points, tried away-fan bans, reduced allocations in the 750-to-2,500 range, and — briefly, in March — a return to a full-size 8,000-strong away end, before this latest incident reset the debate again. Assistant chief constables and match commanders have warned for years about the risks of flares and pyrotechnics inside packed stands, sometimes explicitly citing fears that someone would eventually be seriously hurt or killed by one. The events of March, with a child struck by a coin and an officer hospitalised by a bottle, will likely be cited as exactly the kind of near-miss those warnings were about.
The sectarian dimension of the rivalry — rooted in Celtic’s identity as a club founded by and for Glasgow’s Irish Catholic community, and Rangers’ historical association with the city’s Protestant and unionist communities — has also shaped decades of legislative and policing responses, from dedicated hate-crime provisions around football to specific stewarding requirements at the derby. That history is part of why Scottish football authorities tend to treat Old Firm disorder differently from a typical instance of pitch encroachment or crowd trouble elsewhere in the league: the potential for it to tip into identity-based conflict, rather than simple football hooliganism, has repeatedly shaped how seriously incidents like March’s are investigated and
For now, the practical reality is straightforward: there is no travelling support at Celtic-Rangers matches in the Premiership or League Cup for the rest of this season, full stop, so there’s nothing for Rangers fans to be warned against travelling to — the away end simply isn’t available to them. The two clubs’ next scheduled Premiership meeting is set for January 3, 2027, at Ibrox, and unless something changes in the interim, that fixture will presumably follow the same no-away-fans format that’s applied to every derby since the ban was announced.
The SPFL has left the door open to revisiting the arrangement if circumstances materially change during the season, and has committed to reconsidering the longer-term picture for matches beyond this campaign well before the 2027-28 season begins. That leaves a real question hanging over Scottish football heading into the new year: whether this becomes a temporary, one-season fix while trust and safety measures are rebuilt between the two clubs and the police, or whether it hardens into something closer to a permanent arrangement, the way Covid-era restrictions initially framed as temporary ended up defining an entire spell of Old Firm fixtures played behind closed doors.
Both managers’ comments suggest neither club is especially happy with where things have landed — both have said, in different ways, that the fixture loses something essential without a full away end contributing to the atmosphere. But given the scale of what happened in March, and a police assessment that’s gone as far as calling large away groups at this specific fixture unsafe, there doesn’t seem to be much appetite on the safety side to reverse course quickly. Whether that changes by January, or by next August, will likely depend on whether this season’s closed-away-end derbies pass without major incident, and on whatever conversations happen between the clubs, the SPFL and Police Scotland in the meantime.
