Scottish Premiership PREVIEW 20 Sep 2026: Rangers won 3-0 at Ibrox a week ago, and all nine of our models still favour Celtic

Seven days ago Rangers beat Celtic 3-0 at Ibrox in the Premier Sports Cup quarter-final, in front of 51,212, their biggest home crowd of the season so far. Our model has read that result and barely blinked. All nine of the models behind the consensus point the same way for the league meeting at Celtic Park, and the consensus settles at 48 per cent Celtic, 29 per cent the draw, 24 per cent Rangers. That is a leaning call rather than an emphatic one, but unanimity across nine independent models is rare in this fixture, and it is the thing worth watching today.

Derek McInnes brings Rangers back to Celtic Park, where his last visit was the closing day of last season and Celtic took the title off his Hearts side. He arrives on four straight wins and has been careful to put the cup tie in its place, saying Rangers will need another big performance and that bit more again to win this one. The squad is thinner than he would like. Captain Lawrence Shankland is out for up to four months after hamstring surgery and Youssef Chermiti is out for the season with a cruciate ligament injury, with Daisuke Yokota, Kosta Nedeljkovic and Jose Cifuentes also unavailable. Tuur Rommens is back in training but remains doubtful, and Ryan Naderi faces a late check on the ankle he hurt in the cup win, a challenge McInnes called a mess and one Rangers have since raised with the Scottish FA's head of referees, Willie Collum.

Martin O'Neill has had the harder week of the two managers. Celtic were beaten 3-1 by Ferencvaros in the Europa League on Thursday night, and he spent Friday's press conference at Lennoxtown insisting the squad were raring to go and ready for this. "It's a big game whether it's played in September or March time," he said. "It's a really big game, and we need to be up for it." Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain is available again after serving a European suspension. Yang Hyun-jun is away with South Korea at the Asian Games, Alistair Johnston has a hamstring problem and Callum Osmand an ankle, Jota is still working back from a knee, and London Emenalo is out. O'Neill also has late fitness calls to make on players who took knocks on Thursday.

The spread inside the model is worth a line of its own. The Elo rating model is the most emphatic of the nine, making Celtic 68 per cent; the plain home-advantage baseline is the coldest of them and still comes down on Celtic. Both clubs' last league outing had the same shape on the same afternoon, 9 September: Celtic won 1-0 at St Johnstone through Mika Baur in the fifty-second minute, and Rangers beat St Mirren 1-0 at Ibrox through Bojan Miovski in the ninetieth. Baur is the player whose challenge on Naderi has since been put in front of the referees' department, which is a fair measure of how quickly this one has found its edge.