Scottish Premiership REVIEW 20 Sep 2026: Rangers win at Celtic Park and every one of our nine models had it wrong

Our model made Celtic favourites for the Glasgow derby and the afternoon took it apart. The consensus settled at 48 per cent Celtic, 29 per cent the draw and 24 per cent Rangers, and all nine of the models behind it leaned the same way, the Elo rating most emphatically of all at 68 per cent for the home side. Celtic 0-1 Rangers goes into our own records as an upset. Rangers had beaten the same opponents 3-0 at Ibrox in the Premier Sports Cup quarter-final on 13 September; the model had that result in front of it and still favoured Celtic when the two met again at Celtic Park on Sunday. It was wrong, and the manner of the defeat leaves little room to argue with the verdict.

The goal arrived on thirty-three minutes and it was a gift. Min-su Kim drove at the Celtic goal from distance, Viljami Sinisalo pushed the shot out rather than away, and Ryan Naderi was waiting to turn the rebound in. Naderi had been a doubt through the week with the ankle he hurt in the cup tie, and Derek McInnes named him anyway in an unchanged side, the same eleven that had won at Ibrox. There had been warning before it. An Auston Trusty volley was ruled out for offside inside the opening five minutes and Kieran Tierney struck the crossbar, while Djeidi Gassama hit a post at the other end. The half had chances in it for both sides. Only one of them counted.

Rangers thought they had a second on seventy-five, Olwethu Makhanya volleying in from a corner, but it was ruled out after a video review for handball in the build-up. By then the game had the shape Rangers wanted. Martin O'Neill sent on Kasper Hogh at the interval and worked through his bench across the second half, James Forrest on sixty-three, Haissem Hassan and Sebastian Tounekti together on seventy-one, Shumaira Mheuka on eighty-nine, and the scoreline did not move again. The bookings carry the temper of the thing. Emmanuel Fernandez went into the book on four minutes and McInnes himself on five, after a shouting match in the technical area with Celtic coach Mark Fotheringham that John Beaton settled by booking both men. Min-su Kim, Callum McGregor, Tounekti and Badredine Bouanani followed.

McInnes had made no secret of what the fixture meant to him. "I'm looking forward to it. It's something that I've always wanted to do," he said in the build-up, of walking into Celtic Park as the Rangers manager, and he spent the same week telling his players that the 3-0 would count for nothing once this one kicked off. In the event Rangers did the same job with less drama, took the one clear chance the afternoon gave them and defended the rest of it. Celtic were beaten by these opponents on 13 September and beaten by them again on 20 September, and the second one cost league points. Our model has now read this result too. Whether it has properly read the first is the question we take into the rest of the season.