The Ninety-Minute War
Celtic and Rangers have been playing each other since 1888. But the Old Firm derby was never really about football. It was about who you were, where you came from, and which side of a divided city — and a divided island — you stood on. It still is.
6/2/20269 min read
LONG READ · IDENTITY
The Ninety-Minute War
Celtic and Rangers have been playing each other since 1888. But the Old Firm derby was never really about football. It was about who you were, where you came from, and which side of a divided city — and a divided island — you stood on. It still is.
There is a match played in Glasgow that stops a city.
Not just pauses it. Stops it. Pubs divide. Families separate. Workplaces go quiet. The streets empty ninety minutes before kick-off and fill again ninety minutes after the final whistle, charged with whatever the result has left behind — triumph or grievance, jubilation or rage, and always, underneath everything, the ancient hum of something that has nothing to do with football and everything to do with who you are.
The match is Celtic versus Rangers — or Rangers versus Celtic, depending which side you stand on. It is called the Old Firm, a name that dates to around 1904 and refers, with grim commercial accuracy, to the profitable relationship between two clubs that needed each other as much as they hated each other. Between them they have won the Scottish league championship on 111 of the 129 occasions it has been contested.
But the Old Firm is not remembered for the football. It is remembered for what surrounds it — the history, the hatred, the violence, the songs that cannot be sung anywhere else, and the disaster that happened on a January afternoon in 1971 when sixty-six people who had gone to watch a football match did not come home.
This is that story.
WHY GLASGOW
To understand the Old Firm you have to understand Glasgow in the nineteenth century. And to understand Glasgow in the nineteenth century you have to understand Ireland.
The Irish Famine of 1845 to 1849 killed approximately one million people and displaced another million in the most catastrophic humanitarian disaster in nineteenth-century Europe. Of those who fled, many went to Scotland — specifically to Glasgow, which was expanding rapidly as the centre of British industrial production, its shipyards and factories demanding unskilled labour in volumes that Scotland’s existing population could not supply.
Famine in Ireland from 1845 to 1849 sparked off mass Irish emigration that continued through to the twentieth century, with large numbers of poor Catholic Irish immigrants arriving in Glasgow and other industrialised towns and cities of Scotland’s Central Belt looking for work. By the 1880s there were hundreds of thousands of Irish Catholics in Glasgow, concentrated in the East End, working the lowest-paid jobs, living in the worst housing, and facing discrimination from an established Scottish Protestant population that resented their presence and their faith.
Scotland had been a Catholic country until the Reformation of the sixteenth century, when it adopted Presbyterianism as its state religion. The arrival of large numbers of Irish Catholics did not simply create economic competition. It reopened a religious wound that had never fully healed. Irish immigration to the industries of central Scotland brought with it sectarian rivalries and stirred a cultural anti-Catholicism, and even anti-Protestantism, that infected the workplace, local politics and the shape of social life for generations.
Into this world came football.
THE TWO CLUBS
Rangers Football Club was founded in 1872 by four young men — Peter McNeil, Moses McNeil, Peter Campbell and William McBeath — as a straightforward sporting association with no religious or political character. They played on Glasgow Green. They wore light blue. They were a football club and nothing more.
Celtic Football Club was founded fifteen years later with a very different purpose. Brother Walfrid, born Andrew Kerins in Ballymote, County Sligo, was an Irish Marist Brother who founded Celtic Football Club on 6 November 1887 at a meeting in St Mary’s Church Hall in the Calton district of Glasgow. His intention was charitable: to raise funds to feed the poor Irish Catholic children of Glasgow’s East End, whose families could not afford food, and who were being offered meals by Protestant soup kitchens in exchange for renouncing their faith. Celtic was explicitly Irish, explicitly Catholic, and explicitly political from its first days.
By the 1890s, as Celtic began drawing a widespread fanbase amongst Irish Catholic immigrants and their descendants, Rangers had in turn begun to draw widespread Protestant Unionist support. Rangers had not been founded as a Protestant club. But Celtic’s existence as an Irish Catholic institution created an opposite pole, and Rangers — whose support increasingly came from the Protestant working class and from Ulster Protestant immigrants who had arrived to work in the Clydeside shipyards — moved toward it.
The sectarian character of the rivalry was not an accident of nature. It was constructed, sustained and commercially exploited by both clubs over decades. The two clubs exploited this tension to boost their fan bases for commercial gain. The hatred was real, but it was also useful.
What those clubs represented went far beyond football. Celtic stood for Irish identity, Catholic faith, and eventually Irish republicanism — opposition to British rule in Ireland, sympathy with the cause of a united Ireland. Rangers stood for Scottish and British identity, Protestant faith, and Unionism — loyalty to the Crown, support for the union of Britain and Northern Ireland. Every match between them was a proxy battle for these identities. The stands at Ibrox and Celtic Park are still proxy battlefields for the enmity, division, and contrasting political viewpoints, largely held by the respective fanbases.
1872
Rangers founded
1887
Celtic founded
111
Combined league titles from 129 seasons
THE UNWRITTEN RULE
Between the 1920s and 1989, Rangers operated something that most of their directors would never publicly acknowledge existed: an unwritten policy of not signing Catholic players.
It had not always been this way. Before the First World War, Rangers had Catholic players and no formal policy regarding religion. But during the 1920s, as the Orange Order — the Protestant fraternal organisation whose July parades still march through Glasgow and Belfast every year — grew in influence and as Rangers directors and players began attending Orange functions, the club quietly closed its doors to Catholics. Not officially. Not in writing. Never admitted. But everyone knew.
From around the 1920s onwards Rangers had an unofficial policy of not signing Catholic players or employing Catholics in other roles. The policy applied not just to players but to managers, coaches, and all club staff. It was, in the language of a later era, institutional discrimination — sustained for sixty years in plain sight.
The consequences were significant. Talented Catholic players from Glasgow who might otherwise have played for either club were effectively excluded from one of them. When Willie Waddell, the Rangers manager, was asked about the policy in 1971 following the Ibrox disaster, he denied it existed while simultaneously pledging that “no religious barriers will be put up at this club regarding signing of players.” Despite this assertion, no senior Catholic players were signed by Rangers following it.
The policy ended in 1989. Graeme Souness became Rangers manager in 1986 and declared his intent to build a team based only on merit, saying that signing players who observed another religion or had a different skin colour “felt completely normal.” In the summer of 1989, Rangers signed Mo Johnston, a former Celtic player and openly Catholic.
Johnston had recently agreed to return to Celtic from Nantes, but the deal had not been completed, and signing such a prominent ex-Celtic player was an especially significant coup for their rivals. Following the announcement, the general secretary of the Rangers Supporters Association stated: “It is a sad day for Rangers. Why sign him above all others? There will be a lot of people handing in their season tickets. I don’t want to see a Roman Catholic at Ibrox.” Some fans burned their season tickets. The Rangers kitman refused to lay out Johnston’s kit before each match. Celtic supporters called Johnston a Judas for joining their rivals.
It was 1989.
THE VIOLENCE
The Old Firm has produced some of football’s most extraordinary matches. It has also produced some of its most dangerous afternoons.
The relationship between the Old Firm and violence is long, documented and not simply the product of alcohol or passion. It is structural — the product of two communities that have used football as a battlefield for identities that are genuinely in conflict. The songs sung at Old Firm matches include songs that celebrate the murder of members of the other community’s tradition, songs that reference historical massacres, songs that are banned under Scottish law and sung anyway.
Domestic violence statistics in Scotland spike around Old Firm fixtures. Police Scotland deploys more officers for an Old Firm match than for almost any other event in the country. In the years before modern policing, the violence could be severe. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the Troubles in Northern Ireland were at their height and the political stakes of the rivalry felt most acute, the atmosphere at Old Firm matches could turn life-threatening in minutes.
The violence was never contained to the stadium. It spread through the streets, through the pubs, through the estates. Celtic and Rangers scarves became, in certain Glasgow postcodes at certain times, dangerous to wear. Boys were beaten for what colours they wore. Men were stabbed for what songs they sang.
This is not history. It continues. The forms it takes have changed — social media has given sectarian abuse a new platform and a new reach — but the underlying divisions that the Old Firm expresses remain present in the city. In the five years before 2011, annually there were between 600 and 700 charges of an offence aggravated by religious prejudice in Scotland.
STAIRWAY 13
On January 2, 1971, the Old Firm derby took a different kind of toll.
The disaster occurred on Saturday, 2 January 1971, when 66 people were killed in a crush as supporters tried to leave the stadium. The match was an Old Firm game attended by more than 80,000 fans.
It had been a tense, close match. In the 90th minute, Celtic took a 1–0 lead through Jimmy Johnstone, but in the final moments of the match, Colin Stein scored an equaliser for Rangers. As thousands of spectators were leaving through Stairway 13 — the steep, concrete exit stairway in the corner of the ground nearest the Copland Road subway station — someone fell. The crowd behind kept moving. The bodies stacked up. People fell on top of one another as pressure from fans behind increased, and at one point bodies were stacked up to six feet deep. Most of the deaths were caused by compressive asphyxia — lungs unable to expand due to force on the torso.
Among the victims were 31 teenagers and the youngest fan was only nine years old.
Stairway 13 had killed before. In 1961 two people had been killed in a crush on the stairway. In 1967 eight spectators were injured. In 1969 twenty-six were injured in another accident on the same stairway. No measures were taken to consult a professional firm to discuss the potential dangers from crowds on Stairway 13 following these events.
“The said accident was due to the fault and negligence of the defenders, Rangers FC.”
— Sheriff James Irvine Smith, civil damages trial, Glasgow Sheriff Court, 1974
The club did not dispute this finding. Rangers was found liable and sued for damages in sixty cases brought by relatives of those who died.
The 1971 Ibrox disaster remains the worst in Scottish football history. It was the worst in British football history until Hillsborough in 1989. It prompted safety reforms — the Wheatley Report, the Green Guide to Safety at Sports Grounds — that changed how football managed its crowds. It reshaped Ibrox itself, which was reconstructed into a modern all-seater stadium by 1981.
It did not end the Old Firm. Nothing has ended the Old Firm.
WHAT IT IS
The Old Firm is the most politically charged football rivalry on earth. More charged than El Clásico, which is a regional identity dispute. More charged than Fenerbahçe against Galatasaray, which is a class and geography dispute. More charged than the Superclásico in Buenos Aires, which is a class dispute.
The Old Firm is all of those things simultaneously, plus a religious war, plus a proxy for a century-old constitutional conflict about the governance of Ireland, plus a daily referendum on what it means to be Scottish, Irish, British, Catholic, Protestant, Unionist and Republican — all conducted on a football pitch, twice a season, in a city of around 635,000 people.
The identities have softened at the edges. Rangers signed Mo Johnston in 1989 and had a Catholic captain by 1999. Celtic’s greatest ever manager, Jock Stein, was a Protestant. The generation growing up in Glasgow today is less defined by these divisions than their parents were. The number of people who actually attend church — Catholic or Protestant — in Scotland has declined sharply.
But the songs remain. The parades remain. The divisions remain, written into the streets and the family histories and the school catchment areas of a city that has never fully resolved what happened when two traditions arrived in the same place and found they could not share it peacefully.
The Old Firm remains.
Every time those teams walk out, every chant and banner and song is a dispatch from a conflict that football didn’t start, that football can’t end, and that football simply gives a shape and a schedule — twice a season, for as long as the clubs exist.
Two clubs. Two cities within one city. One unrelenting argument about who belongs here and on whose terms.
The Old Firm isn’t a football match.
It never was.
FURTHER READING
The Old Firm: Sectarianism, Sport and Society in Scotland · Bill Murray (1984)
Nil by Mouth — Scottish anti-sectarianism charity · nilbymouth.org.uk
1971 Ibrox Disaster · Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Ibrox_disaster
Sectarianism in Glasgow · Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectarianism_in_Glasgow
Rangers FC Signing Policy · Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangers_F.C._signing_policy