Ahead of the Scottish Premiership returning for the 2026-27 season on Friday, the Opta supercomputer has run 10,000 simulations of the campaign. Who won most often?
It might feel like something of a jump scare amid this sleepy post-World Cup recovery period, but top-flight football is back this week.
The Scottish Premiership returns for the 2026-27 season on Friday just over two months on from Celtic winning a record-setting 56th title by pipping Hearts on the final day of 2025-26.
Ahead of the action kicking off, we check in with the state of play at each of last season’s top three and reveal the Opta supercomputer‘s predictions for the campaign.
Celtic
Martin O’Neill was adamant Celtic would not “rest on past success” when he was announced as the club’s permanent manager for a second time in June after two interim spells in charge last term, when he guided them to a fifth successive Premiership title.
Many fans have been left a little underwhelmed with how they’ve gone about their business in the transfer market, however.
Several areas of the squad looked ripe for reinforcing but, so far, the only players to arrive are Colombian centre-forward Camilo Durán from Qarabag and Denmark international striker Kasper Høgh, who signed for a reported £11 million from Bodo/Glimt on Tuesday.
Haissem Hassan – who impressed for Egypt at the World Cup – and Germany Under-21 international Mika Baur may yet arrive too. Either way, fans will have hoped for more business to have been concluded prior to the domestic season starting.
Nevertheless, the club will still be riding the crest of a wave following last season’s successful title defence, securing a record-breaking 56th top-flight crown.
It certainly wasn’t plain sailing, but that arguably made the taste of glory even sweeter.
Celtic trailed Hearts at the top of the table for most of the season. The Jam Tarts led the way for 250 days and held that position ahead of the final weekend of the campaign, but to win the title they needed to avoid defeat at Celtic Park.
Celtic were 3-1 victors in what was essentially a play-off for the title, denying Hearts their first league crown since 1960. It marked a triumphant return for O’Neill and vindicated the club’s decision to initially give him only his second club management role since 2013.
O’Neill had two spells in charge last season, first taking over on an interim basis after Brendan Rodgers resigned in October and leading them until December, when Wilfried Nancy was appointed.
Nancy lasted barely a month, however, and O’Neill returned in January, ultimately to the detriment of Hearts.
Having presided over his first pre-season in club football since 2012, O’Neill will hope Celtic hit the ground running to set the tone for a less chaotic 2026-27, beginning at home to Dundee on Monday.
Rangers
Rangers’ response to finishing 10 points behind Celtic was to hire the guy who ran the Bhoys close.
Derek McInnes came within one match of being the first manager to break the Celtic-Rangers duopoly since Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen in 1985, only for Hearts to stumble at Celtic Park on the final day of the season.
He took that personally, joining Celtic’s sworn enemy a month later.
Of course, for a while Rangers were absolutely involved in the three-way title tussle. It was a run of four successive defeats (including one each to Hearts and Celtic) in their final five games that finished them off, leaving them to watch from the sidelines as the other two battled to the bitter end.
McInnes’ subsequent arrival was part of fairly significant pre-season of change for Rangers. Seven players have joined the club, six on permanent deals, including Cammy Devlin and Lawrence Shankland, both of whom followed McInnes from Hearts.
And the hope is they’ll get another two players in before the transfer window closes.
There is a cautious sense of optimism around the club, even if McInnes’ team still very much resembled a work in progress during recent friendlies against Saint-Etienne (2-1 win) and West Ham (0-0 draw).
McInnes is targeting a fast start to the season, though, pointing out this is something Rangers have struggled with over the past few years.
In 2025-26, they won just one of their first eight league games; in 2024-25, they won two of their first four, a run that included a 3-0 loss at Celtic; the season before that they lost three from their opening seven outings.
They begin away to Dundee United on Friday, before home games against Hibernian and St. Mirren, though a two-legged Europa League qualifier against Jagiellonia across the next two weeks may complicate matters slightly.
The target will be to draw level with Celtic on 56 league titles. The last time they began a season with fewer titles than their rivals was 1927-28.
Hearts
How do you pick yourself up from the most bitter of disappointments?
Hearts were 90 minutes from footballing immortality. They just needed a point against Celtic on the last day of the season to end the club’s 66-year wait for a top-flight league title, only to come up short having topped the table for almost the entire campaign.
They were so close, and yet so far.
In many respects, it’s difficult to imagine them pulling off a repeat or going one better. For one thing, there’s the losses; McInnes, Devlin and Shankland all swapped Tynecastle for Ibrox. That contributes to the more general upheaval; nine players have left and 12 have arrived (so far). And finally, there’s the standard; can you really expect Rangers and Celtic to both be as poor this season as they were last?
Last season was only the fifth since 2010 in which a team won the Scottish title with under 90 points, and Celtic’s 82 points was the joint-second fewest earned by the champions since 1998-98 (Celtic – 79 in 2012-13). Over the same period, 2025-26 was just the second season in which both Celtic and Rangers earned less than 83 points (also 2017-18).
In normal circumstances, it’d be entirely plausible to suggest 2025-26 was Hearts’ only chance, and they let it slip through their fingers.
However, Hearts are a very well-run club. Backed by Tony Bloom and his Jamestown Analytics firm, the same combination that’s reaped rewards at Brighton and Union Saint-Gilloise, there’s plenty of reason for fans to be optimistic that last season was merely the start of something special and new coach Wouter Vrancken will continue where McInnes left off.
Admittedly this season has already got off to an inauspicious start with a 4-0 loss at Sturm Graz in the first leg of their Champions League qualifier, followed by a 2-0 defeat at home in the second leg, but they needn’t write off their campaign yet.
Scottish Premiership 2026-27 Opta Supercomputer Predictions
Ahead of the 2026-27 Scottish Premiership campaign starting on Friday, the Opta supercomputer’s season predictions have Celtic as the overwhelming favourites.
The Opta supercomputer ran 10,000 simulations of the season and O’Neill’s side were crowned champions in a whopping 55.36% of them.
That’s more than twice as often as any other team – although perhaps not especially surprising considering they have won 14 of the last 15 Scottish top-flight titles.
And despite their issues last term, Rangers are the likeliest to challenge them, according to the prediction model.
The title went to Ibrox in 26.35% of the 10,000 season simulations. So, while obviously significantly less often than Celtic, that’s still over a quarter of the sims.
Hearts were the only other side to win the title in more than 10% of the sims, doing so 11.86% of the time. That equates to 1,186 instances out of 10,000, of course, which might look a little more encouraging.
Either way, the supercomputer certainly considers them a threat if Celtic and Rangers don’t set a high bar, and they were both erratic enough last term to offer some encouragement to Hearts.
But there’s little hope dished out to anyone else. In fact, Hearts’ success rate of 11.86% alone is more than the other nine clubs (excluding Rangers and Celtic, obviously) combined.
Motherwell (3.04%) and Hibernian (2.67%) caused the odd shock in the simulations, but no other side won the title in more than 0.24% of the simulations.
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