The Old Firm: Football, Identity & Rivalry in Glasgow

The Old Firm is often described casually as simply "the world's most heated football rivalry," a framing that risks reducing a complex social and religious history to sporting colour. This card treats it as what it documentably is: a football rivalry between two historic Glasgow clubs that has been, from an early stage, entangled with religious, ethnic and political identity in Scotland — a dimension that must be stated plainly, not softened or sensationalised, to be understood accurately.

This card applies the collection's standard three-tier framework with particular care, given the sensitivity of the subject: documented facts are drawn from football governing-body records, Scottish Government and Parliament records, and contemporaneous reporting of specific dated incidents; traditional claims describe widely repeated characterisations — such as the precise origin of the "Old Firm" nickname — that are generally accepted but not settled with full certainty; and disputed/legend claims are popular assertions not supported, or actively contradicted, by the documentary record. The editorial standard applied throughout this collection — accuracy over patriotism — requires particular discipline here: this card does not take a side between the two clubs or communities, does not minimise or sensationalise documented sectarian conduct and violence, and distinguishes clearly between what is established fact (founding dates, signing policies, specific dated incidents, legislation) and what remains a matter of interpretation or dispute (the precise weight of religion versus politics versus simple footballing rivalry in any given fan's experience of the fixture today).

Two clubs, two founding stories

Rangers Football Club was founded in 1872 by a group of young men with a shared interest in rowing and football, and its early history records no explicit religious or sectarian affiliation. Celtic Football Club was founded fifteen years later, in 1887, under markedly different and explicitly stated circumstances: Brother Walfrid, an Irish-born Marist brother working in Glasgow's impoverished East End, established the club with the specific, documented aim of raising funds to relieve poverty among the area's Catholic population, many of Irish immigrant origin or descent, through a charitable organisation called the Poor Children's Dinner Table. Celtic played its first match in 1888. This asymmetry in founding purpose — one club with no stated communal affiliation, the other founded explicitly in service of a specific immigrant religious community — is itself part of the documented historical record and helps explain why the clubs' later associations with different communities were not simply imposed from outside but rooted, at least on Celtic's side, in the club's own founding intent.

How the rivalry acquired its sectarian dimension

Over the following decades, as Glasgow's population grew through both Irish Catholic immigration and internal migration from Protestant communities (including, notably, Ulster-Scots workers), the two clubs became associated — by their own supporters as much as by outside observers — with these distinct communal identities. Rangers' association with Protestant, Scottish and Ulster-Scots identity was reinforced in 1912, when the Belfast shipbuilding firm Harland and Wolff relocated a significant number of workers to a new shipyard in Govan, in Rangers' home area, bringing with them strong existing ties to Ulster Protestant culture and politics. Celtic's identification with Irish Catholic Glasgow, rooted in its founding purpose, deepened correspondingly as the club became a focal point of communal pride and identity for that population, often facing discrimination and economic disadvantage in Scottish society at the time.

It is important to state plainly, as the site's editorial standard requires, that this was not a minor or incidental feature of the rivalry's history: match-day identification with "the other side" came to carry real religious, ethnic and — particularly regarding Northern Ireland — political weight, expressed through symbols (Rangers supporters commonly displaying Union flags, Celtic supporters commonly displaying Irish tricolours) and song, some of which has remained a focus of ongoing controversy and, in some cases, prosecution under Scottish law for sectarian or threatening conduct.

Documented discrimination: Rangers' unwritten signing policy

One of the clearest and most specific pieces of documented evidence for the rivalry's sectarian dimension is Rangers' long-standing, widely acknowledged unwritten policy against signing Catholic players, which persisted for most of the 20th century. This was not a formal, written club rule, but its existence and effect are well attested in football history and have been acknowledged by figures connected to the club itself. The policy ended in 1989, when manager Graeme Souness signed Mo Johnston — notably, a player who had previously played for Celtic — a transfer widely regarded as a deliberate and symbolically significant break with the club's past practice. An accurate account should neither understate this documented history of exclusion nor treat its end in 1989 as having, by itself, resolved sectarian tension among sections of either club's support in the decades since.

What the club said, and the 1973 boardroom dispute

established The policy was defended openly by the club's own officials. The psychologist and historian Gerry Finn, in "Faith, hope and bigotry", a chapter of Grant Jarvie and Graham Walker (eds), Scottish Sport in the Making of the Nation (1994), quotes the Rangers chairman John Lawrence in the Daily Express in June 1969: "the policy of not signing Catholics has been with us since the club was formed". A former player, trainer and chief scout, James Smith, justified it as a matter of team "harmony". Finn notes that the vice-chairman Matt Taylor had also defended the policy in 1967.

established Finn's second case study concerns the club's centenary year, 1973. Lawrence, then 79, publicly named his fellow director David Hope, who ran the successful Rangers Pools, as his successor. The board blocked the appointment. Lawrence told the Daily Record that Hope was being unfairly attacked because he had married a Catholic in a Catholic church in 1930; his wife had died years earlier. Other directors gave conflicting accounts: George Brown said the marriage was raised but had no bearing, Taylor denied it was raised at all, and Hope himself denied it was a factor. Taylor became chairman in June 1973. The journalist Jack Webster, who followed the story, later wrote that the marriage "became an issue".

shared Finn argues that the affair showed anti-Catholic prejudice "at the very centre of the club" and that much of the Scottish press, especially the Glasgow Herald, treated it as an ordinary boardroom battle. He accepts that Hope's marriage may have been used opportunistically in a struggle that was also about power, shares and money. The participants' own denials are part of the record, and readers should weigh both.

Other views from the 1994 studies

shared Not all historians frame the rivalry the same way. Alan Bairner, in "Football and the idea of Scotland" in the same book, notes that Celtic's founders chose the name "Celtic", rather than "Hibernian" or "Harp", partly because it carried Scottish as well as Irish meaning, that Celtic signed Protestants as well as Catholics, and that it appointed a Protestant, Jock Stein, as manager in 1965. He also cites Graham Walker's warning against turning the rivalry into an ideological story, with Celtic cast as progressives and Rangers as reactionaries. The historian Christopher Harvie, in his chapter of the book, argues that Celtic was from the start the flagship of a whole community and a well-run business, and that by 1914 it was patriotic in a British sense.

shared The sociologist H. F. Moorhouse, in his chapter on fanzines, is the most sceptical. He argues that talk of Glasgow as a divided city had been doubtful for twenty years, that most Scots now held Protestant and Catholic identities lightly if at all, and that the Old Firm clash is better seen as "a burlesque" of older divisions than as evidence of deep ones. He found that the main Rangers fanzine, Follow, Follow, received about 50 letters on the Johnston signing, split roughly half for and half against, and that the Celtic fanzine Not the View greeted the end of discrimination only grudgingly. Finn's and Moorhouse's chapters, written for the same book, reach opposite conclusions about how far sectarian prejudice still mattered in the early 1990s.

established Bairner records that the divide also reached the national team. Some Rangers supporters were less hostile to England than other Scots, while some Celtic supporters followed the Republic of Ireland rather than Scotland. The Celtic programme in November 1991 carried an article urging Celtic fans to get behind Scotland.

Violence and disorder: specific, dated incidents

Rather than speaking generally about the fixture's "intensity," an accurate history names the specific documented incidents of violence and disorder associated with it. In 1909, successive drawn Scottish Cup Finals between the clubs led to a riot, after which the trophy was withheld for that year. On 2 January 1971, a crowd crush on a stairway at Ibrox Stadium following an Old Firm match killed 66 people — Scottish football's worst stadium disaster, and a tragedy that, while not itself caused by sectarian conflict between rival fans, led directly to major British stadium-safety reforms. In 1980, violent clashes broke out on the pitch between rival supporters after Celtic's Scottish Cup Final victory, an incident serious enough that it directly prompted the UK Parliament, through the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1980, to ban alcohol from Scottish football grounds the same year — a restriction that remains in place today. In 1999, Celtic supporters threw objects onto the pitch at referee Hugh Dallas during an Old Firm fixture, forcing a stoppage of play for medical treatment. These incidents, spanning seven decades, should be understood as specific, dated events rather than evidence of constant or undifferentiated violence at every fixture; the overwhelming majority of Old Firm matches, including in the modern era, pass without disorder of this kind, even as sectarian chanting and related prosecutions have continued to be a recurring and unresolved issue.

The law's response, and its limits

The Scottish Parliament's most direct legislative response to football-related sectarianism was the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act, passed in 2012, which created specific criminal offences for sectarian and other threatening conduct connected with football matches, carrying penalties of up to five years' imprisonment. The Act proved controversial from the outset: legal academics, civil liberties organisations and, at various points, political opposition parties criticised it as poorly drafted, inconsistently enforced, and disproportionately targeted at football supporters compared with similar conduct in other contexts. The Scottish Parliament repealed the Act in 2018. This repeal should not be read, and should not be presented, as an official judgment that sectarianism connected to football had been resolved or was no longer a problem; the documented reasoning behind repeal centred on concerns about the law itself, not a finding that the underlying conduct it targeted had ceased.

Rangers' 2012 liquidation and the "new club" dispute

A further documented complication in the rivalry's recent history is Rangers' financial collapse in 2012: the club's holding company was placed into liquidation due to financial difficulties, and a reformed entity, under new ownership, was admitted to the bottom tier of the Scottish league system, working its way back up over subsequent seasons. This event remains genuinely disputed in its interpretation, not merely in its facts: many Celtic supporters, and some neutral commentators, maintain that the post-2012 Rangers is a legally and historically distinct entity from the pre-2012 club, preferring the term "Glasgow derby" to "Old Firm" for matches since; many Rangers supporters and the club itself maintain continuity of identity, history and honours with the pre-2012 institution. An accurate article should present this as an active, unresolved point of dispute rather than adjudicate it.

The rivalry today: dominance, economics, and ongoing tension

In the modern Scottish Premiership, Celtic and Rangers remain overwhelmingly dominant by historical trophy count, between them having won the large majority of Scottish league championships, Scottish Cups and Scottish League Cups contested since the respective competitions began — a scale of duopoly with few parallels among major European leagues. The fixture generates substantial economic activity for Glasgow and Scotland through tourism, broadcasting and matchday spending, but also significant public costs, particularly policing, reflecting the continued, documented potential for disorder around the fixture even as outright violence of the kind seen in 1909, 1980 or 1999 has become less frequent. Both clubs have, since the mid-2000s, formally participated in initiatives aimed at reducing sectarian conduct among their supporters, with acknowledged, if incomplete and contested, progress. An honest treatment of the Old Firm today recognises it simultaneously as one of world football's most compelling sporting rivalries and as a fixture still carrying genuine, unresolved historical and social weight — not a closed chapter of Scottish history, and not something that can be reduced to sport alone.

• Celtic was founded in 1887 explicitly to fund poor relief for Glasgow's Catholic community, via Brother Walfrid's Poor Children's Dinner Table charity — a stated charitable purpose, not simply a sporting one.
• Rangers' unwritten policy against signing Catholic players lasted for most of the 20th century, ending only in 1989.
• The 1971 Ibrox disaster, which killed 66 people, remains Scottish football's deadliest stadium tragedy and directly shaped modern British stadium-safety regulation.
• Scotland's alcohol ban at football grounds, still in force today, traces directly to violence at the 1980 Scottish Cup Final between Celtic and Rangers.
• The Scottish Parliament's dedicated anti-sectarian football law was repealed in 2018, just six years after it was introduced, following sustained legal criticism — not because sectarianism was judged solved.
• Rangers' 2012 financial collapse and reformation remains a genuinely disputed question among supporters: whether the current club is a continuation of, or a separate entity from, the pre-2012 Rangers.
• Combined, Celtic and Rangers have won the overwhelming majority of major Scottish domestic honours contested since their respective competitions began, among the most dominant two-club duopolies in major European football.
• The exact origin of the term "Old Firm" is disputed — the most-cited explanations point to a commercial/satirical framing from the early 1900s rather than any religious or political meaning.

• The rivalry should never be presented as "just football" or, conversely, as defined solely by sectarianism. Both framings are inaccurate; the documented history shows a genuine sporting rivalry entangled with, but not reducible to, religious and political identity.
• Do not take a side on whether the post-2012 Rangers is the "same club" as the pre-2012 institution. This is a live, unresolved dispute among supporters and commentators and should be presented as such, not adjudicated.
• The exact origin of the term "Old Firm" is not settled with certainty — present the commercial/satirical explanation as the best-supported, traditional account, not as proven fact.
• The 2018 repeal of the Offensive Behaviour Act should not be presented as evidence that sectarianism in Scottish football has ended. The documented reasoning for repeal concerned the law's drafting and enforcement, not the underlying problem.
• Avoid implying constant, undifferentiated violence at Old Firm matches. Cite specific, dated incidents (1909, 1971, 1980, 1999) rather than generalising from them to the fixture as a whole, and note that most matches pass without such incidents.
• Do not state Rangers' founding or early history as having an explicit religious affiliation — this developed over subsequent decades, unlike Celtic's explicitly stated founding purpose.