Celtic could be crowned champions for a fifth season in a row this week, and the maths now looks stark. Wins over Motherwell on Wednesday and Hearts at home on Saturday would restore the trophy to Parkhead and give Celtic a 14th title in the last 15 years.
The timing matters because Sunday’s Old Firm victory officially took Rangers out of the title race, leaving Celtic with the clearest possible path to another championship. Brendan Rodgers’ side have won six matches in a row since the start of April, a run that has shifted the mood around a season that had threatened to slip away.
What gives this finish its edge is how far Celtic have had to climb back. In March, they lost 2-0 at Tannadice against Dundee United, a defeat that was their eighth league loss of the season. In Celtic’s experience, no team had ever won the title after suffering eight league defeats in a campaign, and across Scottish football it has happened only nine times since 1979 that a side has reached eight or more league losses and still gone on to win the league. The last time it happened was in 2000.
The history is even harsher than that. No side has been Scottish champions with eight or more league losses on its record for 91 years, since Rangers won the Division One title in 1935 despite losing eight of 38 games. Rangers finished three points above Celtic that year and five clear of Hearts, a reminder that this kind of comeback has almost vanished from the record book. Celtic are now trying to write a version of it in the opposite direction, by turning a season that once looked vulnerable into another title march.
That would be the cleanest reading of a campaign that has not been clean. Celtic’s season included a Champions League exit at the hands of Kairat, Brendan Rodgers resigned after falling out with the board, and there was a 33-day Wilfried Nancy experiment before the club settled back into something more familiar. Yet none of that changes the immediate reality: win the next two league matches, and Celtic lift the trophy again.
The unresolved question is not whether Celtic have recovered enough to finish the job. It is whether this title, if secured on Wednesday or Saturday, marks a routine assertion of dominance or the most hard-fought of the club’s recent five-in-a-row campaigns. Either way, the finish line is now in sight.
