Eighty-seven minutes into their 38th league match of the season and the title belonged to Hearts. If all anybody remembers is who won, never how and never the losers, there will be an exception this season. But this day still belonged to Celtic. The gravitational pull of established might and financial advantage found a way in the end.
Celtic are not used to winning titles in different ways, having to sprint down the home straight rather than easing up to pose for the cameras, shake a few hands and admire the view. Let the record show that they won seven straight league matches to end the season.
That, we must include, is what champions do. They hadn’t been top since September but they were top at 2.30pm on 16 May and that will keep half a city dancing until Monday morning and beyond. For Martin O’Neill, an extraordinary story arc towards the end of a managerial career that many thought was done.
Hearts both lost it at Celtic Park and didn’t; they came to Paradise and missed out on their nirvana. As in 1986, that great calamity they were attempting avenge on Saturday, this was a final-day drama after so long in a position of strength.
But the pressure became heightened due to opportunities missed and precious oxygen wasted along the way: Livingston, Kilmarnock, St Mirren. Hearts had failed to win 13 league matches before the final day and more than half were against sides who ended in the relegation group. They beat the Old Firm five times, the most since Fergie’s Aberdeen. That should have been enough.
Inevitably, there will be a great deal of forlornness, along the Maroon Mile and in Scotland and beyond. A widespread gnashing of teeth about coming so close and ending so far, about hope being all that keeps you alive until it kills you in the final scene. About domination and power and financial might ruling all else.
And…fair enough. If you can’t win it this year, The One With Wilfried Nancy and after Brendan Rodgers’ grand falling out part two, when will you? Celtic are not a club in rude health; quite the opposite. The off-field structure is broken, much of the fanbase is engaging in quiet or noisy protest and they have employed the same guy as an interim and permanent manager in the same season. And still they won again.
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The assumption is that change is coming at Celtic. The assumption has to be that Rangers respond, either by changing manager again or working on better solutions to guarantee a title challenge throughout next season. That is the lot of the outsider: your window of opportunity usually exists only as a crack and can be pulled shut without warning. Ask the boys of 1986 about that.
But there is another story here, perhaps one for when Celtic Park has emptied out and when the bitter disappointment of leading but not winning dissipates just enough to make it bearable to countenance.
In June 2025, Brighton owner Tony Bloom’s company bought a 29 per cent stake in Hearts. The club had already been using Jamestown Analytics, another Bloom company, for their recruitment. Bloom arrived with a plan to disrupt the Glasgow domination of the Scottish Premiership and it would be impossible to argue that he has not done so already. This was a five-year plan that almost achieved the unthinkable inside 12 months.
The recruitment has shifted significantly already. Last season in the Scottish Premiership, 72 per cent of all playing minutes were given to those who represent Scotland, England, the Republic of Ireland, Wales, Northern Ireland and three major British-speaking countries (Australia, Canada, USA) and most of the exceptions were at the Old Firm.
Against Celtic, Hearts’ team had representatives of Burkina Faso, Netherlands, DR Congo, Greece, Austria and Germany; add Norway, Kazakhstan, Albania and Portugal on the bench. That work will continue again this summer.
It will take time – how could it not? It may well never happen – how could there be any guarantee? The financial reality of this league means that the duopoly will take years to shift. They will always generate more revenue and attract higher-profile players because that is how established wealth and power works. To make any dent in the establishment, you have no choice but to try something different. Different means risk and risks don’t always work and aren’t always enough.
But remember too where Hearts have come from so quickly. In April 2025, they lost 0-2 at home to Dundee and Neil Critchley was sacked with relegation a genuine possibility. That was the last time Hearts lost at home, 13 months ago. Now it is a place of wonder.
At Tynecastle in October, when Hearts won the Edinburgh derby in added time, the place felt visceral enough as to make relentless pursuit of more days like this a certainty. If you could come that far in four months of new investment and ownership, where could the next four years of the five-year plan take them?
The crying shame, for almost everyone not associated with Celtic or Hibernian, is that we are still talking in questions rather than monumental results; a different vista is still a mirage for now. We wanted to know if the duopoly would ever end and we still do.
I still think there’s room for hope of change here. I think we have to believe in that and I think it would be good for Scotland, whatever Glasgow will – entirely understandably – say. The world was not shifted off its axis and rolled down the Gorgie Road, but it surely wobbled for a while. A glimmer of air finally rushes through that dusty window again. Celtic won the battle; Hearts are still preparing for war.
