Top of the table, and stung twice in one week
Top of the Premiership, eighteen points from seven games, fourteen scored and four against. On paper the season is behaving beautifully. Off it there is now a stone in the shoe: four days in the middle of September, two home defeats, and one of them a derby. Take the damage first, because it is the freshest thing in the record. On the seventeenth of September, Ferencvaros came to Celtic Park — the venue down for that one is Celtic Park, and it was a home match — and won three-one in the UEFA Europa League. On the twentieth, Rangers arrived for the league derby and won one-nil, again at Celtic Park. One goal across the two afternoons, four conceded, and both afternoons at home. The table at the foot of this piece covers the league alone, so the Ferencvaros score lives outside it; the derby score sits right in the middle of it. Before that week this was as clean a start as the record holds. Dundee at home on the third of August, one-nil, the kind of win nobody argues with. Kilmarnock away on the ninth, five-one — the widest margin anywhere in this record. Falkirk at home on the twenty-ninth of August, two-one. Aberdeen at home on the second of September, three-nil. Then two away days inside four days: two-one at St Mirren on the fifth, one-nil at St Johnstone on the ninth. Six league wins, not a draw among them, and the goals turning up in ones, twos, threes and fives. Four goals conceded in those seven league games and never more than one on any afternoon. The away form is the part that would have carried the whole month. Three league trips so far — Kilmarnock, St Mirren, St Johnstone — and three wins, eight scored and two conceded. A lot of this season's calmness has been built on other people's grounds, one-nil and two-one at a time, and the only five-one of the record happened on the road at Kilmarnock. It is a strange kind of comfort: the away column is unblemished, and the home column is where September went wrong. The derby ledger has its own texture across these two seasons. A nil-nil at Rangers on the thirty-first of August 2025. A three-one home defeat on the third of January 2026. A two-two at Rangers on the first of March. A three-one home win on the tenth of May. And now one-nil to Rangers at Celtic Park. Two of the last three derbies at Celtic Park have ended in defeat, and the two played away in this record both finished level. That is the sort of pattern nobody draws up and everybody notices. And the spring that closed last season was all wins: three-one over Falkirk on the twenty-fifth of April, two-one at Hibernian on the third of May — one-two in the file, the away way round — three-one over Rangers on the tenth, and three-two at Motherwell on the thirteenth, which reads two-three. Four straight to finish, two of them on the road. So the shape is an odd one for a side top of the league: six wins out of seven, and a fortnight that felt as though none of them had happened. The Europa League now sits alongside the Premiership in the same stretch of weeks, and the only certainty the record offers is blunt — the last two entries were both defeats at Celtic Park, and everything before them this season was a win. First, and sore. By the numbers — Premiership (league only): 1st · 7 played · 6-0-1 · 14-4 · 18 pts · form WWWWL (most recent last). All data from ScoreCrowd's match records, retrieved 24 September 2026.