Scottish football doesn't deserve its fans
UEFA report hailed as triumph by SPFL turns out to be another reason to be miserable about Scottish football. Still better than England, though.
1. Scotland loves football (and the SPFL is fake news).
With another predictably depressing international break looming, it’s easy to despair about Scottish football.
The men’s team haven’t reached a World Cup since 1998. The long standing domestic duopoly of Rangers and Celtic can’t win a game in Europe (or in Rangers’ case, even at home).
It looks grim. But I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong to despair.
In September, the SPFL proudly announced that Scotland was home to Europe’s best-attended top-flight league per capita for the 2024/25 season. Rejoice!
Sarcasm aside, that’s genuinely impressive. Citing UEFA’s annual European Club Talent and Competition Landscape report, the SPFL celebrated its attendance per capita being “70 per cent higher than any other league on the continent.” Which would indeed be incredible, if it were actually true.
Nowhere in UEFA’s report are attendances presented per capita. The raw attendance figures are there, but the SPFL seems to have done its own back-of-the-envelope calculations when deriving the per-capita statistics. Presumably in crayon.
The SPFL have lied. Perhaps not maliciously, but the numbers they presented aren’t factually accurate. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, they probably calculated their figures using only the countries that made UEFA’s top 20 list for total attendance. If you restrict the comparison to that shortlist, then yes, Scotland tops the table. Scotland loves its top flight football the most… among the football nations big enough to make the table in the first place.
But if you dare to scroll past page 8 of UEFA’s thrilling 105-page report, you’ll find attendance data for all UEFA member associations, not just the top 20. And when you include everyone, things look rather different.
Despite what the SPFL might want you to believe, these small nations are still real places, where football matches happen, in a league format, that people go to watch. When you include the attendance data for every top flight league in a UEFA nation, Scotland’s position gets surpassed by the Faroe Islands, San Marino and Andorra. And by some way.
I thought I’d maybe made a mistake when I first worked this out. But after checking similar rankings published elsewhere, including by Belgian Football Stats and in the 2014 edition of Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski’s Soccernomics, it became clear that the SPFL’s celebratory headline wasn’t the full story.
Based on my own calculations for the 2024/25 season, the Faroese Premier Division, with an average attendance of 418 (meaning roughly 2,090 fans per match week across five fixtures) and a total population of 54,719, boasts an astonishing average of around 4% of the population attending a top-flight game each week. That’s 38.2 people per 1,000. Scotland’s equivalent? Just 18.9 (or 18.5, if you believe the SPFL). Less than half.
Still, even with the SPFL’s creative arithmetic, the real numbers remain impressive. According to UEFA’s actual report, Scotland ranked eighth for total attendance and seventh for average top-flight attendance in 2024/25, despite having by far the smallest population among the top ten nations. Portugal, tenth in both categories, has nearly twice Scotland’s population at 10.7 million.
Of course, the inevitable retort is: “Take out Rangers and Celtic, then see what happens.” I haven’t run those numbers myself, but Inside the SPFL has. According to their analysis, removing Rangers and Celtic drops Scotland just three places. Then, if you remove the top two attended clubs from every other country, Scotland climbs back up two spots.
It’s unclear whether their analysis includes away fans, which would still inflate Scottish figures given the Old Firm’s enormous travelling support, and their data, like the SPFL’s, excludes the Faroe Islands. Regardless, it’s an interesting point.
2. Scotland is better at football than you think.
However you fiddle the numbers, it’s undeniable that Scotland, particularly for its size, turns out in force to support its domestic game. But that raises a familiar, uncomfortable question.
A few weeks ago, a colleague mentioned the SPFL’s proud “Europe’s most passionate fans per capita” claim in the office coffee area. Surrounded by Greek, Portuguese and English colleagues, the obvious question of “if Scotland loves football so much, how are they still so crap at it?” came up.
Given what I said earlier, you’d be forgiven for thinking they’re right. But if we’re talking in per capita terms, like we are for attendances, can we really say Scottish clubs underperform as badly as it seems?
To get some sense of that, I looked at how each UEFA nation performs relative to its population, using the UEFA association coefficients at the end of the 2024/25 season as a crude measure of “footballing performance.” It’s not perfect — it just reflects club success in UEFA competitions — but it gives us a consistent, measurable way to compare nations and leagues of wildly different sizes.
Below, I’ve plotted UEFA coefficient against population for all UEFA member associations.
Since both metrics span several orders of magnitude, I used logarithmic scales for both axes. That avoids squashing the smaller nations into the bottom corner and lets us see the broader relationship more clearly. When you fit a power law relationship to the data, you find that about 59% of the variance in a nation’s UEFA coefficient can be explained by its population.
In other words, bigger countries usually perform better. Scotland sits comfortably above the trend line, meaning it performs better than would be expected for a country of its size.
There are, of course, other factors that affect how well a country performs beyond headcount. In Soccernomics, Kuper and Szymanski show that home advantage, historical football culture, GDP per capita, and population all correlate with international success. Scotland’s GDP per capita is modest compared with Western Europe’s powerhouses, but its footballing infrastructure, fan engagement, and longevity in the sport all help it punch slightly above its weight.
If we rank nations by their UEFA coefficient per million people, the microstates dominate again. Liechtenstein, the Faroe Islands, and Gibraltar all rise to the top simply because it doesn’t take much to move the needle in a very small country. But even in that company, Scotland still manages to sneak into the top 20.
So maybe Scottish football gets an undeservedly hard time. After all, we Scots are known for being miserable — and tight with money, and fond of drink, and partial to anything that can be deep fried etc. etc. etc.
Of course Scottish football isn’t the marvel it once was, back in the late 1800s when the “Scottish Professors” started to spread their footballing philosophies across the globe. But given we’re a nation of fewer than six million people, with a shoestring league and two clubs hoarding most of the trophies and TV money, it’s probably not as bad as we think.
3. Better than England in fact.
The big question then: when you adjust for population, is Scotland’s performance (which we’ve seen is better than expected) much worse than its passion (which we’ve seen is excellent)?
The plot below shows exactly that, comparing top-flight attendance per 1,000 people on the x-axis against UEFA coefficient per 1,000 people on the y-axis. Again, both axes are on logarithmic scales, which makes the spread between nations clearer.
The orange line again shows the power-law trend between the two. If footballing success scaled perfectly with fan engagement, every country would sit neatly along that line. The ones above it are nations whose performances exceed their level of domestic support; the ones below it are the opposite.
This relationship is noticeably weaker than the one we saw earlier between population and UEFA coefficient (lower R² here of 0.42 vs. the earlier 0.59). In other words, a country’s size is still a better predictor of footballing success than how many people show up to watch it. But if I’m being honest, it’s more of a relationship than I was expecting.
Scotland sits just below the trend line. In other words, the passion slightly outweighs the performance, which I suppose was to be expected. But we’re not far off the line, and crucially, not as far off it as England. Scotland might not be great, but we’re still better than England, at least once you divide everything by population.
The Faroe Islands, of course, sit in a league of their own again. With a lower population than Paisley, their combination of attendances and minimal European presence is enough to send them to the top of the chart. But among the rest of us, Scotland’s balance between passion and performance looks healthier than many of Europe’s supposed heavyweights.
Of course, the huge disclaimer here is that I’ve only looked at top flight attendance and haven’t considered the lower divisions, for which England, and others, would surely move closer to that line given the much healthier attendances in the lower tiers than Scotland. But that would be no fun.
All in all: yes, Greece will probably win 3–0 on Thursday. But when you look at the numbers, Scotland isn’t doing all that badly. In fact, by the most important metric of all, performance per pint of hope, we’re still comfortably ahead of England. And the Faroe Islands are the new European champions.