Old Firm

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No other local derby features two teams who have such a rich trophy-winning tradition.
Between them, Celtic and Rangers have won 161 league titles and Scottish Cups.
No other derby features two teams with a three figure total of national league and cup wins between them.

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15 years their senior, Rangers became the newly-formed Celtic’s first ever opponents.
On 28 May 1888, a crowd of around 2,000 (paying sixpence each) witnessed a ‘friendly encounter’ at the first Celtic Park.
The Celtic team featured eight guest players from Hibernian and won 5-2 with their first goal scored by Neil McCalllum after ten minutes.
Celtic wore white shirts with a green collar and red celtic cross on the breast.
If the game had taken place five years earlier, it would have been Rangers who were wearing the hooped shirts. Other than a period from 1879 to 1883, Rangers have worn a variation of their familiar solid light blue shirt.

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Only three players have appeared in Old Firm, Merseyside and Manchester derbies; Michael Ball, Craig Bellamy and Andrei Kanchelskis.
Kanchelskis is the only player in history to have scored in all three.

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Rangers went into the 1957 Scottish League Cup final on the back of a second successive league title and were strong favourites to comfortably overcome a struggling Celtic side.
Instead, Scotland witnessed what the Sunday Post described as ‘an October Revolution’, as Celtic won 7-1 to establish a record scoreline for a British domestic cup final that stands to this day.
It was a game to savour for the Celtic supporters, especially as it came in advance of one of the most frustratingly unsuccessful periods in the club’s history.

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In 1931, an iconic and tragic figure emerged in the shape of Celtic's John Thomson, a brilliant young goalkeeper who suffered fatal head injuries in diving bravely at the feet of Rangers forward Sam English in an Old Firm match at Ibrox.
Aged just 22, he had played four times for Scotland.
His funeral was attended by over thirty thousand people.

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Rangers manager Graeme Souness caused a sensation when he signed catholic Mo Johnston in July 1989.
Johnston was also a former Celtic player and seemed poised to return to Parkhead only a month earlier.
He is one of five players who’ve appeared in competitive games for Celtic and Rangers since the war.
Alfie Conn won the Scottish Cup with both sides. He won it for Rangers in 1973 where they played Celtic in the Final and in 1977 his Rangers side defeated Celtic.
Kenny Miller has since matched Conn’s achievement.
He signed for Celtic in 2006 after having previously played for Rangers.
After a year, he left Celtic Park for Derby County and, following a year south of the border, moved back to Rangers in 2008.
Steven Pressley (Rangers 1990-94 and Celtic 2006-09) and Mark Brown (Rangers 1997-2001 and Celtic 2007-to date) make up the quintet.
Keeper Brown is presently on loan at Kilmarnock.
Current Celtic midfielder Barry Robson started his career at Rangers but did not make a senior appearance before joining Inverness Caledonian Thistle.

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Their early rivalry meant it was deemed to be mutually beneficial to have local competition of a similar stature.
It also led to a perception that the two clubs were working together to maximise their commercial potential.
Their relationship was the inspiration for a cartoon in a sports paper called The Scottish Referee shortly before their meeting in the 1904 Scottish Cup Final.
It depicted a sandwich-board man that carried the slogan ‘Patronize the Old Firm – Rangers, Celtic Ltd’.
This is believed to be the birth of the famous nickname.

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Having taken over from Jock Stein, Billy McNeill led Celtic to the Scottish Premier League title at the first time of asking in 1979.
After a difficult start, they won 13 matches out of 17 in the second half of the season meaning they could regain their crown with a victory in their final match of the campaign against Rangers at Parkhead.
It looked like they’d come up short when, already trailing 0-1, they went down to ten men after 55 minutes when Johnny Doyle was sent-off.
In an amazing climax, the Buoys eventually ran out 4-2 winners with McNeill concluding: “There are lots of fairytales throughout Celtic’s history, and that was one of them.”

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When Rangers played Celtic in the Glasgow Charity Cup in 1930, the teams were level at 2-2 and at four corners each which counted in determining drawn games.
With Rangers due to set off immediately for a tour of the USA, the cup was decided by the toss of a coin – which Rangers won.
More famously, Celtic came out of the winning side of a toss coin in a European Cup tie against Benfica in 1969.