Scottish Premiership 1X2 Stats: The League Beyond the Old Firm

The Scottish Premiership's headline numbers are bent out of shape by two clubs. Across 4,711 matches from 2005/06–2025/26 the league produced 43.3% home wins, 24.2% draws and 32.6% away wins, but those figures mix Celtic and Rangers fixtures with everything else. My question is simple: what does the result market look like once the Old Firm are stripped out?

The answer is a different league. The 3,358 matches involving neither club ended 41.8% home, 27.0% draw and 31.2% away, and the draw is the outcome that shifts most. This is the base-rate file I check before building prices for my today's 1X2 tips page, and the short version is that the market already understands most of it.

§ 1The Old Firm distort every league-wide 1X2 figure

The first chart splits the sample four ways. With Celtic or Rangers at home, the 643 matches ended 79.2% home, 14.6% draw and 6.2% away. With them on the road, the home side won only 14.0% and the visitors 66.5%. Those two groups are not football matches in the usual 1X2 sense; they are heavy favourites pulling the league averages towards decisive results.

The bottom bar is the one I care about for most weekends. Matches involving neither club were drawn 27.0% of the time, noticeably more than the 24.2% league-wide figure. Old Firm meetings themselves, on just 66 games, were drawn 21.2% of the time.

My takeaway: never price a mid-table Scottish match off the league's overall draw rate. Use the non-Old Firm base, because that is the competition those clubs actually play in.

§ 2Prices for the rest of the league track reality closely

Here I compare the margin-free priced chance with what happened in those 3,358 matches. The home win was priced at 42.2% and landed 41.8%; the draw was priced at 27.3% and landed 27.0%; the away win was priced at 30.6% and landed 31.2%. Fair odds are simply one divided by each of those frequencies, and the two sets sit almost on top of each other.

Every gap falls well inside the 95% ranges shown, which are ±1.7, ±1.5 and ±1.6 points. In plain terms, nothing on this chart is distinguishable from noise.

That matters because it tells me where value is not. There is no structural mispricing of the draw or the home side in the wider league, so any edge has to come from match-level work: availability, motivation, the matchup itself.

§ 3Blanket staking lost everywhere, away sides lost least

The returns table shows flat 1-unit stakes on every selection at the main price. In non-Old Firm matches, backing every home side returned −7.8%, every draw −7.9% and every away side −4.7%. Away sides lost the least, which fits the slight lean seen in the previous chart, but a loss is still a loss.

The Old Firm rows are more interesting. Backing them at home returned −0.8% and away −3.9%, so the short prices on the big two have been close to fair. Backing the home side in Old Firm meetings shows +17.9%, but that comes from only 66 matches.

This is my main caveat: past flat-stake returns describe what happened, and edges of this size, especially on a sample that small, can appear by chance. None of these rows is a betting system; they are a guide to where the margin bites hardest, and the draw in Old Firm home games, at −15.3%, is one of those places.

§ 4Hearts rely most on home games, St Johnstone barely

The final table covers 2016/17–2025/26 for clubs with 100+ league matches. Hearts had the biggest home-away gap: 1.77 points per game at home against 1.13 away (+0.65) over 329 matches. Kilmarnock (+0.61) and Livingston (+0.58) follow closely, with Livingston's 0.76 away return among the weakest in the table.

At the other end, St Johnstone took 1.17 at home and 1.12 away (+0.06), almost no difference at all. One note on this table: post-split fixtures mean clubs do not all play each other the same number of times home and away, so treat small gaps loosely.

I use this as a tilt, not a rule. When a strong home-reliant side travels, I look harder at double chance on the hosts or at the draw rather than assuming the visitors' overall form carries over.

Compiled byTalia Rosen

I'm Talia Rosen, based in Las Vegas, and I write the win-draw-win tips at fixed-match.tips — treating the match-result market as a question of price against probability, never of backing the bigger badge.

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