I Know Where the Scottish Title Goes

This diagram shows how novel each of the winners of the Scottish league was. For example Hearts’ title win in 1957-58 was very novel because it was their first since 1896-97. Rangers’ win in 2010-11 had very little novelty to it as they had won the league just the year before. There was an infinite amount of novelty to Dundee United’s 1982-83 title because it was their first.

For each champion an arc links the season back to the last time that club won the title. The arcs are all semi-circular so the size of leaps are represented by their width as well as their height. If a club had never won the league before their arc stretches off to infinity i.e. is a straight line that reaches the edge of the image (which, in practice, is not quite infinity pixels wide). In short: large arcs and straight lines show novelty, small arcs show repetition.

I have previously applied this graphical treatment to the English championship and you can read more about the rationale behind the diagram in that post.

Anecdotal evidence suggested that the Scottish title is almost always won by one of a small number of teams. I was not only able to narrow this down to an exact number of teams (two) but I was also able to identify the teams by name: Celtic and Rangers, coincidentally both from the same city: Glasgow.

Click image to enlarge.