What chances of survival in Scotland's top flight after 15 seasons in the wilderness?
Falkirk haven't played in Scotland's top division since 2009-10 but now return after back-to-back promotions from the third tier. What are their chances of survival?
This piece was commissioned for the new Nutmeg Substack and I’m writing for them once a month. Those pieces will appear here, and over there. More about Nutmeg, the Scottish Football Quarterly, later.
The 2025-26 football season represents the 117th league campaign in the history of Falkirk since 1902-03 and Nutmeg commemorates that both on the digital site today and then, next Tuesday, in a Bairns match programme takeover, by using a statistical crystal ball to see what might be in store for them in this top-flight season.
I remember covering Falkirk in 2006-07 when I was the Scottish football correspondent at The Independent; one of the standout players was the Trinidad midfielder Russell Latapy. He was a Trinidad & Tobago veteran and played for them at the 2006 World Cup.
I knew quite a few members of that team and got on with them well. They had the misfortune that their nation’s most senior football official was Jack Warner, one of the most notorious of the Blatter-era FIFA villains.
Warner ripped off his own players often and ripped off his nation’s fans, and took bribes for everything and hawked matched tickets on the black market. He did lots of really bad other stuff, from stealing charity money raised to help earthquake victims to embezzling pretty much whatever development funding he could get his hands on.
I loved Latapy as a player, and his attitude. One of the other players in that 2006-07 campaign was Anthony Stokes, then a firecracker young Irishman on loan from Arsenal with the world at his feet. They were exciting days for Falkirk.
Last season was a triumph too, of course, a modern triumph of getting promoted under John McGlynn as Championship champions, and that just a year after getting promoted as a League One champions after five years kicking around in League One.
We all know that teams that get promoted to top divisions in many countries struggle in their first seasons back, let alone if they’ve just come up via back-to-back elevations.
So bear with me while I furnish you with a few statistics from other major leagues in Europe - outside Scotland - before we see what the really important data tells us.
In the past five seasons in England’s Premier League, 15 teams have been promoted from the Championship and no fewer than 10 of them, or 66.6%, have been immediately relegated after one season. That included all six teams in the past two seasons - Leicester, Ipswich, Southampton, Burnley, Sheffield United and Luton - plus Norwich and Watford in 2021-22 and West Brom and Fulham in 2020-21.
Why do clubs struggle upon going up? It’s a fairly obvious blend of the promoted teams needing to play catch-up on experience, squad quality, confidence and financial stability to make choices that can mitigate all that.
Over in Spain’s La Liga, five the 15 promoted teams in the last five seasons, or 33.3%, have gone straight back down while in Italy’s Serie A, it’s been six of 15, or 40%. In Germany’s Bundesliga, only 10 teams have gone up in the last five years and four of them (40%) have gone straight back down. And in France’s Ligue 1, it’s been four going straight back down from 12 over five years, or 33%.
So what do the Scottish numbers tell us, and how can we explain what has happened, and indeed might what happen to Falkirk in 2025-26 based on this experience?
I’ve gone back and considered the entire Scottish Premiership era since 2013-14, the first season of the revamped top division with the competition part of the newly formed SPFL following the merger of the SPL and the SFL.
In the intervening 12 seasons, no fewer than 15 clubs have been promoted to Scotland’s top flight, either directly as Championship winners or as a result of the end-of-season play-offs between the 11th place in the top division and those 2nd to 4th in the Championship.
The amount of them who have survived at least for their first season is surprising set against the context of most other leagues. In the table below I’ll list the 15 clubs, and their managers when they went up (and how long they lasted in their jobs), and the fate of the club in the season they went up.
I have also added where each of the clubs ranked in terms of attendance in the top-flight seasons in question, as a proxy for the “size” of each club more than anything.
In a second graphic lower down in this piece, I consider the top league scorer for each relevant team, to assess whether you need, for example, to have at least one 10-goal striker to give you the firepower to underpin a survival tilt.
First all of all, however, the headline findings. And then I’ll run through all the detail and the minutiae.