The Top 100 Best Scottish Results In European Football
Based entirely on ClubElo rating of the opposition
Following the latest dismal display by a Scottish team in Europe, I used historical ClubElo ratings to find exactly where Hibs’ Kosovan calamity ranks in the long history of Scottish disasters.
Deciding whether one result was “worse” than another is highly subjective. There are so many factors to consider: the respective budgets, the venue, the pitch, the weather, how recently the manager or players arrived, and that is before looking at anything relating to the opposition. The margin of defeat matters too, as does the aggregate score. If a team recovers to progress, the damage is clearly less severe than a defeat which ends its European campaign.
As a one-off match, Celtic losing to Lincoln Red Imps would take some beating, given the vast difference in stature and budget between the clubs. However, the result did not cost Celtic the tie because they recovered in the second leg at Celtic Park. Hopefully we can say the same about Hibs if they pull off a rare two-goal turnaround.
There will be more on those two-goal European comebacks in an article next week.
For now, though, the result stings for Hibs fans and coefficientistas alike.
Once aggregate scores and the wider context of each tie are considered, Rangers’ defeat by Luxembourg’s Progrès Niederkorn is probably the worst of the lot. It brought complete European elimination for one of Scotland’s most storied clubs, even though Progrès had a higher ClubElo rating than Lincoln Red Imps.
I wanted a consistent way to categorise these defeats, so I used the independent rating system at ClubElo.com. For every European match lost by a Scottish club, I took the opposition’s ClubElo rating immediately before the game. The lower the opponent’s rating, the worse the defeat is.
ClubElo gives every club a rating designed to reflect its strength at that point in time: the higher the number, the stronger the team. Ratings change after each match, with unexpected results producing the biggest movement. Beating a highly rated opponent earns more points than beating a weaker one, while losing to a low-rated side causes a larger drop. The system also considers home advantage, the winning margin and differences between domestic leagues. For these lists, I have used each opponent’s rating immediately before the match.
Another approach would be to use the gap between the two teams’ Elo ratings. That would reflect the fact that Celtic losing to a particular opponent represents a bigger upset than Motherwell losing to the same side. For this exercise, though, I have used only the opposition’s rating.
On that basis, and disregarding every other factor, including the aggregate score, Malisheva’s 2-0 victory over Hibernian is the eighth-worst result ever suffered by a Scottish club in Europe. If Hibs turn the tie around next week, five of the ten “worst results” on the above list will still have seen the Scottish club progress to the next round.
The Top 20 Worst Results -
Removing the Old-Firm
Before moving on to the best results, we can have a collective bout of PTSD while recalling some of these horror shows.
These are the 20 worst defeats suffered by non-Old Firm clubs, based solely on the ClubElo rating of the opposition.
Motherwell Flying The Flag
It was a poor week for Scotland’s coefficient, that we won’t dwell on anymore and instead will look at the only positive - Motherwell ended it with an encouraging 2-0 win over Faroese side HB.
Five summer signings made their competitive debuts, while 19-year-old academy graduate Mikey Booth also made his first team debut. The newly assembled side got the job done under new manager Alfred Johansson, helped by a rare combination of goals - two from outside the box.
Martin Moormann and Lukas Fadinger both scored from range, something Scottish clubs have rarely managed twice in the same European match.
From the beginning of the 2001/02 season until Wednesday, Scottish clubs have played 733 matches, with the Scottish side scoring at least twice in 257 of them.
My European database contains every match result in UEFA history, and extensive scorer and line-up coverage, but my “goal-type” data is more limited. Of those 250 matches where Scottish teams scored at least twice, I have ‘inside-or-outside-the-box’ information for 132 of the games.
Within that 132 match sample, Motherwell, Rangers, Celtic and Hibs are the only Scottish clubs I have found to score twice from outside the box in the same European match.
Celtic managed it three times from the matches I have, most recently nearly a decade ago in a Champions League play-off against Hapoel Beer-Sheva. Tom Rogic opened the scoring from the edge of the box, with the goalkeeper stranded, before Leigh Griffiths curled in a free-kick from near the corner of the penalty area.
Prior to that, Celtic drew 2-2 away to RB Salzbug in 2014, with both Scott Brown and debutant Wakaso Mubarak (who?) scoring from outside the box, although I can’t find footage from this game.
The most famous example for Celtic I have is the 2-0 Quarter-Final win against Liverpool at Anfield, en route to the UEFA Cup Final in 2003. Alan Thompson scored a free kick before John Hartson sealed the win from range.
More recently, one of the highlights of Russell Martin’s time at Rangers was the 2-0 home win over Panathinaikos. Findlay Curtis and Djeidi Gassama both scored from distance to give Rangers a healthy lead to take to Greece, where a 1-1 draw carried them safely into the next round.
Hibs are the other team I have a record of doing so - and they did it twice in a week in July 2018. The Hibees scored six in each leg against Faroese minnows
Runavík, with Oli Shaw and debutant Stevie Mallan scoring outside the box in the first leg - before Mallan did it twice more in the away leg 7 days later.
Minutes 2:51 and 5:56 for Mallan’s two in the Faroe Islands:
Back to 2026, and Motherwell’s victory added 0.2 points to Scotland’s coefficient in a season when we should be aiming for at least 10 points to begin closing the vast gap above us. Hopefully Motherwell win the second leg and progress, giving them another two matches to try and add more points to Scotland’s total.
For this season’s graphics, I will unfortunately no longer be tracking from 10th-15th and instead will be monitoring from 15th down to 23rd! We are nearly 8 points (20 league phase wins) behind Cyprus in 15th and so we won’t be rejoining the top 15 this season.
We will need bumper points tallies this season and next to get anywhere near that threshold - which would only get us back to the current European entry points of this summer.
Our drop outside the top 15 will kick in this time next year, and that’s when the entry points get really bad.
The Best Results In History
The following section will show the
Top 100 best European results from non-Old Firm sides
The top 10 non-Old Firm wins this century
The top 20 Old Firm wins & Old Firm Losses
First, here are the ten best European results achieved by non-Old Firm Scottish clubs. As with the worst defeats, the list is compiled solely using the ClubElo rating of the opposition immediately before each match.
Aberdeen beating Real Madrid to win a European trophy is clearly the greatest result outside of the Old Firm. Using ClubElo rating’s only though, their quarter-final victory over Bayern Munich ranks higher because Bayern had a stronger Elo rating at the time.
ClubElo ratings update after every match. For example, when Dundee United beat Barcelona at Tannadice, the result caused Barcelona’s Elo rating to fall. That means the return victory at the Camp Nou two weeks later, which is clearly more impressive, actually ranks lower because Barcelona entered the second leg with a reduced rating. The away victory sits just outside the top ten.
I shared this graphic on social media and was inundated with messages and comments asking where other famous results would rank. For this reason, the next section shows the top 100 non-Old Firm European victories across ten graphics, allowing you to find almost every great result you might have had in mind.
Before that, here is compelling evidence of how far Scottish football has fallen: only 11 of the top 100 best results have come since 2000! The other 89 all came during the first four decades of Scottish participation in European football.
Best Non-Old Firm Results Since 2000
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