Why Does Everyone Overlook the Ten Other Scottish Premiership Clubs When Writing About Scottish Football?

An Aberdeen fan at Pittodrie watches a 1-1 draw with Motherwell. The result determines whether the Dons finish third or sixth. That match matters more to those supporters than a Celtic-Rangers game they were never going to attend.

You would not know it from most UK-wide Scottish football coverage. The narrative in the English press keeps returning to Celtic and Rangers. Large chunks of the Scottish press do the same, as if the other twelve Premiership clubs were footnotes.

The Old Firm dominance is real. But the coverage bias is a separate problem, and it distorts what the SPFL actually is for the majority of Scottish football supporters.

The Coverage Bias in Practice

Watch any UK news bulletin covering Scottish football and count the mentions. Celtic and Rangers dominate almost every segment. The other twelve Premiership clubs register only when they play one of the two, or when they produce something newsworthy in European competition.

The pattern extends to written coverage. Long-form Scottish football writing in most UK publications is essentially Old Firm biography, with occasional guest appearances from Aberdeen, Hearts, and Hibs when they make Europe or challenge for a top-four finish.

The other nine clubs get treated as tabloid decoration. Motherwell, Kilmarnock, St Mirren, St Johnstone, Ross County, Dundee, Livingston, Falkirk, and Dundee United all have supporter bases with genuine engagement that the coverage does not reflect.

Where SPFL Fans Actually Find Coverage

SPFL supporters have developed their own workarounds for the coverage gap. Local newspapers do the best work, with the Edinburgh Evening News, the Aberdeen Press and Journal, the Dundee Courier, and the Herald Scotland running genuinely detailed club coverage. Podcasts have filled a huge share of the ecosystem, covering nearly every club at some level of depth.

Fan forums carry the most active club-specific discussion in Scottish football. Between-fixture conversation, transfer speculation, and match analysis on those platforms goes deeper than what most national outlets produce.

Off-day entertainment fills specific gaps the coverage does not. Between fixtures, during international breaks, and across the summer months, SPFL supporters rotate through the same broad mobile-first leisure categories as any other UK football audience. PlayUK sits in that category alongside streaming subscriptions, mobile gaming, and social media rotation.

What the Attendance Numbers Actually Show

The attendance numbers make the coverage bias look particularly odd. Football Scotland's 2024-25 attendance breakdown recorded Hearts averaging 18,527 through home fixtures, Aberdeen at 18,194, and Hibs at 16,569. Those are not footnote numbers by any measure.

Dundee United's average of over 10,000 puts them ahead of many English Championship sides. St Mirren, Kilmarnock, and Motherwell all draw crowds larger than several League One English sides. That comparison is worth doing more often than it gets done.

The ratio of coverage to attendance is genuinely lopsided. Aberdeen have more per-fixture supporters than most English clubs receiving weekly national coverage. They generate a fraction of the column inches those clubs receive.

Six Clubs That Deserve More National Coverage

The specific case for widening the coverage frame is worth making club by club. Six clubs stand out as consistently underserved by the current media rhythm:

• Hearts. Tynecastle Park is one of the most atmospheric grounds in British football, and the club's recent Bloom-backed ownership shift has genuine strategic depth worth covering. Hearts sit third in the attendance table and third in the football conversation, only when the national press stops writing about the Old Firm.

• Hibs. The Edinburgh derby is the most under-covered fixture in senior British football. Hibs' 2016 Scottish Cup final win ended a 114-year drought and produced one of the great football-writing moments of the decade, which received a fraction of the coverage a comparable moment at an English club would have earned.

• Aberdeen. The 1983 Cup Winners' Cup and Super Cup wins under Alex Ferguson are Scottish football history that gets treated as trivia rather than tradition. Modern Aberdeen sides carrying that identity into European competition should be more consistently interesting to non-Aberdeen supporters than they are.

• The Dundee derby. Dens Park and Tannadice sit 200 yards apart, closer than any other senior football grounds in the world. The derby between Dundee and Dundee United is a legitimate case study in urban rivalry that gets almost no space in wider football writing.

• Motherwell. Fir Park hosts one of the most distinctive fanbases in Scottish football, with a specific working-class Lanarkshire identity that has survived the club's various financial recoveries. The story of a mid-table side quietly rebuilding itself is a specific type of football writing rarely done well.

• Kilmarnock. Rugby Park, Killie Pies, and the specific Ayrshire tribal identity make Kilmarnock one of the most textured clubs in the Premiership. Their history of upsetting the Old Firm and producing above their financial weight is the kind of story English football coverage would write regularly if the club were south of the border.

Six clubs is only half of the twelve overlooked sides. Ross County, St Mirren, St Johnstone, Livingston, Falkirk, and Dundee all have genuine editorial angles that the current coverage rhythm skips over.

What Better Coverage Would Look Like

Widening the frame does not mean ignoring the Old Firm. Celtic and Rangers are legitimately the two largest clubs in Scotland and generate the most commercial and sporting news. The coverage bias is not about denying that fact.

It is about proportion. Aberdeen genuinely have more per-fixture supporters than most Championship English clubs. Hearts average attendances above eighteen thousand, and the ratio of coverage should reflect those numbers at some level.

Better coverage would treat the SPFL as twelve substantive clubs with occasional Old Firm inflection. The current model does the reverse. That model does not match what most Scottish football supporters actually experience week to week.

The next time a national piece on Scottish football is published, count the mentions of the twelve clubs beyond Celtic and Rangers. The answer is usually noticeably fewer than the attendance numbers would justify. On-field stakes and supporter engagement point the same direction.