And so how have Celtic done in the Scottish League Cup? The answer is not as well as we might have, and with 20 wins out of 76 starts, Celtic have a success rate of 26%. In the Scottish Cup with 40 wins out of 122 starts, they are 32%, and in the Scottish League with 51 out of 125 start they are at 40%. So the Scottish League Cup is the least successful of the domestic trophies as far as Celtic are concerned.
Sadly Celtic’s 20 wins mean that while they are 20 ahead of the current Ibrox club they trail the old Rangers’ 26, although both clubs have appeared in the same amount of finals – with Sunday being the second final for 2012 formed version of theRangers.
There are reasons for Celtic’s comparative lack of success. For one thing, Celtic were slow starters to this competition. The trophy started in 1946 mainly because the Scottish League grew jealous of the SFA and their money spinning trophy called the Scottish Cup, and wanted one of their own.
Celtic had had a poor Second World War and an even poorer time in the immediate aftermath, The result was that it was 1956 before Celtic won this trophy, and thus we have the astonishing statistic that East Fife had won the Scottish League Cup final three times and Dundee twice before Celtic even appeared in a final.
Between season 1964/65 and 1977/78 Celtic appeared in every final. Thirteen in a row, but it is not as good as it sounds, for they lost 7 of them, in many cases through hard luck (three times against Rangers by the odd goal and once to Aberdeen in similar circumstances) once on an unplayable pitch amazingly sanctioned by Bobby Davidson against Dundee, once when McNeill was out injured and they underestimated Partick Thistle and once when Hibs were simply the better team.
And then there were 15 seasons between 1982/83 and 1997/98 when the League Cup and Celtic were strangers. It was a dreadful time generally and included defeats to Rangers, and the worst of all was the penalty shoot out to Raith Rovers. That one was bad because we were on our knees at that time, desperate for some success, and also because it fell to one of our best ever players, Paul McStay, to miss the penalty. But 15 seasons is a long time for Celtic to miss out on a trophy and no prizes for guessing who prospered the most in those 15 seasons.
But there have been good times as well. The 7-1 triumph of October 1957 is the second most famous Celtic match of all time (a close second to Lisbon) and when Jock Stein was Manager we won the League Cup five years in a row with one of these games – the Celtic v Hibs 6-2 Scottish League Cup final of 1969 – producing the best football that I have ever seen Celtic play. And of course we had four in a row in recent times from the “Invincibles” of 2016/17 to the missed penalty of Alfredo Morelos in 2019/20.
Celtic have a great history in this competition, sometimes unfairly decried as being “just” the League Cup. We look to our team on Sunday to bring home that beautiful trophy with the three handles. We know and we expect.
Over the next few days we will examine in detail some of our great triumphs in this tournament, beginning possibly with a fine autumn day in October 1957…
Incidentally, there is an excellent recent book on the Scottish League Cup available on
Amazon but this book, I must warn you, has been panned by some critics as being pro Celtic and anti Rangers, You know however that that is not true!
David Potter
