Scottish Premier – the top league. 10 teams playing 4 times against each other, the last one relegated. Well… the rest was Glasgow Rangers.
Hamilton Academicals – last and relegated with 14 points. The winners of second level in the previous were now hopeless outsiders.
Motherwell – 9th with 27 points.
Dundee – 8th with 28 points.
St. Mirren – 7th with 29 points.
Hearts of Midlothian – 6th with 31 points.
Hibernian – 5th with 35 points.
Dundee United – 4th with 44 points.
Celtic – 3rd with 46 points.
Aberdeen – 2nd with 50 points.
Glasgow Rangers – practically unchallenged champions with 56 points from 26 wins, 4 ties, 6 losses, and 62-26 goal-difference. Graeme Souness did excellent job, but it was noticed that he used quite liberally the chequebook – of course, he felt right to do so, because Rangers wanted success and that meant spending money and buying classy players. Domestic success was even smaller part of the ambitious project: international success was the real aim, which naturally supposed domestic success in order of reaching and concurring Europe. Thus, Rangers under Souness reversed the traditional flow – instead of selling Scottish stars to English clubs, they were buying English top players and grumbling along the way that the Scottish league was too weak for them. Which was true, so buying bug English names was also seen as waste of money. So far, Rangers was getting what they wanted and concurring Europe was becoming possible, but UEFA suddenly hit hard Rangers by introducing stiffer requirements for foreign-born players – and Rangers was exceeding the new limits. For they had 7 English players this season: Chris Woods (30 years old), Terry Butcher (31), Mel Sterland (28), Gary Stevens (26), Mark Walters (26), Ray Wilkins (33), and Kevin Drinkell (29). Six of them were regulars, that is half of the team and the very skeleton of it, and 3 (Woods, Butcher, and Stevens) were current English national team players. Add 2 more Northern Irish – Jimmy Nicholl (34) and Johnny Morrow (18) – and Rangers had way too many foreigners without much room to play around the new UEFA regulations. Yet, Souness still added one more big name at the beginning of the season – Andy Gray (34), luckily, he was Scottish, but it was clear that the regular line would not be able to play in Europe – and what could be the point of trying to organize two similarly strong sides: one for domestic use and another for international? Anyhow, at the moment Souness had very strong team with reliable reserves and at least at home dominated.
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